Kansas Man Convicted Over $20 Fee Wins Reversal at State Supreme Court

A Wyandotte County man convicted of two felonies and a misdemeanor for failing to pay $60 in sex-offender registration fees has had all three convictions thrown out by the Kansas Supreme Court. Terrance Sims, who was on parole for sex abuse crimes at the time, missed $20 registration fee payments in October 2013, January 2014, and April 2014 — and Wyandotte County District Judge Bill Klapper convicted him of all three nonpayment offenses.

The case, decided on August 14, has wound through the courts for more than a decade, according to the Kansas City Star. Sims argued that convicting him based on his inability to pay the fees violated constitutional due process protections, telling the court he was indigent and could not afford the payments required of registered sex offenders under Kansas law. Under state law, failing to pay the fee is a misdemeanor the first time, but subsequent failures to pay are classified as felonies.

All five participating Kansas Supreme Court justices agreed that Sims' convictions had to be overturned, but they split sharply on why. Chief Justice Eric Rosen and Justice Dan Biles favored reversal on narrower procedural grounds — the prosecution had missed a court-ordered deadline — while Justices Caleb Stegall, K.J. Wall, and Larkin Walsh concurred based on broader due process concerns about criminalizing an indigent person's failure to pay, according to CaseMine's analysis of the ruling. Justice Melissa Taylor Standridge did not participate because of her prior involvement in the case on appeal.

A Decade of Delay Inside the Courts

The case's tangled procedural history traces back to a 2019 remand. The Kansas Supreme Court took the unusual step that year of retaining jurisdiction over Sims' appeal while sending the case back to Wyandotte County District Court to determine whether his public defender had provided ineffective assistance by failing to raise procedural due process arguments earlier in the case, according to FindLaw's record of the decision. In January 2020, the district court ruled that the public defender's performance had indeed prejudiced Sims' case.

Yet the state did not file a copy of that January 2020 decision with the Supreme Court until 2024 — and only after the court ordered a case status update that June. Chief Justice Rosen wrote that the parties had failed for years to follow the court's direction, arguing the state simply did not meet the court's timeline. Justice Biles supported Rosen's reasoning that the reversal rested on this procedural failure rather than a constitutional finding.

The Kansas Supreme Court ultimately determined that Sims' district court lawyer did not properly pursue a due process argument early in the proceedings — the same ineffective-assistance question the 2019 remand had sent back for review. That finding, paired with the state's own missed deadlines, gave the two-justice bloc grounds to overturn the convictions without reaching the constitutional question at all.

The Due Process Argument the Court Didn't Fully Resolve

Justice Stegall's concurrence took a different tack, writing that the registration-fee statute itself raised due process concerns. He questioned what public harm is prevented by imprisoning a registered offender who owes just $20 in Kansas Offender Registration Act fees, a concern Justices Wall and Walsh joined. Wyandotte County District Court had never formally deemed Sims indigent before the offenses occurred — a gap that had already surfaced in his original trial.

At that trial, Judge Klapper had acknowledged on the record that the registration law contained a potential procedural problem, according to KCUR's reporting: the statute required defendants to have been declared indigent by a court before reporting, yet offered little realistic opportunity for an unrepresented offender to actually obtain such a declaration. That flaw wasn't new. In the 2018 case *State v. Owens*, the Kansas Court of Appeals had already noted that the law's indigency exception required a prior court declaration but provided no explicit mechanism for an offender to proactively request an indigency hearing before registration. In Sims' own case, the Kansas Court of Appeals had rejected his due process argument, citing public safety as the relevant government interest at stake.

What the $20 Fee Actually Requires

Under Kansas Statute Annotated 22-4905, registered offenders must remit a $20 administrative fee to their local sheriff's office at each required check-in, and the law requires the payment every three months for life. Failing to pay within 15 days is a class A misdemeanor for a first violation and escalates to a severity level 9 felony once two or more past payments go unpaid, according to the Atchison County Sheriff's Office. Registered offenders separately must report in person four times a year during their birth month and every three months after, and must notify law enforcement of any change in residence, employment, or vehicle within three business days, per the Riley County Police Department — the same registration framework outlined in Hoodline's recent coverage of a Shawnee case.

The constitutional principle underlying Stegall's concurrence isn't new either. The U.S. Supreme Court's 1983 ruling in *Bearden v. Georgia* established that the Fourteenth Amendment bars incarcerating someone solely for failing to pay criminal justice fees without first inquiring into their ability to pay and considering alternatives, according to the Harvard Law Review. More recently, in April 2023 the U.S. Department of Justice issued guidance to state and local courts nationwide warning that mandatory fines and fees imposed without an indigency assessment risk violating due process and equal protection, a concern that echoes through the Sims case even though the Kansas court's majority never formally adopted it as binding precedent.

Lawmakers Already Moved to Fix the Gap

Kansas legislators appear to have already recognized the statutory defect at the heart of Sims' case. During its 2026 session, the Kansas Legislature passed Senate Bill 487, amending the registration act to formally establish a court petition process for indigency determinations and allowing law enforcement to issue notices to appear rather than making arrests over fee nonpayment, according to the Kansas Office of Revisor of Statutes.

It isn't the first time the state's highest court has reined in the registration law. In the 2016 decision *State v. Redmond*, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that retroactively applying amendments extending registration periods from 10 years to 25 years or life violated the federal Ex Post Facto Clause for offenses committed before the law changed, according to Criminal Legal News. Because the Sims majority rested its reversal on procedural grounds rather than a unified constitutional holding, it remains an open question whether other past KORA fee convictions across Kansas could be affected, or whether the state's fee structure remains vulnerable to future constitutional challenges.