Andanh.com

Prosecutor Marc Bennett pointed at Ted Burnett and asked the woman in the jury box if she could impose the death penalty.

"We're not talking hypotheticals, what we're asking is... if you could consider giving this man, sitting here in the white shirt, death?" Bennett said.

"It would be difficult," she said. "But I could consider it."

That is the question facing potential jurors in Burnett's capital murder trial, which began Monday.

From a pool of 500 possible jurors, 12 will be chosen to decide Burnett's case.

Ted Burnett smoked pot a few times with the teenage boy who had been hanging around his apartment complex.

That boy, Everett Gentry, would later testify in court, implicating 51-year-old Burnett in an alleged murder-for-hire scheme that will have him on trial for his life this week.

Jury selection begins today for Burnett's capital murder trial in the killing of Chelsea Brooks, who died nine months pregnant at age 14. The trial could span nearly three weeks.

Gentry's credibility on the witness stand is expected to be central to the trial. His testimony provides prosecutors with the main link between Burnett and Elgin Robinson, the father of Brooks' unborn child.

Robinson, Gentry says, agreed to pay Burnett $500 to kill Brooks -- who had just completed eighth grade at Allison Middle School -- in June 2006. Robinson, then 20, feared he would face rape charges because of her age.

Through the first three months of the year, Sedgwick County has billed 17 cities for more than $956,000 for housing their inmates in the Sedgwick County Jail.

So far, the county has collected less than $16,000.

Last month the Sedgwick County sent "demand letters" to the eight cities that have refused to pay the roughly $2.09 hourly fee that the county started charging Jan 1 for housing city inmates in the county jail. Among those refusing to pay is the city of Wichita, which the county says owes $869,087.59.

The letters say the county will pursue "all legal remedies" in its efforts to collect the fees. But county Public Safety Director Bob Lamkey, who oversees the fee program, said the county hasn't decided whether to take the matter to court.

Wichita made its position clear in a March 3 letter from City Attorney Gary Rebenstorf.