So, you wonder, what has this to do with Topeka Kansas? The point is Olson possibly might not have been prosecuted there for such behavior, these days, because of how the good city and county leadership folks there face up to their budget realities.
Perhaps it is "wants" vs "needs" in their unique Kansan-conservative perspectives on life, on America, and on life in America's twenty-first century. ginandtacos.com reports:
A vignette from a nation in the final stages of dementia:
Last night, in between approving city expenditures and other routine agenda items, the Topeka, Kansas City Council debated one rather controversial one: decriminalizing domestic violence.
Here's what happened: Last month, the Shawnee County District Attorney’s office, facing a 10% budget cut, announced that the county would no longer be prosecuting misdemeanors, including domestic violence cases, at the county level. Finding those cases suddenly dumped on the city and lacking resources of their own, the Topeka City Council is now considering repealing the part of the city code that bans domestic battery. [...]
Since the county stopped prosecuting the crimes on September 8th, it has turned back 30 domestic violence cases. Sixteen people have been arrested for misdemeanor domestic battery and then released from the county jail after charges weren’t filed. "Letting abusive partners out of jail with no consequences puts victims in incredibly dangerous positions," said Becky Dickinson of the YWCA. "The abuser will often become more violent in an attempt to regain control."
Well, at least we have our priorities straight. Better to decriminalize things than to pay enough in taxes to allow the government to enforce the law. And if you have to decriminalize something, why not start with wife beating rather than, you know, something important like possession?
Yes, I understand that part of this is a political pissing match between the city and county, each trying to embarrass the other as they quibble over shrinking budgets. That said, legalization schemes of this type are like cannibalism: if you're seriously considering it, you're either beyond desperate (say, on a desert island) or completely divorced from reality. We're beyond desperate, alright – desperate to cling to a failed, debunked political and economic ideology no matter how absurd the costs.
I could harangue or moralize. But the item speaks for itself. There also are reader comments.
The "vignette" link over from ginandtacos.com sources the story -- it is real. It is not made up.
This really happened in the windy heartland of the US of A, early twenty-first century. Our times.
Despite our own local county council's intensive (obsessive?) will to trim so as not to tax, (a new thing since the last election and curiously not reaching so far as to impact wants vs needs along commuter rail routes), my hope and expectatation is the Topeka situation would not happen in Anoka County. First, there are awake and vocal anti-domestic violence voices here, and second, Tony Palumbo in the County Attorney's office has character enough so he would never play at any such politics. Moreover, his friend and campaign director Natalie would be jumping on him with spurs on, if he even had one thought in the Topeka direction. Yes, no?
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| photo from here |
With that degree of tightness to a shooting pattern, a shoot-to-maim intent and action might prove fatal.
We do not know about Hackbarth. And accuracy.
He carried but kept it holstered.
Finally, the Brown vs. Board of Education case striking down school segragation of the races involved defendant, Topeka Board of Education. Not my kind of town folks with them appearing so consistent over time.
Anyway, I do not live in Kansas, I live in Oz.
_____________UPDATE____________
I googled = "Mark Olson" "Jill Clark" trial. I was generally aware of the charges during the time of the trial, but not detail.
Material from the trial reporting was still online.
Olson had delayed trial while the legislature was in session, a perfectly legal step, and had changed lawyers, to Clark.
Prior to trial it was reported that he and Clark would advance the "battered husband" defense, painting Mark Olson as victim and Heidi Olson as spousal abuser. The five children were Heidi's by a previous marriage, the home on Big Lake was hers, (insurance from when her first husband was killed in a road accident had paid the mortgage for her and family). The home had been built on the site during her marriage to snowmobile racer Darcy Ewing. Mark Olson had been a friend of the Ewings, and Heidi remarried to Mark shortly after Ewing's fatal accident while bicycling, being hit by a vehicle attempting to pass another while unaware of a bicyclist on the road.
Events from earlier in the marriage as well as the final event leading to the misdemeanor charges were in evidence, with each spouse blaming the other. There was never any indication that Heidi Olson had domestic dispute or trouble in her first, durable marriage. Nor was any evidence reported on Mark Olson's status and affairs before this marriage.
Olson online legislative bio materials are here. During the marriage Mark Olson prominently featured his family status on his campaign website. A marriage dissolution proceeding was pending, Heidi Olson as filing spouse, at the time trial was held.
Both spouses expressed remorse that the marriage had failed, and each did so from a "Christian " perspective, Heidi saying she believed Mark needed counseling. Reporting was that Heidi Olson outweighed and was taller than Mark, and admitted that during the four-year marriage she had once struck Mark, facts brought out at trial by Jill Clark's questioning, as suggestive of a battered husband situation being more credible because of that.
Bottom line, I was not there when the Olson spouses intereacted and cannot say which spouse instigated what, and whether one was more abusive than the other. However, the Clark-Olson battered husband defense failed to convince the jury, with the entire affair tried in Sherburne County instead of being conflicted out to another venue, (as was the case with Bebig, the former Anoka mayor and his conduct re Rod Grams' son, Morgan, while Bebig was acting as a part-time sheriff's deputy).
Readers should look here, for a very thoughtful and balanced analysis of "DV" uncertainty (this is one of the items the Google search returned further down the list from direct local contemporaneous reporting that remains online).
Reporting indicated Mark Olson, aside from legislature service, was a carpenter and Heidi Olson a nurse in Wright County. Curiously, both of the Kiffmeyer spouses have nursing professional backgrounds; and Kiffmeyer did take over the district seat after Olson left the legislature in large measure because of the notoriety of the charges, trial, and conviction. The Republicans at the tail end of his final term stripped him of house privileges, and he was staffed at the end as the legislature's sole "independent Republican." The ins and outs of Sherburne GOP politics is a dark matter to me, one which I expect would on examination be distasteful to me, but I could not locate any online ties between the Kiffmeyers and Heidi Olson.
HOWEVER: That was all several years ago, and I do not aim to let uncertainties about it detract from the absolute immorality and indecency of how the Topeka politicians are acting now, with regard to the real and constant problem of spousal and child abuse in the community. I am only qualifying my initial reaction to tie Olson affairs into the Topeka situation. The trial was had. The result was a guilty verdict.
Jill Clark argued the battered husband thing, and elicited testimony in support of that theory, from the defendant, her client, Mark Olson. If there was much supporting testimony to bolster Mark Olson's version of "truth" it was not adequately reported.
