Kehoe’s got ex-KC cop’s back. All friends of inmates who’ve killed feel that way | Opinion

It's understandable that Missouri's governor-elect, Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe, feels for his friend who is in prison for killing someone.

I know many people with a friend behind bars for ending a life, and they all share the deep empathy that Kehoe has expressed for former KC police officer Eric DeValkenaere , who fatally shot an unarmed Black man, Cameron Lamb, as Lamb was backing into his own garage on Dec. 3, 2019.

"I'm very sensitive to Eric's case," Kehoe said. "I would consider Sarah," DeValkenaere's wife, "a good friend of my wife and I's. I met Sarah and Eric before he was imprisoned and I would say wrongly. I believe we need to have Eric's back, and I've been very vocal about saying should I succeed in running for governor, Eric DeValkenaere will be home with his family."

It's good to be sensitive. But unless we want to have one criminal justice system for friends of the powerful and another one for the unconnected, then DeValkenaere should not be sent home early.

Others who care about someone who is in prison share Kehoe's anger on behalf of the incarcerated, especially in cases unlike this one where it's not even clear that the accused pulled the trigger. Or when that person couldn't afford much of a lawyer . Or when he sold the house to pay one who still didn't care.

They all know, just as our next governor suggests that he now does, that there's more to the story of the person who is serving time for ending a life than what they did that day.

Yet some are executed, or remain in prison for life, for crimes that the evidence says they didn't even commit. And what Gov. Mike Parson has told all of them is that they were found guilty in a court of law, so that had to be the final word.

When Parson was fighting the release of Kevin Strickland, who served 43 years for a triple murder that he did not commit, a spokeswoman for the governor said he just couldn't in good conscience second-guess a court, because "we must give great deference to the judicial process."

When gubernatorial friends are in trouble, though, it's courts be damned, as we saw most recently when Parson commuted the sentence of former Kansas City Chiefs assistant coach Britt Reid, who severely injured a 5-year-old girl while driving drunk. The court that enforced the law in that case might as well have taken those days off, because Parson undid their work in a blink, presumably out of team spirit.

Now the only question seems to be whether it will be Parson or his successor who will pardon DeValkenaere for the same reason.

Judge Dale Youngs brave to hear case We didn't make a big deal of it at the time, but it took a lot of guts for Jackson County Circuit Court Judge J. Dale Youngs to find DeValkenaere guilty of second-degree involuntary manslaughter and armed criminal action in 2021. Youngs sentenced DeValkenaere to six years in prison.

Youngs was brave to even hear the case, when he could have fobbed it off on someone else, and brave to do what the law said instead of what most of the law enforcement community wanted to him to do.

On appeal, three judges appointed by Parson also ruled that DeValkenaere acted with criminal negligence, and said in a blistering decision that Lamb was not holding a gun when DeValkenaere shot him. In the appeals court ruling, the judges upheld the trial judge's finding that DeValkenaere had violated Lamb's Fourth Amendment rights by running onto his property without a search warrant. They said that the circumstances did not justify the use of deadly force.

DeValkenaere shot Lamb all of nine seconds after arriving at his home in response to a call about someone that a police helicopter had seen speeding. When DeValkenaere rolled up on that house, he and his partner knew nothing else.

Lamb was not holding gun, Parson appointees ruled Prosecutors said that Lamb, who was backing into his basement garage when he was shot, could not physically have been holding a gun at the time DeValkenaere claims that he shot him in self-defense, to save the life of his partner, Troy Schwalm.

At his trial, DeValkenaere testified that he had to rush in because "we had a reasonable suspicion that crime was afoot." He had to go in, too, he said, because his partner already had, and "I'm not going to leave him in there by himself."

If he had stopped to get a warrant, what crime would it even have been for, a prosecutor asked him in court. He didn't know what might have been happening, he said. "That's why we didn't" get a warrant, DeValkenaere said.

Even Schwalm said that he saw no gun in Lamb's left hand. Which is not surprising, since Lamb was not only right-handed, but had limited use of his left hand after having been shot in the index finger in 2015. Phone records showed that Lamb was also on a phone call, on the cell he was holding in his right hand, at the time he was shot.

If Lamb didn't have a gun, as prosecutors and appeals judges said he did not, then someone planted it on the ground outside the driver's side of Lamb's truck after he was shot. Prosecutors believe the gun was planted as Lamb bled out, while EMTs on the scene were denied entry.

All along, Parson has sympathized with DeValkenaere and blamed Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, who is a Democrat, for "making this more of a political issue."

Now Kehoe is doing the same, claiming that DeValkenaere was wrongly convicted by a woke prosecutor. When again, it was a judge who found him guilty, and three Parson-appointed judges who upheld that decision.

The argument really seems to be that Eric DeValkenaere is a good guy and so needs to get out. In prison, there are a lot of good guys who've done bad things, and many whose incarceration doesn't make the rest of us any safer. But mercy shown only to personal friends and favorites is closer to corruption than compassion.