(Missourinet) – The Missouri Court system is in the early stages of correcting improper felony convictions that were the result of the way a law was written.

It started with a 2002 legislative amendment to the state’s criminal code that included misinterpreted wording.

The amendment added an enhancement allowing for stealing to be classified as a felony if “value” was an element of the crime. The wording was problematic because the offense of stealing had no “value” attached to it in the code.

But from 2002 on, people were charged and convicted with felony stealing until 2013, when an attorney suspected there were inconsistencies in the law. That case involved Amanda Bazell, who was sentenced to concurrent 12 year prison terms for burglary and stealing firearms.

An August 2016 decision in State vs. Bazell by the Missouri Supreme Court finally identified the flaw in the statute. The court said “stealing” is “not defined to include, as an element of the offense, the value of property or services appropriated.”

Attorney Ellen Flottman, who handled the Bazell case for the Public Defender’s office, says the courts are now going through the process of finding relief for wrongly convicted people.

“That’s what going to be the ultimate remedy for all of the people that get relief under the Bazell decision, is their re-sentence as a misdemeanor instead of a felony, because that’s what Bazell said,” Flottman says. “Bazell said that all of these stealings that were tried and convicted as Class C felonies should have Class A misdemeanors.”

The Supreme Court heard arguments in three cases Wednesday involving similar circumstances. In all three, the defendants pleaded guilty to felony stealing of items worth more than $500. All three defendants were given suspended sentences with probation. And they all had their prison sentences reinstated after numerous parole violations.

Also, after the high court’s Bazell decision, attorney’s for all three defendants filed motions that were successful in getting charges reduced to misdemeanor status.

The Supreme Court is now being asked to determine if circuit courts exceeded their jurisdiction in granting the relief.

Since the Bazell decision last year, lawmakers have rewritten the criminal code, and a new version of the statute for stealing went into effect last January.  There’s no ambiguity over felony stealing now. The cases beforehand are a different story.

Flottman says a lot of litigation will take place to determine a path forward after courts and attorneys misinterpreted the law for 15 years.

“Some of them already served their sentences years ago, but have a felony stealing on their record. Some of them are still sitting in prison and have several more years left to serve on a felony that the Supreme Court has said should only have been a misdemeanor. Some of them have pleaded guilty to a stealing that was a felony, and should only have been a misdemeanor.”

Days after the Supreme Court’s Bazell decision, the Missouri State Public Defender’s Office issued a memo stating that there a few classes of stealing felonies that went untouched.

Flottman says there are so many different scenarios of the crime facing so many people that it’s not known if all of them will be granted relief.

“We don’t know those thing yet. So there’s a lot of issues to work out. And everybody’s situation is different, and there’s thousands of these people.”

Jackson County chief public defender Ruth Petsch told KCUR radio after the Bazell decision that her office had plead or had trials for at least 10,000 felony stealing cases since 2002, when the language in question was added to the criminal code.

While representing the Platte County prosecuting attorney on Wednesday, attorney Joseph Vanover argued that most charges could not be reduced, even if their cases were given retroactive status.

“The issue of retroactivity is a good one, is an important one that’s been discussed,” said Vanover.  “I think we probably end up with the same result if it’s retroactive or not.”

Vanover claimed that only cases under current review could be reduced.

In his representation of defendant Robby Ledford on Wednesday, attorney Stuart Huffman argued that his client was wrongly convicted of a felony because courts were misinterpreting the law.

“The interpretation at the time was that it was a felony, and unfortunately it was always a misdemeanor offense,” said Huffman.

The seven judge state Supreme Court is considering the argument made Wednesday and will render a decision at an upcoming date.

(Missourinet) – Missouri crews are fighting wildfires in Montana, Mississippi, Wyoming, Oregon and California.

Nearly 200 active wildfires nationwide are wreaking havoc on land, in forests and to homes. Wildfires have damaged thousands of acres of land, including about 500,000 acres in Montana.

Cody Norris with Mark Twain National Forest in mid-Missouri’s Rolla says the work is intense for the 100 Missouri firefighters battling the flames.

“They often have to quickly learn the terrain, how fire behaves in that area, heavy fuels, trees that have fallen on the ground due to beetle kill and wind events,” says Norris.

Norris tells Missourinet there are more than 100 national forests and grasslands nationwide to protect.

“The U.S. Forest Service does have a very strong fire component because it’s very important for us to protect the resources we’re managing by putting out wildfires on the land and using prescribed fires as a tool to do restoration efforts in areas that are fire-dependent ecosystems. We do have folks stationed with that expertise on most, if not all of those forests and grasslands,” says Norris. “This has been happening for decades. It’s a national support effort. Somebody might work on a forest but they’re often supporting the emergency response nationwide.”

Norris says Missouri’s natural wildfire season is in the spring and fall. Western states have more wildfires during the summer months.

He says some Missouri members might be assigned to hurricane relief efforts when they return from firefighting assignments.

(Missourinet) – Anti-discrimination activists held a dinner at a Jefferson City church Thursday night to draw attention to what’s being referred to as racial dynamics in jury selection.

In a news release, organizers couched the gathering in the wake of recent events in Charlottesville, VA, noting patterns of racial discrimination are being looked at in many communities.

Patterns of racial discrimination in jury selection have been alleged by public defenders to have taken place in mid-Missouri’s Cole County where Jefferson City is situated. One case in the county circuit court was reversed by the Western District Appeals Court in Kansas City after it ruled prosecutors improperly cut a potential black juror from serving.

A 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision stated that race can’t be a factor in keeping someone on the jury, or striking them from the list of potential jurors.

The day after the appeals court ruling, Justin Carver, the Supervising Public Defender for Cole, Miller, and Moniteau counties wrote an open letter to Cole County Prosecuting Attorney Mark Richardson.

In it, Carver sighted five cases in which an African American was struck from serving. The defendants in four of the cases were African American while the defendant was Native American in the fifth. Carver says in the seven counties that he’s handled cases, the pattern of purging African Americans from juries where the defendant is African American has only occurred in Cole County.

“In my mind, there’s a very clear pattern,” said Carver. “They are treating potential jurors who are African American very differently than they are treating potential jurors who are Caucasian.”

Richardson was unavailable for comment for this story. His office said he was attending a conference of prosecutors.

Attorney Andrew Sartorius was the lead public defender on the case that was reversed by the appeals court. He calls the alleged practice of Cole County prosecutors one of the most brazen violations of someone’s due process rights that he’s seen.

“Certainly when I was trying this case, I did my best to try and address the racial tensions that existed, with Ferguson and everything,” Sartorius said. “But you don’t expect to actually see a prosecutor systematically remove an entire class of people.”

Lawrence Mosley, an African American man, was convicted of distributing marijuana by a Cole County jury in 2016 and sentenced to 12 years. In his appeal, which was handled by the public defender’s office, he challenged “the fact that he was convicted by an all-white jury.”

Carver says the reasons given by the prosecutor for striking a potential black juror from cases have been outrageous. “Because she worked for the state. OK, really? This is Cole County. We get state employees on juries all the time. I will tell you that I can’t think of another case in which the state struck a state employee just because they worked for the state.”

Sartorius thinks if county prosecutors are trying to eliminate black jurors from cases with black defendants, they’re being helped by an underrepresentation of African Americans in the jury pool itself.

Typically, those called in for jury duty are supposed to represent a cross section of the community. Sartorius says it’s not unusual in Cole County for only two out of 60 people in a jury pool to be African American.

He contends prosecutors have an easier time of eliminating black jurors when there are far fewer of them to choose from. “It’s kind of hard, if it’s an equal representation of two groups of people to get rid of a group. But when there’s two or three out of 60, it makes it a lot easier to get rid of an entire class of people.”

One of the speakers at the Thursday dinner held by the anti-discrimination activists was Missouri NAACP head Rod Chapel. He’s also an attorney who represented a group of black clergy members known as the Medicaid 23, who went to trial after disrupting floor debate in the Missouri Senate over Medicaid expansion.

Chapel says Cole County prosecutors struck potential black jurors in that case as well. “The idea that if you have a black defendant, that black people can’t serve on the jury flies in the face of American traditions of our jury system” said Chapel.

Carver, the Cole County Supervising Public Defender, sees the process of striking potential black jurors is having an adverse impact on black defendants. He says the practice could be harmful to African Americans’ trust in the justice system.

“It really causes the accused to lose respect for the court system, to lose respect for the verdict,” said Carver. “And if we want people to follow the law, they’ve got to have respect for the process. And they’ve got to feel like they’ve been treated fairly and justly.”

Mosely, whose verdict was reversed by the appeals court, will get a new trial in Cole County. Carver’s hoping that the jury selection this time around will be highly scrutinized. “You would sure think and hope! Yes!”