By JONATHAN ZWEYGARDT
Hays Post
Ellis County District Judge Tom Drees denied a request Friday to reconsider a sentence handed down earlier this year for a man who admitted to robbing a Hays Dollar General Store in 2022.
Defense attorney Alex Herman argued on behalf of his client Batalova Senuoke, 39, and with the support of Ellis County Attorney Robert Anderson that Drees should reconsider the sentencing because they reached a plea agreement.
Both attorneys told the court they were not aware of any case law that would allow a judge to reconsider a felony sentencing and Drees denied the motion.
Anderson and Herman expressed frustration at Senuoke’s initial sentencing in October and again Friday in Ellis County District Court with Drees’ decision to alter a plea agreement the two sides, and prosecutors in Jefferson County Kentucky had worked out in a similar case.
Senuoke, who is currently in custody in Kentucky, was convicted of first-degree robbery charges in Jefferson County, Kentucky. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison for the crimes in Kentucky.
In October, Drees sentenced Senuoke to a total of 10 years in prison for aggravated robbery and aggravated battery. Drees set those to run consecutively with the 12 years in Kentucky. Senuoke will serve 12 years in Kentucky and then return to Kansas to serve an additional 10 years.
At Friday’s hearing, Herman said the state of Kentucky imposed Senuoke’s sentence there to run concurrent to the one in Kansas, meaning he would serve just the 12 total years in prison. His Kansas sentence would run at the same time as the Kentucky sentence.
“Mr. Senuoke is going to be doing 10 years (in prison), whether it’s in Kentucky or whether it’s in Kansas,” Herman said. “As a taxpayer, I would prefer that he do it in Kentucky, not in Kansas because that’s going to save us money on housing an individual for 10 years.”
Herman claimed that the Kansas Department of Corrections estimates that it would cost more than $300,000 to house Senuoke for 10 years.
If Drees modified the sentence to run concurrently, Herman said Senuoke would serve the 10-year sentence in Kentucky.
Herman and Anderson also argued returning Senuoke to serve his time in Kansas would eventually mean he would be paroled in Kansas and that would make him a resident of the state, something that nobody wants.
“When your honor ordered the sentence to be consecutive against the request of the state and against the request of the defense, what your honor did was chose where he would do his 10 years (in prison) not that he would do 20,” Anderson said.
Anderson claimed that Drees, “has a habit of disrupting plea agreements far more often than [the court] has a habit of going along with it.”
“That has consequences,” Anderson said, “unintended consequences and intended consequences.”
He also said the judge's ruling would make it harder for his office to close cases.
Drees said Senuoke is a felon with several prior convictions and while he agreed to a reduced sentence from the maximum sentence of 233 months, or 19 years and five months to 10 years, he did not agree to run the sentence at the same time as the Kentucky sentence because of the harm he did in Kansas.
“Mr. Senuoke is a violent offender with multiple prior person felonies. He did great harm to a citizen of Ellis County and the state of Kansas — great emotional harm, which she may never recover from. It was a violent crime, and it calls for an imprisonment sentence,” Drees said. “The court found the 10 years to be appropriate, and the court sentenced him to those 10 years of imprisonment. The court believes it's appropriate to run that consecutive to Kentucky and the court did that.”
Drees said even if the Kentucky judge elects to run the 12-year prison sentence concurrently with his Kansas prison sentence, he believes Senuoke would serve 10 years in Kansas and then return to Kentucky to serve the remainder of his two years there.
Drees disagreed with Anderson's and Herman’s concerns about the cost of housing Senuoke with the Kansas Department of Corrections for 10 years.
“The cost is also a static cost for the state of Kansas. The state is not going to pay an additional $300,000 for this individual,” Drees said. “That is the average cost because Kansas budgets for incarcerating 10,600 people.”
Drees said the state has seen a significant drop in the number of inmates housed with the Kansas Department of Corrections to fewer than 9,000 this year.
“Kansas is going to pay that cost whether Mr. Senuoke is here or not,” Drees said.
Drees also rebuffed Anderson’s allegations he has a habit of altering plea agreements.
“I have rarely, rarely gone against plea agreements,” Drees said. “It’s been a handful of times in the three years that we’ve been sentencing.”
Anderson disagreed and claimed he has had days that Drees has “done something to toy with or tweak” with 80-90 percent of the plea agreements in cases on the docket.
To which Drees said, “I don’t think you’ll be able to show that, and at the end of the day, that’s my job to impose an appropriate sentence.”
Drees added, “This is one of those occasions where I disagree with your plea agreement. I don’t agree with letting Mr. Senuoke commit multiple, multiple armed robberies and be punished in effect for one.”