Resentencing not needed after all

Life delivers its sentence before court can

By PHYLLIS ZORN

Staff writer

A rural Marion man who appealed his 22½-year prison sentence because he disagreed with a criminal history score used to determine the sentence’s length would have had his day in court for a new sentencing last week — except that he died three days before the hearing.

Initially charged Oct. 28, 2020, with first-degree murder in the death April 8, 2020, of Wichita resident Shalan Niccole Gannon, 27, Robert B. Mans, 51, pleaded no contest April 18, 2022, to voluntary manslaughter and aggravated battery.

Even before judge Mark Braun told Mans his sentence, Mans’ lawyer objected to a score used for his criminal history.

Mans and his lawyer thought his criminal history score should have been a “B,” the second most serious score. Instead, pre-sentencing investigators gave him a score of “A,” the most serious.

Ruling that circumstances aggravated his crime, Braun handed Mans consecutive sentences of 228 months in prison for voluntary manslaughter and 43 months for aggravated battery.

Because the sentences were to run consecutively, this meant Mans would remain in prison 22½ years.

Braun also originally ordered Mans to register as a violent offender and to pay $8,962.25. Of that, $3,224.25 was restitution to a crime victims compensation board.

In ruling on an appeal in the case, the state appellate court agreed in part and disagreed in part with Mans’s sentence.

The court remanded the case back to district court, and a new sentencing hearing was to have been conducted July 18.

Mans died July 15 at Lansing prison. Cause of death was not disclosed.

Evidence indicated Gannon was killed at property owned by Mans’s in Canada.

She was reported missing three days later. Her body was found in the Ninnescah River in rural Sumner County two months after that.