Background
Children’s Advocacy Centers use child-forensic-interview professionals to conduct a single interview with an abused child while other investigators observe through a one-way mirror. The Kansas Legislature created the Children’s Advocacy Center fund in 2004 and financed it partly through K.S.A. 20-370(a), which requires “any defendant convicted of a crime” under chapter 21 “in which a minor is a victim” to pay “an assessment fee in the amount of $400” to the district court clerk.
A jury convicted Jack Rex Mildfelt Jr. of six child-sex crimes involving two minor victims. The Saline District Court sentenced him to life imprisonment without parole eligibility for 100 years and imposed a $400 assessment for each conviction, totaling $2,400. Mildfelt challenged only the assessment amount, arguing that the statute required one $400 fee. The Court of Appeals, in an unpublished October 3, 2025 decision, affirmed on the ground that the statute’s plain language required a fee for each conviction. The Supreme Court granted Mildfelt’s petition for review and heard oral argument on May 20, 2026.
The Court’s Holding
The Supreme Court held that K.S.A. 20-370(a) requires a court to order any defendant convicted of a crime involving a minor to pay one $400 assessment fee, regardless of the number of convictions in the criminal case. Statutory interpretation presented a question of law subject to unlimited review. The court found the statute ambiguous because both the per-defendant and per-conviction readings were reasonable. Although “a crime” could mean “one crime,” it could also mean “any crime,” so the phrase’s ordinary meaning did not settle the dispute.
The court disagreed with the Court of Appeals and State v. Sanders, 65 Kan. App. 2d 236, 563 P.3d 234 (2025), to the extent they concluded that the plain language compelled a per-conviction assessment. It explained that in pari materia analysis can help resolve ambiguity and may also be useful in determining whether statutory language is plain and unambiguous. But the other fee statutes were not truly in pari materia with K.S.A. 20-370: none was enacted by the same legislative body that adopted it, and only K.S.A. 20-369 appeared in the same code article. Even if considered, those statutes reinforced rather than resolved the ambiguity. Some expressly specify fees per case, complaint, offense, charge, or defendant, while K.S.A. 20-370(a) lacks comparable clarifying language. The examples also showed no consistent correlation between use of “crime” and per-conviction assessment.
The grammar canon supplied the most persuasive evidence of legislative intent. Under that canon, rules of grammar govern statutory interpretation unless they contradict legislative intent or purpose. The phrase “convicted of a crime . . . in which a minor is a victim” is a participial phrase modifying “defendant”; it identifies which defendants must pay rather than how many fees must be imposed. The singular object “an assessment fee” then specifies that each qualifying defendant must pay one $400 fee. The court did not decide whether the absurdity canon or rule of lenity applied because grammar already resolved the ambiguity. It also found the 2004 enactment history and 2013 amendment history equivocal: proponents discussed funding the centers and shifting some financial burden to defendants, but did not directly address the assessment method. The court rejected reliance on isolated testimony and nonverbatim committee minutes as decisive, and explained that a comparison with the KBI laboratory fee concerned the $400 amount, not the method of assessment.
Key Takeaways
- A qualifying defendant owes one $400 Children’s Advocacy Center assessment in the criminal case, not $400 for each conviction.
- The court reversed the Court of Appeals on the issue under review, vacated the $2,400 assessment, and remanded for an amended journal entry imposing a $400 fee.
- The court left open how the statute applies when crimes involving minor victims are prosecuted in multiple cases; it did not adopt a per-victim rule.
Why It Matters
The decision resolves the per-defendant versus per-conviction dispute for a single criminal case and rejects the notion that “a crime” by itself unambiguously establishes a crime-to-fee ratio. It also provides a detailed example of Kansas courts using grammatical structure after finding statutory text ambiguous, while treating related statutes and legislative history as potentially informative but not dispositive.
For sentencing courts and practitioners, the immediate consequence is concrete: Mildfelt’s assessment must be reduced from $2,400 to $400 on remand. The opinion’s holding concerns the number of convictions in the criminal case before the court and expressly reserves the distinct multiple-case scenario for a future controversy.