Sarah Gonzales-McLinn, serving a life sentence for killing her abuser, cried when she talked about the advocates and legal aides who are trying to convince the governor to grant her clemency.

For years, advocates have argued Gonzales-McLinn didn’t receive a fair trial because the jury didn’t know Hal Sasko had controlled her finances and repeatedly raped her before she killed him in 2014 in Lawrence. Now, a 25-page report from the Washburn University Law Clinic brings new accusations against an appeals attorney who, the report claims, pressured her to accept a plea deal she didn’t understand.

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Gonzales-McLinn, in a phone interview from prison, said she wouldn’t even have known how to ask for help.

“But just because of their own kindness and compassion for me, these people have reached out and done exceedingly above and beyond what I could have even imagined, and it does feel amazing, and there is something so healing in that,” she said. “I have had so many experiences with people being so cruel, that to really have also experienced the opposite side of that, where people show so much love and care, it’s just amazing, and it really has shaped me as a person.”

The governor’s office has given no indication of whether Kelly intends to grant clemency to Gonzales-McLinn. But her supporters remain hopeful the governor will make a decision before she leaves office in January.

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The law clinic report offers the governor a legal basis for commuting Gonzales-McLinn’s sentence to the 12 years she has already served.

Matt Bender, director of the law clinic, presented the report in July at the Kansas Women Attorneys Association conference in Lindsborg, where he was joined by retired journalist Dave Ranney and Michelle McCormick, executive director of the Kansas Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence.

“I think it’s a meritorious case,” Bender said in an interview after the presentation. “And I think that Sarah is also somebody who there’s no purpose in keeping her in prison. She’s not going to kill another person. She has certainly served the time for whatever she was culpable for, and if she gets relief now, she can probably live a meaningful life outside of prison.”

Escape from pain

Gonzales-McLinn didn’t plan a murder, the report argues. She planned an escape.

As the report recounts, she moved in with Sasko when she was 17. The 52-year-old knew she was vulnerable from a past sexual assault and established himself as a father figure.

Sasko controlled her existence, the report argues. He kept her paychecks. Every night, he slipped an itemized bill under her door — for rent, food, and a surgery for glute implants she didn’t want. He monitored her movements and conversations, and made her turn her phone over to him at night. He would break doors and bottles and lay his loaded gun on the table while he insulted her. He forced her to have increasingly painful sex.

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On the night she killed him, she expected him to rape her again. She crushed Ambien into his beer, waited until he was unconscious, tied his wrists, cut his neck with a knife and wrote “freedom” on the wall in his blood.

The jury only heard about her act of violence as her trial attorney instead pursued a defense based on her fractured mental state. In 2021, the jury foreman told the Kansas City Star the details of her abuse could have changed the verdict.

The law clinic report argues she should have been convicted of voluntary manslaughter or second-degree murder. And it faults her post-conviction attorney, Jonathan Sternberg, for convincing her to sign a plea deal that left her first-degree murder conviction intact and abandoned her right to appeal.

Sternberg, in an interview for this story, said she was free to reject the deal.

The plea deal

Sternberg was pursuing a new trial for Gonzales-McLinn when the prosecutor’s office presented a plea deal.

The offer would reduce her minimum time in prison from 50 to 25 years before she was eligible for parole.

“Frankly, the fact that there is an offer at all is extraordinary,” he wrote in an email to Gonzales-McLinn’s mom.

According to the law clinic report, Sternberg met briefly with her at prison and pressured her to agree to the offer, which would expire in 48 hours. She sent him a follow-up email that made clear she didn’t understand that signing the deal meant giving up her right to pursue a new trial.

The report says Sternberg was “constitutionally ineffective.” It speculated that he pushed the deal because her family, after making monthly payments of $3,000 for nearly two years, had exhausted the ability to pay him.

Sternberg said there was “no financial” aspect to presenting her with the offer. He said he spent “hours” going over the deal with Gonzales-McLinn over the course of several weeks and that he gave her enough information to make a decision.

“Nobody has filed a bar complaint against me,” Sternberg said. “Let them do that, and I will have due process.”

He said the report “puts me in a bad position,” because he supports the governor granting clemency to Gonzales-McLinn.

Life after pain

Gonzales-McLinn told Kansas Reflector she didn’t fully understand the plea deal when she signed it because it had been explained to her in different ways.

“It was just a very confusing, kind of like chaotic, really heartbreaking time,” she said.

She has been taking college classes through Washburn University and plans to earn a bachelor’s degree in the spring of 2027 in integrated studies, with an emphasis in human behavior and a minor in psychology.

For now, she is hopeful the governor will grant her clemency, “that God will touch her heart.”

And she is healing.

“You can feel so broken and just ashamed and crushed that it’s really hard to imagine the other side of that,” she said. “I would just want people to know that there is life and there is hope after experiences of extreme hurt and extreme pain.”