By John Hanna
Associated Press
TOPEKA, Kan. — Kansas’ parole board has reversed its decision to release a man convicted of a state Highway Patrol trooper’ 1978 murder after strong criticism prompted the governor to call on the board to reconsider.
Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly on Tuesday applauded the Prisoner Review Board’s reversal in Jimmie K. Nelms’ case, and top Republican officials said they were relieved or grateful that criticism appeared to change the board’s mind. The board is part of the Kansas Department of Corrections, which announced the reversal late Thursday but did not disclose the board’s reasons.
Nelms, now 78, formerly from Tulsa, Oklahoma, was sentenced to serve two life sentences for the aggravated kidnapping and murder of Trooper Conroy O’Brien following a traffic stop on the Kansas Turnpike about 55 miles (89 kilometers) northeast of Wichita.
In Kansas, killing a law enforcement officer now can be punished by death, with life in prison without parole, the only other possible sentence in a capital case. But in 1978, Kansas had no death penalty and even though Nelms received two life sentences, he nevertheless was eligible for parole after 15 years under the more lenient criminal sentencing laws then. The Prisoner Reivew Board and its predecessors repeatedly denied his parole requests, most recently in 2021.
“It is hard to imagine why the parole board would have ever thought parole was appropriate for a cop killer serving two life sentences,” Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, a Republican, said in a statement Tuesday.
Kobach and Kansas Senate President Ty Masterson, also a Republican, said state lawmakers should consider overhauling the board.
Its three members are veteran Department of Corrections employees appointed by the agency’s top administrator, who reports to the governor.
Before 2011, the governor appointed board members subject to Senate confirmation. That year, GOP Gov. Sam Brownback replaced that board with the Department of Corrections panel, seeing it as a cost-cutting move. Also, sentencing laws enacted in 1993 and afterward limited parole.
“Today, justice was reaffirmed, and we are grateful,” the Kansas State Troopers Association said in a statement. “Tomorrow, we will begin working to make sure such a close call never happens again.”
In some states, governors must sign off on an inmate’s release. But under Kansas law, it had appeared unlikely that critics could override the parole board’s decision.
A state board’s reversal of parole is uncommon but not unknown, said Wanda Bertram, a spokesperson for the Prison Policy Initiative, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit and research group that advocates for prisoners’ rights. In Wisconsin in 2022, at Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ request, the state Parole Commission’s chair reversed a decision to release a man who had been convicted of stabbing his wife.
But Bruce Hedrick, executive director of Legal Services for Prisoners Inc., a Kansas nonprofit that assists inmates, called the reversal unfair. Bertram said longtime inmates often have done “tremendous work” in changing themselves.
“Making parole release available to people in prison only to deny it based on someone’s crime of conviction — which is the one thing they no longer have any control over — is a cruel practice that dangles false hope in front of incarcerated individuals,” she said.
Nelms has served most of his sentence in maximum-security prisons but was transferred to a lower-security facility in 2023, where he works in the prison laundry.
The parole board’s decision to release Nelms came several weeks after a March 6 hearing but wasn’t public until the trooper’s association publicly criticized it May 8. Kelly’s call for a reversal came the next day. A week after that, on Friday, the board had another hearing for Nelms, said David Thompson, a Department of Corrections spokesperson.
Officials who said Nelms should remain in prison have called his crime cold-blooded. Authorities said that as O’Brien was writing a ticket, Nelms forced him out of his patrol car at gunpoint, took the trooper’s own gun and shot him twice in the head, leaving his body in a ditch. O’Brien was 26 with a pregnant wife. Nelms was 31.
“It’s still deeply concerning this error even happened and the reversal likely wouldn’t have occurred if not for the massive public outcry,” Kansas House Speaker Dan Hawkins, a Republican, said in a statement.