A former assistant attorney general is hoping to become Missouri’s next attorney general. Elad Gross of St. Louis ran unopposed in the Democratic primary.
Gross said that he wants to get that office back to work for Missourians.
“As attorney general, I will start Missouri’s first civil rights division. I will end the practice of jailing innocent people after they’ve been proven innocent,” Gross said. “We shouldn’t be wasting our taxpayer dollars, and we shouldn’t be participating in these kind of immoral spectacles so that some guy can run for whatever office he wants to in the future.”
A judge in southwest Missouri’s Greene County held the acting Director of the state Department of Corrections in contempt of court for not releasing an elderly prison inmate whose conviction was overturned.
Howard Roberts, 82, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for financial exploitation, but his sentence was tossed out in June after a review showed that records and testimony omitted from his trial could have resulted in an innocent verdict. Greene County Senior Circuit Judge David Jones overturned Roberts’ conviction and ordered him released, but Attorney General Andrew Bailey called the warden at South Central Correctional Center in Licking and told him to keep Roberts locked up, according to the Kansas City Star.
A Missouri appeals court sided with Bailey this week in his pursuit to keep Roberts locked up. Whether the case will be appealed is unknown.
Bailey attempted to keep two other people imprisoned whose convictions were overturned this year. Sandra Hemme’s murder conviction and life sentence were vacated after a judge ruled that evidence pointed to a now-deceased St. Joseph police officer as being the killer. A St. Louis judge overturned Christopher Dunn’s murder conviction and life sentence after ruling there was evidence of “actual innocence.”
Bailey kept both Hemme and Dunn imprisoned as his office appealed the lower court rulings to the appeals courts and to the Missouri Supreme Court. The high court issued rulings in both cases that led to Hemme and Dunn being set free.
Gross said Bailey is “dangerous.”
“I mean, he is calling for the execution of somebody that DNA evidence may exonerate in just a few weeks here, and he was trying to push that hearing back to the execution date would be pushed forward and the guy would be dead before we even looked at the DNA evidence in court,” said Gross. “I think a lot of the stuff that he’s doing is wrong.”
The Missouri Supreme Court has set an execution date for Marcellus Williams. He was convicted of the 1998 stabbing death of former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Gayle.
Williams has maintained his innocence throughout his time in prison. He is scheduled to die as early as 6 p.m. on September 24.
Gross said that he wants to start Missouri’s first public corruption unit “to make sure that taxpayer dollars go exactly where they are supposed to.”
“I’ll bring back the conservation division that Jay Nixon actually started that Josh Hawley got rid of when he was attorney general,” he added. “When we talk about federal overreach and some issues with the federal government, I think we really need to be protecting Missourians and our families. That includes holding the federal government accountable for the nuclear waste that they left us with and poisoned our families with.”
Regarding making sure taxpayer dollars go where they are supposed to, Gross takes issue with current Attorney General Andrew Bailey over repeated lawsuits to overturn and prevent the Biden Administration’s student loan forgiveness plan from moving forward.
“I have a problem with our attorney general and a lot of the litigation he is choosing to participate in on behalf of the state,” disagreed Gross. “In this situation, there’s some questions about what kind of executive authority there is. I’m a big believer in separation of powers and also smaller government. There is a lot of authority out there for what the president is doing with this more tailored approach to student loan forgiveness versus what he was doing before. So, some of this will get worked out in the court system already, but we are spending a lot of taxpayer money on this specific case.”
Bailey argued that President Biden is sidestepping the Constitution by “saddling working Missourians with a half trillion dollars in college debt.”
Gross will also share a position on the November ballot with an effort that looks to guarantee the right to an abortion. This follows the Missouri Secretary of State’s office certifying the ballot question, saying that it met the minimum requirement of valid signatures collected from voters.
“We’re going to have an opportunity to put reproductive freedom in the state constitution,” Gross weighed in. “We will do that in November, but when we do, we need an attorney general who was going to defend those new rights that we have in the constitution.”
Gross worked as an assistant attorney general under former Attorney General, and fellow Democrat, Chris Koster. Gross said that unlike previous Missouri attorney generals that went on to higher offices, he is running only to do this specific job.
He challenges Republican incumbent Andrew Bailey, along with Libertarian Ryan Munro.
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