Review of Golubski cases is a step toward justice. Wyandotte County can’t stop there

Wyandotte County residents have waited years for county law and government officials to investigate claims of possible criminal behavior by an allegedly corrupt Kansas City, Kansas, cop. Finally, after pleas from the community, calls from The Star’s editorial board and multiple indictments of retired police detective Roger Golubski on federal charges of sexual assault, kidnapping and conspiracy connected to human trafficking, it looks like a full audit will take place.

Thursday night, after a nearly two-hour debate with county commissioners, District Attorney Mark Dupree said he will investigate every criminal case that Golubski ever handled in any capacity in his 41-year police career — from 1975 to 2010 in KCK, and from 2010 to 2016 in Edwardsville. The Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department will also participate in the review.

It’s too rare that Wyandotte County officials heed pleas from the community. We applaud this action because it is overdue, and because justice for the Golubski victims we know about — and those who may yet be found — and the entire community he’s accused of terrorizing for more than 30 years depends on it.

“There absolutely needs to be justice,” said Commissioner Andrew Davis.

We also encouraged Dupree to request additional funds from the county to help expedite what will no doubt be a tremendous task, and we are equally pleased he made that request Thursday night. To their credit, the commissioners agreed to find half the money he requested right away, and to keep looking for ways to fund the balance of his request. That’s prudent and long overdue.

Kansas City, Kansas, residents have complained for years that Golubski targeted Black women for sex, sometimes threatening to have their relatives jailed if they did not submit.

“It’s my job as prosecutor that when we get a wrongful conviction to do everything in my power to correct that,” Dupree said. Not every case involving Golubski will prove to be stained with corruption. But Dupree told us he believes it’s “absolutely” possible people could be wrongfully sitting in jail because of criminal police behavior.

Dupree said he has wanted to take this action since he took office in 2017 but was obstructed by the lack of a digitized case filing system that made searching for every Golubski case nearly impossible. Until 2017, Wyandotte County kept paper criminal case files in boxes stored in a dank, “moldy, roach infested,” room on the fifth floor of the courthouse, Dupree said. The county is roughly 20 years behind the times with its filing system. Many cities began digitizing case file storage in the early 2000s. Most old Wyandotte County records, including from cases during Golubski’s tenure, are still in boxes.

On Thursday, commissioners agreed to pay the $1.7 million Dupree said is needed to digitize all the files, prioritizing those touched by Golubski. We’re pretty sure we are not the only ones happy to hear that news. A notable sigh of relief from residents in attendance at the meeting filled the room after the commission’s 9-0 vote supporting the upgrade.

Document review to begin in December

Understandably, commissioners fretted about an overburdened county budget that they approved. They questioned where they would find the money for Dupree to hire another attorney and victims’ advocate for his conviction integrity unit, as well as contract with an outside company to sort and digitize files. Commissioners agreed to pay half — $850,000 — of what Dupree asked for within seven days, with the rest to come soon afterward.

Dupree estimates the 18-month process will begin as early as Dec. 1. But he said his office will begin reviewing old Golubski cases as soon as the digitizing begins.

The evidence of Golubski’s alleged involvement in criminal activity has mounted since he was first named as having framed Lamonte McIntyre, who wrongfully served 23 years in prison before being freed in October 2017.

In September, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted Golubski on charges that he repeatedly sexually assaulted two women under “the color of law.”

Earlier this week, Golubski was one of four men charged in a grand jury indictment accusing them of running a violent sex trafficking operation that targeted troubled teenage girls at a KCK apartment complex in the 1990s.

Since the Golubski revelations began, we have been calling on officials to treat this case as what it is: a development that should and could stain scores of other cases touched by Golubski.

Wyandotte County officials should be praised for finally supporting the public plea to search every Golubski case and seek justice where it is found to be lacking. However, the cleanup should not stop there. They should look much deeper at the police department and overall law enforcement and justice systems where such corruption was allowed to live and make sure nothing so foul festers there ever again.

To that end, we’re still waiting for the KCKPD to announce its own investigation into how such blatant criminality as alleged in the federal indictments could have been permitted over such a long period of time.