Every federal criminal case in Kansas — a wire-fraud indictment returned in Kansas City, a methamphetamine conspiracy charged in Topeka, a felon-in-possession count filed in Wichita — proceeds in one court: the United States District Court for the District of Kansas. That court is not a larger version of state court. The prosecutors, the procedural rules, the sentencing system, and the exposure are all federal, and the defense must be built federal from the first day.
This guide covers what actually matters about defending a federal case here — the three staffed courthouses, the judges who preside, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and its priorities, the district’s docket numbers, and the prison litigation that flows through this court from FCI Leavenworth. Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C. defends federal criminal cases, appeals, and post-conviction matters nationwide, and Elizabeth Franklin-Best has been admitted pro hac vice in the District of Kansas. This page is part of our federal courts directory.
If agents have made contact, a grand jury subpoena or target letter has arrived, or an indictment is already on the docket in the District of Kansas, we offer a paid, one-hour initial consultation to evaluate the case and chart the next moves.
Table of Contents
Quick Answer: District of Kansas
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What court handles federal cases in Kansas? | The U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas — one district for all 105 Kansas counties, with staffed courthouses in Kansas City, Topeka, and Wichita. |
| Who prosecutes federal cases there? | The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Kansas, led by Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorney Ryan A. Kriegshauser since December 2025, with offices in the same three cities. |
| Which circuit hears appeals? | The Tenth Circuit, sitting in Denver. A criminal notice of appeal is generally due 14 days after entry of judgment. |
| Where are post-conviction motions filed? | A § 2255 motion attacking a Kansas conviction is filed in this district; § 2241 petitions from FCI Leavenworth are also heard here, because the prison sits inside the district. |
| Has the firm appeared in this court? | Yes — Elizabeth Franklin-Best has been admitted pro hac vice in the District of Kansas, and our paid, one-hour initial consultation is the place to start. |
Key Takeaways
- One statewide district: every federal prosecution arising in Kansas’s 105 counties is filed in the District of Kansas.
- The statute, 28 U.S.C. § 96, names nine Kansas cities where court may be held; as of mid-2026 the court actually staffs three courthouses — Kansas City, Topeka, and Wichita.
- The district sentenced 340 people in fiscal year 2024 — drug trafficking (31.8%), firearms (18.2%), and fraud, theft, or embezzlement (12.6%) led the docket.
- U.S. Attorney Ryan A. Kriegshauser was confirmed by the Senate on December 18, 2025, making Kansas one of the districts with Senate-confirmed leadership.
- Guilty pleas resolved 97.6% of fiscal year 2024 convictions, and § 5K1.1 substantial-assistance departures ran well above the national rate — cooperation decisions dominate defense strategy here.
- The 14-day window for a criminal notice of appeal is short enough that we settle the appeal question with the client before sentencing day ends.
- FCI Leavenworth — the century-old federal prison long known as USP Leavenworth — keeps a steady § 2241 and compassionate-release docket before this court.
- This bench produced United States v. Black, one of the country’s defining decisions on government intrusion into attorney-client communications.
- Elizabeth Franklin-Best has been admitted pro hac vice in the District of Kansas and handles trial defense, Tenth Circuit appeals, and post-conviction work here.
The District of Kansas at a Glance
The United States District Court for the District of Kansas covers the whole state — all 105 counties and roughly 2.8 million people — as a single judicial district. On paper, 28 U.S.C. § 96 says court “shall be held” at nine cities: Kansas City, Lawrence, Leavenworth, Salina, Topeka, Hutchinson, Wichita, Dodge City, and Fort Scott. In practice, the court staffs courthouses and clerk’s offices in three — Kansas City, Topeka, and Wichita — and every criminal docket in the district runs through them.
Prosecutions are brought by the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Kansas, whose own offices track the court’s three-city footprint. Appeals go to the Tenth Circuit in Denver, which reviews convictions and sentences from Kansas alongside those from Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming.
The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure apply here as everywhere, but the district layers its own requirements on top: a local-rules set whose current edition took effect April 1, 2026, a separate local speedy-trial rule, detailed administrative procedures for criminal filings, and the court’s “Pillars of Professionalism.” Counsel who already know those documents — and the expectations of the judges who enforce them — start a Kansas federal case ahead, which is why we study a district’s local practice before the first appearance, not after.
Federal Criminal Cases in the District
The District of Kansas sees the full federal docket — white-collar offenses and fraud, drug and firearms prosecutions, and everything between. The numbers give the docket its shape: of the 340 people sentenced here in fiscal year 2024, drug trafficking accounted for 31.8 percent, firearms 18.2 percent (well above the 13.2 percent national share), and fraud, theft, or embezzlement 12.6 percent — roughly one and a half times the national figure for economic crime.
A Kansas federal case usually announces itself before charges exist — a target letter, a grand jury subpoena, or agents at the door. An indictment typically follows, then the initial appearance and arraignment in Kansas City, Topeka, or Wichita, pretrial motions and discovery, and a resolution by plea agreement or trial, followed by sentencing under the Guidelines framework. Our federal criminal process hub explains each stage; what this page adds is how those stages actually play out in this district.
And in this district they play out at the negotiating table: 97.6 percent of fiscal year 2024 convictions came by guilty plea, and only eight defendants went to trial all year. Just as telling, sentencing judges granted government substantial-assistance motions under U.S.S.G. § 5K1.1 in 16.6 percent of cases — far above the 9.9 percent national rate. Cooperation is a live, recurring feature of Kansas federal practice, and whether to engage with it is a decision that needs counsel before the first proffer session, not after. We defend across the district’s offense mix — investigating the government’s case, litigating the motions that have leverage, negotiating when a resolution serves the client, and trying the case when it does not.
Applied Insight: In a district where more than 97 percent of convictions come by plea and substantial-assistance departures run far above the national average, the case is usually decided early — in what gets said to agents, whether a proffer happens, and how the Guidelines calculation is framed before the presentence interview. The lawyer you have between the target letter and the indictment in Kansas often matters more than the one you would have had at trial.
The Bench: Three Staffed Courthouses, Nine Statutory Seats
Congress allots the District of Kansas six district judgeships under 28 U.S.C. § 133. As of mid-2026, the court’s own roster shows all six active seats filled: Chief Judge John W. Broomes and District Judges Holly L. Teeter, Toby Crouse, Anthony J. Powell, Anthony W. Mattivi, and Jeffrey M. Kuhlman — the last three seated after a run of confirmations that ended years of vacancies on this bench. Five senior district judges — John W. Lungstrum, Kathryn H. Vratil, Julie A. Robinson, Eric F. Melgren, and Daniel D. Crabtree — still carry substantial caseloads, so a Kansas federal defendant may draw either a newly seated active judge or a seasoned senior one.
The magistrate bench — Gwynne E. Birzer, Angel D. Mitchell, Rachel E. Schwartz, Brooks G. Severson, and Jennifer B. Wieland, supported by two recalled magistrate judges — conducts initial appearances, detention hearings, and much of the pretrial calendar in all three cities. The detention decision made in that first week often sets the trajectory of the case, so we prepare for the magistrate courtroom as carefully as for the district courtroom.
What Federal Prosecutors Pursue in Kansas
The United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Kansas covers all 105 counties from offices in Kansas City, Topeka, and Wichita, organized into criminal, civil, and administrative divisions. Its leadership is settled in a way many districts’ is not right now: Ryan A. Kriegshauser served as interim U.S. Attorney beginning in July 2025, was appointed by the district court that November, and was confirmed by the Senate on December 18, 2025.
The charging mix tracks the sentencing data — methamphetamine-trafficking conspiracies, firearms offenses, and economic crime. A March 2026 indictment returned by a federal grand jury in Topeka, pairing methamphetamine-trafficking counts with firearms charges, is the bread-and-butter case here, and Kansas’s position astride the Interstate 70 and Interstate 35 corridors keeps interstate drug conspiracies on the grand jury’s agenda. On the firearms side, the Tenth Circuit held in Vincent v. Bondi, 127 F.4th 1263 (10th Cir. 2025), that the felon-in-possession statute, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), remains enforceable after Bruen and Rahimi — though the national split over the statute’s reach is still live, and we preserve the constitutional objection wherever it could matter later. The Supreme Court’s 2026 decision in United States v. Hemani, No. 24-1234 (U.S. June 18, 2026), sharpened that point rather than settling it: the Court struck the drug-user firearm bar of Section 922(g)(3) only as applied and expressly declined to decide the felon-in-possession bar of Section 922(g)(1), which leaves Vincent controlling in this circuit.
Leavenworth: Federal Prison Cases and the Recorded-Calls Litigation
The district’s most distinctive docket grows out of Leavenworth. FCI Leavenworth — the historic prison that operated for more than a century as USP Leavenworth — sits just north of Kansas City and, per Bureau of Prisons data current to June 2026, houses roughly 1,600 people in a medium-security institution and an adjacent minimum-security camp. Because habeas petitions under 28 U.S.C. § 2241 are filed in the district of confinement, disputes over how a sentence is being executed — good-conduct and First Step Act credit calculations, placement decisions, detainers — land before District of Kansas judges no matter where the prisoner was convicted. An attack on the conviction or sentence itself is different: that is a § 2255 motion filed in the district of conviction, and the Supreme Court confirmed in Jones v. Hendrix, 599 U.S. 465 (2023), how narrow the § 2241 detour around that rule has become. Our federal post-conviction practice covers both tracks.
Leavenworth is also where one of the defining attorney-client-privilege battles in modern federal practice unfolded. In United States v. Black, No. 16-20032-JAR (D. Kan.), a contraband-trafficking prosecution arising inside the privately operated CCA-Leavenworth detention center (its operator has since been renamed CoreCivic), discovery revealed that the government had obtained video of attorney visitation rooms and audio recordings of detainees’ calls with their lawyers. The court appointed a special master, and after a years-long investigation, the court’s findings of August 13, 2019 applied the Tenth Circuit’s rule that a purposeful, unjustified government intrusion into the attorney-client relationship is a per se Sixth Amendment violation — no showing of prejudice required — dismissed the indictment with prejudice as to one defendant, and channeled the claims of more than a hundred affected prisoners into consolidated proceedings, In re CCA Recordings 2255 Litigation.
Two practical points follow. First, this bench has shown it will police the confidentiality of the defense function as forcefully as any court in the country — and counsel who know the Black record know exactly what to demand if privileged material may have reached the government. Second, the district’s post-sentencing docket is genuinely active: Kansas judges decided 40 compassionate-release motions in fiscal year 2025 and granted 9 — a 22.5 percent grant rate against the 14.1 percent national figure — although after the Supreme Court’s May 2026 decision in Rutherford v. United States, nonretroactive changes in sentencing law no longer qualify as extraordinary and compelling reasons.
Appeals and Post-Conviction Matters
A District of Kansas case does not have to end at sentencing. Every defendant may appeal to the Tenth Circuit in Denver, and under Federal Rule of Appellate Procedure 4(b) the notice of appeal is generally due within 14 days after judgment enters. Our practice is to put the appeal decision to the client in writing before the sentencing hearing concludes — the notice takes minutes to file, and no later motion can revive a deadline that lapsed in silence. With only eight Kansas trials in fiscal year 2024, most appeals here attack sentencing error, which is why we draft sentencing objections with the standard of review already in mind.
Beyond direct appeal, post-conviction relief under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 returns to the district of conviction — a motion attacking a Kansas conviction is decided by a District of Kansas judge, often the same one who imposed the sentence. We also litigate compassionate release and sentence-reduction motions here. This work is the core of our practice and is fully portable: the law is federal, the record is electronic, and we brief a Tenth Circuit appeal from Kansas the same way we brief one from Colorado or New Mexico.
How Our Firm Practices in This Court
Elizabeth Franklin-Best has been admitted pro hac vice in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas — we have actually stood up in this court, not merely studied it. Pro hac vice — “for this occasion” — is the standard mechanism by which a qualified attorney from outside a district court’s bar is admitted to appear in a specific case, and it is how experienced federal defenders practice nationwide.
That admission matters less for the formality than for what it reflects: working familiarity with how this district runs — its April 2026 local rules, its three courthouses, its plea-and-sentencing-driven practice. Elizabeth Franklin-Best is admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court and all twelve federal circuits, including the Tenth, and across her career she has appeared in more than 330 federal proceedings — over 100 of them appeals — from Montana to Florida, wherever a federal defendant or petitioner needed counsel admitted for the case. Best Lawyers in America 2026 names her a “Best Lawyer” in Appellate Practice, Chambers USA 2026 ranks her for Litigation: White-Collar Crime & Government Investigations, and she wrote Reversing Your Criminal Conviction.
What should drive the choice of counsel in a Kansas federal case is depth in the phases where these cases are actually decided — sentencing, appeal, and post-conviction review. Elizabeth Franklin-Best argued the Tenth Circuit appeal in United States v. Joseph, 108 F.4th 1273 (10th Cir. 2024), as counsel of record, and her post-conviction work runs from Section 2255 motions to First Step Act Section 404 resentencings and Amendment 821 and compassionate-release litigation. We bring that depth to trial-level defense, Tenth Circuit appeals, and collateral litigation for clients across Kansas.
Frequently Asked Questions
What court handles federal criminal cases in Kansas?
All federal prosecutions in Kansas proceed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas, one district spanning the state’s 105 counties. Although 28 U.S.C. § 96 names nine cities where court may be held, the court staffs courthouses in three: Kansas City, Topeka, and Wichita.
Who prosecutes federal crimes in the District of Kansas?
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Kansas, which maintains offices in Kansas City, Topeka, and Wichita. Ryan A. Kriegshauser has led the office as its Senate-confirmed United States Attorney since December 2025, following interim and court appointments earlier that year.
Which appeals court covers the District of Kansas?
Appeals from Kansas federal convictions go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, headquartered in Denver. The same court hears appeals from Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wyoming, so Tenth Circuit precedent controls every stage of a Kansas federal case.
How does a federal criminal case proceed in the District of Kansas?
Most Kansas cases begin with an investigation — agents, grand jury subpoenas, or a target letter — followed by indictment, arraignment, pretrial motions, and resolution by plea or trial. The plea stage dominates here: 97.6 percent of fiscal year 2024 convictions came by guilty plea, and only eight cases in the district went to trial all year.
Has the firm appeared in the District of Kansas?
Yes. Elizabeth Franklin-Best has been admitted pro hac vice in the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas, so our experience before this court is demonstrated rather than theoretical — and the same admission procedure is available for new matters here.
Does the firm handle federal cases in the District of Kansas?
Yes. We defend federal investigations and charges in Kansas City, Topeka, and Wichita, brief appeals to the Tenth Circuit, and litigate § 2255, § 2241, and compassionate-release matters in this district. Every engagement begins with a paid, one-hour initial consultation.
Is there a federal prison in Kansas?
Yes. FCI Leavenworth — the century-old institution long known as USP Leavenworth — sits just north of Kansas City and held roughly 1,600 people in mid-2026 across its medium-security facility and minimum-security camp. Because the prison lies inside the district, § 2241 petitions about how a sentence is being carried out are heard by District of Kansas judges.
What was the Leavenworth recorded attorney-call litigation?
In United States v. Black, a prosecution arising from the privately operated CCA-Leavenworth detention center, the court learned the government had obtained video of attorney meeting rooms and recordings of detainees’ phone calls with counsel. After a special master’s multi-year investigation, the court’s 2019 findings treated unjustified government intrusion into the attorney-client relationship as a per se Sixth Amendment violation, dismissed one defendant’s indictment with prejudice, and consolidated affected prisoners’ § 2255 claims.
How often does the District of Kansas grant compassionate release?
More often than the national average in the latest data: Kansas judges decided 40 compassionate-release motions in fiscal year 2025 and granted 9 — a 22.5 percent rate against 14.1 percent nationally. Each case still turns on its own facts, and after the Supreme Court’s 2026 Rutherford decision, nonretroactive changes in the law no longer count as extraordinary and compelling reasons.
Can I appeal my federal sentence in Kansas if I pleaded guilty?
Often, yes. A guilty plea does not automatically waive the right to appeal, and even where a plea agreement contains an appeal waiver, that waiver does not reach every issue — an illegal sentence, a sentence above the agreed terms, or ineffective assistance of counsel may still be raised. Because most Kansas convictions come by plea and only a handful of cases go to trial each year, the majority of Tenth Circuit appeals from this district challenge sentencing, so we draft sentencing objections with appellate review in mind. The 14-day deadline under Rule 4(b) still applies.
How does a Section 5K1.1 substantial-assistance motion work in the District of Kansas?
Under U.S.S.G. § 5K1.1, the government may ask the court to sentence a defendant below the Guidelines range — and, where a statutory motion is also filed, below a mandatory minimum — in return for substantial assistance in investigating or prosecuting others. Only the government can file the motion, and the extent of any reduction is up to the judge. Kansas uses these motions well above the national average: sentencing judges granted them in 16.6 percent of fiscal year 2024 cases, against 9.9 percent nationally. Whether to pursue cooperation is a decision that should be made with counsel before any proffer session.
Talk With a Federal Criminal Defense Lawyer
Whether the problem is a target letter from the Kansas City office, a sentencing two weeks out in Wichita, a Tenth Circuit deadline, or a § 2241 issue at FCI Leavenworth, the right first step is the same: a paid, one-hour initial consultation in which we review the record and lay out the realistic options.