TOPEKA — The Kansas Supreme Court upheld the sentence in a Kingman County killing in a decision handed down Friday.
The Kingman County District Court denied a motion by William D. Albright to modify his sentence of life with no possibility of parole for 40 years, a hard-40 sentence, which the district court had imposed for a premeditated first-degree murder that Albright committed in 1999.
Writing for a unanimous court, Justice K.J. Wall affirmed the district court's denial of the motion under the court's recent precedent holding that K.S.A. 21-6628(c) does not provide a statutory vehicle for a sentence modification based on a defendant's claim that a hard-40 sentence violates the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court in Alleyne v. United States, 570 U.S. 99 (2013).