Ten years' worth of discovery violations committed by the Jackson County Prosecutors Office led a judge to throw out all of the state's evidence against Richard Buchli, a Kansas City attorney facing re-trial in 2011 for allegedly killing his law partner.
Richard Armitage was found beaten to death in the office of Buchli &
Armitage in the Power & Light Building. The last call Armitage made
was at 2:01 a.m. on May 5, 2000. On July 30, 2002, Buchli was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.
But that's where the latest saga begins.
Two years after the jury's verdict, the conviction was upheld on appeal. But in August 2006, Circuit Court Judge Sandra Midkiff issued a judgment vacating Buchli's conviction because prosecutors had failed to disclose critical evidence that might have worked in Buchli's favor.
The state had allowed the court and Buchli's defense attorneys to believe that a complete and unaltered surveillance video from the night of Armitage's murder had been destroyed. But the video hadn't been destroyed. In its original format, the tape showed Buchli leaving the Power & Light Building at 2:05 a.m. If the video's time stamp was correct, and phone records proved that Armitage was still alive at 2:01 a.m., then Buchli had only a four-minute window to kill Armitage before he left the office.
In summary, after 2 1/2 years of what should have been active trial preparation, four trial settings and in the face of a show-cause hearing, the state is unable to articulate with any certainty what their evidence will be or even what documentation it has in its possession. The Rules have been ignored, this Court has been ignored and judicial resources have been squandered. The judiciary cannot wait while the state dawdles.Richard Buchli is a free man. The worst part is, we may never know if Armitage's real killer is still a free man, too.
A decade is enough time. This Court is left with but one conclusion: the only effective sanction is to exclude all of the State's evidence from trial.
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