his tenure, in the case of State v. Limon, Kline defended a Kansas law which provided substantially higher sentencing guidelines for acts of homosexual statutory rape compared to equivalent heterosexual acts. A Kansas trial court upheld the law, the Kansas Court of Appeals affirmed that decision, and the Supreme Court of Kansas declined to hear the case. The party challenging the law was barely 18 at the time of the offense, and both Limon and the other boy were residents of a home for the mentally disabled. Kline had repeatedly referred to the older boy as a "predator." His counsel applied to the Supreme Court of the United States for a writ of certiorari. In June 2003, the Supreme Court issued a GVR Order, remanding the case for reconsideration in light of the Supreme Court's then-recent decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which held that a similar Texas law violated the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The Attorney General's office continued to pursue the matter, seeking to distinguish the Kansas law from the Texas law. The Kansas Court of Appeals upheld the earlier decision 2-1, but the Kansas Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of Limon and overturned his conviction in 2005. By the time of his release he had served 5 years of a seventeen-year sentence. If the participants had been of opposite sexes, the maximum sentence for the older one would have only been 15 months. 2006 and 2008 re-election campaigns Kline ran for re-election as attorney general in 2006. On November 7, 2006, he lost to Democratic challenger and Johnson County District Attorney Paul J. Morrison. Kline received 41 percent of the vote. To oppose Kline in the general election, Morrison had changed his political affiliation from Republican to Democratic in the fall of 2005. On December 11, 2006, Johnson County Republican Precinct committeepersons narrowly selected Kline over fellow Republican Steve Howe to serve the remaining two years of Morrison's term as county district attorney. With 60% of the vote, Howe defeated Kline in the August 5, 2008, Republican primary for a full term as district attorney. Church memorandum controversy In late September 2006, an internal election campaign memo from Kline to his campaign staff was leaked to The Interfaith Alliance and quickly was picked up by bloggers, resulting in much discussion and controversy. In the memo, Kline tells his staff how to form a campaign