Opinion ID: 2627231
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: The Merits and The Primary Relief Sought

Text: Having disposed of all of the threshold issues raised by Kline, we now turn to the merits of the mandamus petition and Kline's continuing insistence that we dismiss it. The Kansas Constitution provides this court with original jurisdiction for proceedings in mandamus. Kan. Const. Art. 3, § 3. In addition, K.S.A. 60-801 provides: Mandamus is a proceeding to compel some... person to perform a specified duty, which duty results from the office, trust, or official station of the party to whom the order is directed, or from operation of law. Relief in the nature of a writ of mandamus is discretionary. The burden of showing a right to the relief sought is on the petitioner. Unless the respondent's legal duty is clear, the writ should not issue. State ex rel. Fatzer v. Salome, 169 Kan. 585, 595, 220 P.2d 192 (1950); see Alpha, 280 Kan. at 918, 128 P.3d 364; S.Ct. Rule 9.01(a). Here, CHPP and the Attorney General claim that Kline's and his subordinates' handling of the patient records produced pursuant to Alpha, was unlawful, i.e., in violation of a legal duty. If they have proved that Kline's behavior or that of those for whom he was responsible constituted unlawful performance of a public duty or unlawful exercise of a public office, we may grant them relief. At this point, it is important to note what is not in dispute. CHPP and the Attorney General do not contend that an Attorney General lacks lawful authority to give information arising out of an investigation to others in a position to prosecute a lawbreaker. They also do not contend that a district attorney lacks authority to receive and act upon such information. The nature of this dispute also renders irrelevant Kline's intermittent reliance on his interpretation of events to insist Judge Anderson had granted permission to refer the patient records from the Attorney General's office to the Johnson County District Attorney's office. Again, CHPP and the Attorney General realize, as they must, that referrals of information gathered in criminal investigations are neither uncommon nor inappropriate. They also know that such referrals do not generally require law enforcement or prosecutors to obtain permission from a member of the judiciary. The record demonstrates that Judge Anderson also appreciated this concept. CHPP and the Attorney General do argue that there was no other to whom Kline as Attorney General gave the patient records at issue here, and that there was no other from whom Kline as Johnson County District Attorney received the records. This is true, in their view, no matter which of three possible factual scenarios occurred: (1) Kline's transformation from Attorney General to Johnson County District Attorney happened in an unimaginably brief instant, i.e., there was no temporal gap and no temporal overlap between the time he left the first office and the time he took the second; (2) there was a gap between Kline's tenure as Attorney General and his tenure as District Attorney or between the employment of his subordinates by one office and the other; in this scenario, the records were unlawfully possessed and stored during that gap; or (3) there was an overlap between Kline's occupation of his statewide office and his district office or of his subordinates' employment by the first and then the second; in this scenario, the doctrine of incompatibility of offices controls and renders the possession and storage of the records during that overlap unlawful. We are unpersuaded by the Attorney General's no other argument. It is obviously true that Kline is only one person. But he has held two different public offices, the first via a statewide election not challenged here and the second through a Republican precinct committee selection process not challenged here. As mentioned above with regard to the sufficiency of Kline's sworn responses to this court's 17 factual questions, he is not involved in this action nor is his conduct under our scrutiny because of who he is as a person, but because of the offices he occupied at the time of the subject events. The rub here is that, as Judge King recognized, Kline's movement and storage of the patient records from the Attorney General's office to the Johnson County District Attorney's office was far from typical in timing and method. It also was far from typical because of the unique exchange of prosecutorial offices by Kline and Morrison and the intense political acrimony that surrounded it. Certain other aspects of Kline's handling of these sensitive patient records also were well short of responsible. For example, he should have independently seen to it that a written log of access to the records was consistently and completely maintained, particularly in light of this court's emphasis on their privacy implications in Alpha. To the extent comparison of information from various sources could reveal patient identities, he should have ensured that those to whom the records were to be shown or their contents to be revealed or described were committed in writing beforehand to appropriate confidentiality. The extended time the records spent in Reed's unsecured dining room was nothing short of grossly incompetent. Kline's and his lawyer subordinates' statements to the public, press, Judge Anderson, and this court may yet subject them to disciplinary sanction. But our task at this moment is to determine whether mandamus is the appropriate avenue to relief in this action and, if so, the specific relief it supports. Judge King did not make an explicit finding of fact on which of the three possible factual scenarios regarding Kline's transition existed  whether he simultaneously exited the Attorney General's office and entered the Johnson County District Attorney's office, whether there was a gap between Kline's tenures, or whether there was an overlap. Our detailed review of the record does not establish the precise timing of Morrison's swearing-in as Attorney General or Kline's swearing-in as Johnson County District Attorney. In Kline's own testimony before Judge King, he asserted that there was approximately an hour of overlap in his two offices  from his swearing-in as Johnson County District Attorney until Morrison's swearing-in as Attorney General. Neither CHPP nor the Attorney General appear to take serious issue with that assertion. We thus address the third possible factual scenario and the doctrine of incompatibility of offices. The first Kansas case to discuss the common-law doctrine of incompatibility of office was Abry v. Gray, 58 Kan. 148, 48 Pac. 577 (1897). It recognized that incompatibility of function underlay the common-law doctrine. Abry, 58 Kan. at 149, 48 P. 577 (quoting People, ex rel. Ryan v. Green, 58 N.Y. 295, 304 [1874]); see also Congdon v. Knapp, 106 Kan. 206, 207, 187 Pac. 660 (1920) (holding offices of assistant chief food and drug inspector and hotel commissioner not incompatible). In Dyche v. Davis, 92 Kan. 971, 978-79, 142 Pac. 264 (1914), this court extended the incompatibility doctrine to holding position of public office and job as state employee. And, recently, in U.S.D. No. 501 v. Baker, 269 Kan. 239, 247-53, 6 P.3d 848 (2000), this court applied the doctrine to hold that a teacher's acceptance of a position on the local board of education resulted in an ipso facto forfeiture of her position as a teacher. Kansas has not dealt with facts similar to those raised in this case. We have found only one other appellate court has examined an issue involving its state Attorney General. See State ex rel. Thomas v. Wysong, 125 W.Va. 369, 373, 24 S.E.2d 463 (1943) (no incompatibility between office of Attorney General of West Virginia and commissioned officer in United States Army; duties not inconsistent and so divergent there is no incompatibility; [I]ncompatibility [of offices] rests not upon physical inability to perform the duties of both offices, but arises from the inconsistent nature of the offices and their relation to each other, rendering it improper, from considerations of public policy for one person to perform the duties of both). The statutes governing the duties of the position of the Kansas Attorney General are contained in K.S.A. 75-701 et seq., and the provisions governing the duties of the position of county and district attorneys are contained in K.S.A. 22a-101 through 22a-109. See also KRPC 3.6 (2007 Kan. Ct. R. Annot. 570) (trial publicity); KRPC 3.8 (2007 Kan. Ct. R. Annot. 525) (special responsibilities of a prosecutor as advocate). The only apparent potential for conflict we discern is the Attorney General's statutory duty to provide aid to county attorneys, i.e., to consult with and advise county attorneys, when requested by them, in all matters pertaining to their official duties. K.S.A. 75-704. Such a conflict did not materialize in this case. If anything, Kline's movements of the patient records and other inquisition materials from one office to another appear to constitute aid, consultation, or advice to the Johnson County District Attorney rather than their opposites. As the Attorney General points out, however, it is undisputed that the second factual scenario, a gap between employments or occupation of official position, existed for investigators Williams and Reed. Their employment with the Attorney General's office ended no later than the time of Morrison's swearing-in on the morning of January 8, 2007, and their employment with the Johnson County District Attorney's office began no earlier than the following morning. Thus, to the extent they were engaged in movement or storage of the patient records during the intervening time period, which both they and Kline admit, they were engaged as private citizens with no public authority whatsoever. The Attorney General argues that this engagement was unlawful. We disagree. CHPP and the Attorney General admit, as Judge King found, that there are no binding standards for exactly how to effect an exchange of investigation information between prosecutors. There may be generally accepted professional patterns, and certainly attorney ethics rules establish a floor below which prosecutor behavior may not sink without risk of discipline. Kline's long lob, enabling himself and his subordinates to play both sides of the net, was, at a minimum, unorthodox. At a maximum, it was cynically calculated not only to facilitate Kline's ability to continue his pursuit of CHPP and WHCS despite his rejection by the statewide electorate but also to defeat or delay any review of the legal justification of that pursuit by a political nemesis whom the same electorate had selected as Kline's successor. But the long lob was not illegal. And, there is no law preventing prosecutors from allowing private citizens to have a role in the transport and storage of inquisition documents. Moreover, CHPP is incorrect when it asserts that our Alpha decision required the patient records not to leave the Attorney General's office. Our direction that the records, after redaction by the clinics and Judge Anderson's appointed lawyer and consultant doctors, be turned over to the Attorney General, 280 Kan. at 925, 128 P.3d 364, simply had nothing to do with what happened to the records after that point. Alpha was not intended to instruct and did not instruct on whom Kline should or should not involve in any other aspect of his investigation; whether referrals should be made to other prosecutors; if so, which prosecutors would be acceptable; whether confidentiality agreements should be required of potential witnesses with whom the records' contents were shared; how the records were to be stored; or how access to them was to be documented. In short, any inherent prosecutorial power to transmit information to other prosecutors that Kline possessed the day before Alpha was filed he still possessed the day after. See State v. Williamson, 253 Kan. 163, 165, 853 P.2d 56 (1993). And no law prescribed exactly how he was to go about it. The Attorney General's argument that Kline unlawfully removed personal property of the Attorney General's office also is not persuasive. The Attorney General relies on three cases  Huffman v. Mills, 39 Kan. 577, 18 Pac. 516 (1888); State v. Lawrence, 76 Kan. 940, 92 Pac. 1131 (1907); State ex rel. Terrill v. Thompson, 135 Kan. 193, 9 P.2d 628 (1932)  for the proposition that mandamus is appropriate to compel a former public officer to return property belonging to the office. But these cases are fatally distinct. In Huffman, the petitioner was a successor sheriff who named his predecessor as respondent. The respondent retained property belonging to the office, arguing the petitioner was not qualified to be sheriff because of a failure to canvass election returns. This court held that petitioner took office upon filing of his oath and bond and agreed that an action in mandamus or quo warranto was appropriate to compel respondent to deliver the property of the office to his successor. See 39 Kan. at 578-79, 18 P. 516. In Lawrence, the district court had issued a judgment on a dispute over the legal holder of the office of county treasurer. The execution of the judgment had not been stayed. We held that mandamus was appropriate to compel the delivery of the money, books, and records of the office to the person adjudged to be elected. See 76 Kan. at 944, 92 P. 1131. The Thompson case also involved a treasurer's retention of money, books, and records. In that action, this court approved mandamus to force return of these items to the new treasurer of the township. See 135 Kan. at 194-95, 9 P.2d 628. None of these cases controls here because none involves a situation in which the former public officeholder is also a current officeholder with authority to possess the materials at issue. In Huffman, Lawrence, and Thompson, the continued possession by the former officeholder was entirely without legal support. In sum, the person who holds the position of Johnson County District Attorney may lawfully possess the results of a criminal investigation begun by the Attorney General. An Attorney General or a district attorney may use a private citizen to ferry results of a criminal investigation, e.g., Williams and Reed during the period between employment by the Attorney General's office and employment by the District Attorney's office. To the extent Kline eventually seeks to admit in any criminal prosecution any of the records he and his subordinates and/or private citizens moved from one office to the other, his choices may have exposed that evidence to challenge; but that is an argument for another day in another case. The above analysis leads us to the conclusion that CHPP and the Attorney General are not entitled to the primary relief they seek. We will not force Kline to disgorge each and every copy of the patient records Kline and his subordinates have made and any and all other evidence Kline developed and obtained while he was acting as Attorney General that he took with him to Johnson County. However, as discussed below, this matter does not end there.