Kansas governor denies death sentence clemency for serial killer

Gov. Laura Kelly speaks to reporters on Feb. 24, 2026, at the Statehouse in Topeka. On June 18, she denied the clemency request of a Kansas serial killer. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)

TOPEKA — Gov. Laura Kelly denied a Kansas serial killer clemency from his death sentence on Thursday.

She denied the request of John Robinson, an 82-year-old Kansas prison inmate convicted of killing eight women from the mid 1980s until he was arrested in 2000. The governor said he did not meet the criteria for clemency.

“As the existence of a credible claim of innocence or evidence of manifest injustice are absent in his request,” Kelly said in a press release, “I have denied John Robinson’s request to commute his death sentence.”

The governor’s office declined Kansas Reflector’s request for information about the criteria Kelly considered when making the decision.

Kansas reinstated the death penalty in 1994. The state has not carried out an execution since 1965, and no one has been sentenced to death in a decade.

The year of Robinson’s arrest, investigators found the bodies of two victims inside metal barrels at his Linn County property south of Kansas City Metropolitan Area.

Robinson’s attorney, Madeline Cohen, said in an email to Kansas Reflector that his case is pending on an appeal and setting an execution date could take many years. She also said his age and medical condition mean he will likely die before execution.

“By denying him clemency, Gov. Kelly has ensured that the state must continue to waste vast resources defending his death sentence instead of resolving the case with a sentence of life without parole,” Cohen said.

Robinson appealed two convictions in 2015 to the Kansas Supreme Court, which upheld one conviction and the death sentence. Justice Lee Johnson dissented, arguing the death penalty is unconstitutional under the Kansas Bill of Rights.

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach urged Kelly to deny clemency requests from eight Kansas inmates sentenced to death in a June 9 press release.

“Granting clemency to multiple death row inmates — particularly in the final weeks of a gubernatorial term and based on personal opposition to the death penalty — would substitute one person’s policy preference for the considered judgment of juries, judges, and appellate courts,” Kobach said in the release.

As of Thursday, Kelly had only received Robinson’s request.