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Gov. Parson wants Missouri Attorney General to prosecute murders in St. Louis

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Governor Mike Parson is asking the Legislature to allow him to send state prosecutors to St. Louis to bring more charges in murder cases.  He extended the special session on violent crime to add this measure.

“We’ve got to address this issue, and we’ve got to quit talking about it and try to figure out what we’ll really put in place, all the way from boots on the ground, to the prosecution, to the courts, all those different entities have to come together to fight violent crime.”

Parson, flanked by AG Schmitt at Monday’s press conference.

Parson says out of 161 cases so far this year, only 33 have been charged. He says the prosecution rates were too low in 2018 and 2019.

The governor says he did not talk to Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner about the announcement and denies that it’s a personal move.  He has publicly disagreed with Gardner’s prosecuting a husband and wife who wielded guns against protesters in their St. Louis neighborhood.

“This is not a personal attack, this is nothing to do with anything that we are trying to find violent criminals that are committing murders,” Parson said Monday at the Capitol.

The proposal does not allow the state Attorney General to supervise or replace the Circuit Attorney. Instead, the Attorney General will be able to prosecute cases if 90 or more days have passed, the chief law enforcement officer makes the request of the Attorney General, and the Circuit Attorney has not yet filed charges.

When asked if he would agree with the federal government taking his cases from him, Attorney General Eric Schmitt replied, “Everybody ought to be working together here. That it’s all hands on deck, that there are no politics when it comes to public safety.”

As the special session continues, a Missouri House panel is considering the Senate-passed crime bill. St. Louis Democrats have been vocal about the scope of its potential prosecution of juveniles as adults and recruitment of police officers from outside of St. Louis.

 

Missouri’s governor signs major crime legislation into law

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Sweeping legislation aimed at cracking down on violent crime was signed into law late Monday afternoon by Missouri’s governor in Jefferson City.

Missouri Governor Mike Parson briefs Capitol reporters in Jefferson City on July 6, 2020 (photo courtesy of the governor’s Flickr page)

Governor Mike Parson (R) announced that he would sign Senate Bill 600 during his media briefing with Capitol reporters. He describes the bill as a large step toward safety and justice for communities.

Critics say it will cause Missouri to have to build two new prisons.

The bill updates Missouri’s law involving the offense of conspiracy, a point emphasized by the governor during today’s press conference. Parson says that under current law, a person cannot be convicted of an offense based upon a conspiracy to commit it unless the person committed an overt act.

“This allows law enforcement and prosecutors to hold individuals accountable that plan criminal enterprises. This bill also includes other key provisions to help address violent crime,” Parson tells reporters.

The bill creates mandatory prison sentences for several violent crimes, and creates a new offense of vehicle hijacking. That provision was a priority for State Sen. Bob Onder, R-Lake St. Louis, and for Attorney General Eric Schmitt (R).

Onder testified before a legislative committee in February, saying there were 351 carjackings in St. Louis City in 2019.

“These are violent crimes in which Missourians are terrorized in what should be a safe sanctuary, their cars,” Onder testified that day.

He noted during his February testimony that there was no uniform sentencing in Missouri for carjacking. Some suspects are charged with robbery, while he said others are charged with stealing and are being sentenced to just four months in prison.

The bill also establishes the Missouri criminal street gangs prevention act, which Governor Parson says modernizes the approach to prosecuting criminal gangs.

State Rep. Nick Schroer, R-O’Fallon, sponsored the House bill. Schroer tweeted Monday that the legislation is “a bipartisan approach that will help make Missouri safer.”

Critics of the bill include Americans for Prosperity-Missouri and the ACLU of Missouri.

“Governor Parson’s commitment to signing SB 600 is shortsighted. We know that crime bills like this one exacerbate racial inequalities and fuel mass incarceration with no actual improvement to public safety,” ACLU of Missouri policy director Sara Baker says, in a statement.

Baker says the bill “tears money away from public education and services proven to decrease crime.”

The bill is also opposed by Americans for Prosperity-Missouri (AFP-MO), which predicts the law will increase Missouri’s prison population by 2,500 and will cause two new prisons to be built.

“Locking up more people does not result in safer neighborhoods, but rather harms taxpayers and needlessly rips families and communities apart,” AFP-MO state director Jeremy Cady says, in a statement. Cady says it will cost $500 million to build the new prisons.

With the governor’s signature, the new law will take effect on August 28.

Copyright © 2020 · Missourinet

Missouri discovers about 7,000 untested and partially-tested rape kits since 1980

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The state attorney general’s office has completed its count of rape kits that have sat in labs and on shelves, untested for decades. View full report (66 pages)

With the help of a federal grant, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt appointed a task force that has worked since February, led by Judge M. Keithley Williams. The survey was divided into six geographic regions, with the larger, more rural regions being completed first.

The inventory resulted in 6,987 sexual assault kits. 6,157 of those kits were untested. Of the untested kits, 4,438 were reported, meaning they had a police report to go along with them, and 1,719 were unreported, without an accompanying police report. Additionally, 830 of the kits discovered were previously partially tested.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance provided a $2.8 million dollar grant, with the initial $700,000 going toward the inventory. The remaining will be used for testing, but it will not pay for all of the outstanding kits to be tested.

 

“The initial testing of 1250 kits gets us much further down the road with the existing grant dollars we have now, but ultimately to test all the kits we want to test, there will be additional dollars sought,” Schmitt told Missourinet.

It takes about a thousand dollars to test each rape kit.

Details about counties and statewide stats: https://ago.mo.gov/home/safe-kits/.

Schmitt says the state will now create a way to store and track the kits from now on.

“There really hasn’t been a way for victims or law enforcement to track where these kits are ultimately at. So the purpose of the tracking system is to get an infrastructure set up so that we are not reinventing the wheel every five or ten years, that we have something that people can rely on and as those kits move through the process and ultimately get tested, people can track it,” he said.

Schmitt will meet with advisors tomorrow/Thursday to begin plans for the tracking system.

 

 

Four months remain for Missouri to gather number of untested rape kits or lose millions

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On February 28, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt launched the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative to determine how many thousands of rape kits are sitting on hospital and law enforcement shelves waiting to be tested. At the time, the state had six months to find out.

Attorney General Eric Schmitt

About four months remain for Schmitt’s office to get a firm count. Otherwise, the state does not get about $2 million in federal funding to hire staff to test the kits.

“I mean it’s a big state. You have 114 counties and the city of St. Louis. So, the most important thing early on here is to figure out the enormity and the gravity of the issue and then tackle it head on,” says Schmitt.

Fifty Missouri hospitals have counted how many untested rape kits they have, and the information has been submitted to Schmitt’s office.

Schmitt tells Missourinet a working group is developing a three-step process of determining how many untested kits exist, launching a tracking system for them and getting the kits tested.

“People ought to have an expectation that these cases will ultimately, that justice will be delivered and that people, if they’ve submitted to a kit, that it can be tested. That’s what we’re doing,” he says.

In February, Schmitt announced Judge M. Keithly Williams as the state coordinator of the program. During the announcement, she said about 40% of participants responded to a survey under former Attorney General Hawley, who “suggested” a backlog of about 5,400.

“You here the number of over 5,000 untested across the state and it shocks the conscience, right? And it should. I think that’s why we’ve moved so aggressively with pursuing the grant, hiring Judge Williams and moving forward,” Schmitt says.

When asked if any other hires have been made, Schmitt says his office has internal resources that it is working on.

“But Judge Williams is really the key here,” he says. “We wanted to have somebody who had been in the judicial branch, very well respected, has relationships with law enforcement, with victim advocacy groups.”

Hawley, a fellow Republican now serving in the U.S. Senate, is cosponsoring legislation passed last week by the Senate Judiciary Committee that would reauthorize a federal grant program aimed at ending the backlog of untested DNA evidence from unsolved crimes, especially rape kits. Whether Missouri could draw down additional federal money under the Debbie Smith DNA Backlog Grant Program is unknown. The measure has not been finalized by Congress at this point.

Copyright © 2019 · Missourinet

Missouri Attorney General teams up with federal prosecutors in St. Louis in violent crime initiative

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Five special assistant U.S. Attorneys for the St. Louis region were sworn in on Thursday as part of Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt’s Safer Streets Initiative.

Schmitt says this team of state and federal prosecutors will focus on violent crimes cases.

“Tackling a problem as large and widespread as violent crime takes constant action and discussion. With the swearing-in of these five talented Special Assistant U.S. Attorneys and continuing our work with U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen and his talented team, I’m reminding Missourians that I’m not backing down from fighting violent crime,” said Schmitt.

This week, St. Louis Alderman Brandon Bosley asked for the National Guard to be deployed to north St. Louis to combat the city’s growing rate of violent crime. The unofficial murder count for St. Louis is 36 this year.

“I think Alderman Bosley has rightly pointed out that we need to do something. As far calling in the National Guard, I’ll leave that to the Governor.” Schmitt said.

The five Special Assistant U.S. States Attorneys, who were sworn in by the Hon. Rodney Sippel, Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Missouri, are Katharine Dolin, Gregory Goodwin, Jennifer Szczucinski, Natalie Warner, and Jordan Williams.

Schmitt began the Safer Streets Initiative in January and has expanded the cooperative agreement with the U.S. Attorney’s Office to include Springfield and Kansas City.