OBLANDER SAYS MENELEY DIDN'T ASK

Dave Meneley stepped into a courtroom Monday to face the jurors who
will decide whether he perjured himself when he earlier testified while
wearing the badge and blue uniform of the Shawnee County sheriff.

The ousted sheriff's trial began 16 months after he was charged with
two felonies and six years after cocaine evidence was stolen,
triggering the sheriff's department drug scandal. Meneley, 54, is
charged with two counts of perjury stemming from his testimony twice in
1999 that he didn't know Timothy P. Oblander, a former deputy and
narcotics investigator, was addicted to cocaine.

Oblander, the first witness, testified two hours about how he became
addicted to cocaine while he was a narcotics officer, skimming the drug
from undercover purchases, stealing drug evidence from another
investigator's office and taking drugs used to train the department's
drug-sniffing dogs.

After Oblander spent a month starting June 27, 1995, as a patient at
Valley Hope, a substance abuse treatment facility in Atchison, Meneley
never asked him why he was there, and Oblander never volunteered the
information, he told jurors.

When Oblander returned to work, he and Meneley agreed that Oblander
wouldn't return to his earlier job as a narcotics officer, Oblander
said. He was shifted to work as a warrants officer, starting Aug. 4,
1995.

Oblander said he entered Valley Hope after earlier disclosures of his
drug addiction to his family and his partner, Frank Good, a deputy,
hadn't helped resolve the drug problem. He last used cocaine about 3
a.m. that day, he said, and by 8 a.m. or 10 a.m., Good had driven him
to Valley Hope.

Oblander said he feared:

He would lose his job because he was a "law enforcement officer using
illegal drugs."

He might be charged with drug use and jailed.

That "sooner or later" someone would learn he was at Valley Hope for
drug use.

In the first week of treatment, Oblander said, Meneley and two other
people visited him at Valley Hope.

Oblander said he was fearful "because the Big Man's coming to town,
because there would be big questions. 'Why are you here? What are the
circumstances for (you) being here?' All I was worried about was when I
would get the big question, and it never came."

Just before he was released from the facility, Oblander said, Meneley
returned to Valley Hope to discuss Oblander's return to the sheriff's
department. Oblander didn't tell Meneley he was at the facility for a
cocaine or alcohol problem because "that seemed obvious why I was
there," he said.

Oblander lost no sick time at the sheriff's department for the month he
was in Valley Hope, and he continued to get paychecks while a patient,
he said.

When the attorney general's office subpoenaed him in 1996 to testify at
an inquisition, a secret proceeding to collect evidence, Oblander said,
he knew that Meneley, Good, Deputy Scott Baker, Deputy Philip Blume and
Detective Daniel Jaramillo also had been subpoenaed.

At the inquisition, Oblander invoked the Fifth Amendment to protect
himself against making statements incriminating to himself. Oblander
invoked the Fifth again in November 1998 at a preliminary hearing for a
drug defendant. Oblander didn't tell Meneley about pleading the Fifth
at the inquisition, Oblander said, and Meneley didn't discipline
Oblander for taking the Fifth at the 1998 hearing.

"It's not a very proper thing to do," Oblander said Monday of taking
the Fifth.

Oblander resumes testifying this morning.

The sheriff's department became ensnarled in the drug scandal in 1994
when cocaine evidence disappeared from the department, which Oblander
admitted Monday he took.

Oblander resigned as a sheriff's corporal on Feb. 26, 1999, and
admitted three days later to having cocaine and alcohol addictions.
Good was fired on April 20, 2000, and Meneley, a two-term sheriff, was
ousted Feb. 24, 2000, after two district judges concluded he had
committed perjury on two occasions and concealment on one occasion.

A jury in June acquitted Good of basically the same perjury charges
Meneley now faces.

Before testimony began Monday, it took about 3 1/2 hours to select the
jury of six women and six men. An alternate, a woman, then was chosen
from a group of three prospective jurors.

During questioning, an older man said, "That's a tough one," when
asked whether Meneley started the trial with a presumption of
innocence. "I'm not saying he's guilty. I'm saying he walked a thin
line." He wasn't chosen as a juror.

Another prospective juror, the wife of a retired Kansas Highway Patrol
trooper, acknowledged she and her husband donated money to the
political campaign for Sheriff Dick Barta and had placed a Barta
campaign sign in their yard. Barta, a retired highway patrol major,
defeated Meneley on Aug. 1 during the Republican primary for the
sheriff's office. The woman said she also had supported Meneley in
earlier sheriff's campaigns. She also wasn't chosen as a juror.