COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) — A Missouri appeals court says a woman who gave birth to a baby whose body was later found in a car trunk should not have been convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

The Missouri Western District Court of Appeals on Tuesday overturned the conviction of 43-year-old Emily Usnick, saying in a unanimous opinion that the state didn’t prove she acted recklessly or with criminal intent.

Usnick was originally charged with second-degree murder after her baby died in 2009. She was convicted in 2017 of involuntary manslaughter. Prosecutors argued she gave birth unattended, failed to seek medical attention after the birth and enclosed the body in a plastic bag before putting it in the trunk.

The body was found during a drug raid at Usnick’s home in St. Elizabeth in Miller County.

SEDALIA, Mo. (AP) — A 29-year-old Missouri man has been sentenced in the stabbing death of a woman in Sedalia.

Justin Lewis, of Lincoln, was sentenced Tuesday to 30 years and nearly 31 years, to be served consecutively, for the January 2018 death of 33-year-old Heather McClellan. Lewis was convicted in April of second-degree murder, armed criminal action and unlawful use of a weapon.

Investigators testified during the trial that McClellan suffered eight stab wounds and a slit throat before officers found her in blood-soaked shirt and gasping for air at a Sedalia apartment. She died later a Sedalia hospital from blood loss.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — A 34-year-old black man whose family was homeless at times during his childhood in Kansas City, Missouri, will become the city’s 55th mayor.

Voters on Tuesday chose Quinton Lucas over fellow City Council member Jolie Justus in a mayoral runoff, according to unofficial results that showed him with a commanding lead. Lucas will assume office in August, replacing Sly James, another black mayor who served two four-year terms.

“Our final mandate is this: no matter who we are, no matter where you are, no matter what circumstance you find yourself in, in our Kansas City we always believe that you have an opportunity, we always believe that you can persevere,” Lucas said in his victory speech Tuesday night. “In our Kansas City we believe that whatever has happened in your past does not dictate your future. In our Kansas City we believe in fairness for everyone.”

Justus, a former state lawmaker and current City Council member, had James’ endorsement and would have been the city’s first openly gay mayor. She conceded in a sometimes tearful speech on Tuesday night.

“So what is next?” Justus said. “I’m not going to disengage just because I didn’t get the outcome I wanted.”

Both Lucas and Justus are attorneys with similar voting records during their first terms on the City Council. During the campaign, both said their top priorities were reducing crime, increasing affordable housing and spreading development projects across the city. Although the election was officially nonpartisan, both candidates are Democrats.

Lucas said he and his family, led by a single mother, were often homeless during his childhood on Kansas City’s impoverished east side. Despite those struggles, Lucas won academic scholarships to a prestigious private school in Kansas City and then to Washington University in St. Louis and Cornell Law School. He is a practicing attorney and a member of the University of Kansas law faculty. He was endorsed by the police and firefighters’ unions.

During six debates leading up to Tuesday’s vote, Lucas and Justus offered different approaches to some of their top priorities. Lucas cast himself as an outsider to city government who wanted to fundamentally change how the city provides basic services and distributes tax incentives to encourage development. He said Justus was too close to developers and to James, and said she would continue policies that shortchanged impoverished areas, particularly the east side.

Justus emphasized her history in the Legislature and on the council as someone willing to collaborate with all sides and find solutions to longstanding issues.

Lucas was the primary sponsor of an ordinance that caps tax abatements or other tax incentives for development at 75%, with some exceptions. Developers had been able to get up to 100% property tax abatement on certain projects, which led to criticism from some that the city awarded tax breaks for private projects too often. Some developers and city officials opposed the plan, concerned it might slow Kansas City’s growth and pursuit of development projects.

Justus was chairwoman of the city’s airport committee, which ended a nearly seven-year effort to bring a modern single-terminal airport to Kansas City. She acknowledged mistakes were made early in the process when a no-bid deal was considered without public knowledge to allow Burns & McDonnell to build the privately financed single terminal airport. After severe criticism, the no-bid contract was dropped and the city went through a competitive bidding process.

STONE COUNTY — One person died in an accident just after 8:30p.m. Tuesday in Stone County.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol reported a 2006 Cadillac Deville driven by Dale D. Messmer, 69, Cape Fair, was northbound on MO 13 in Branson West. The driver attempted to pass another vehicle and struck a motorcycle driven by Nathan D. Brookshire, 19, Ozark, who was attempting to pass the Cadillac.

Brookshire was pronounced dead at the scene and transported to the Stone County Coroner. He was wearing a helmet, according to the MSHP. Messmer was not injured and was properly restrained at the time of the accident, according to the MSHP.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — Kansas’ tax collections have beaten expectations nearly every month for the past two years and the state expects to end June with close to $1 billion in cash reserves, but the budget problems that followed a former governor’s notorious tax-cutting experiment aren’t necessarily a thing of the past.

The steep income tax cuts that former Republican Gov. Sam Brownback championed to try to stimulate the Kansas economy contributed to persistent and severe budget shortfalls that caused some GOP legislators to rebel and gave the state’s new Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, a potent issue to successfully campaign on last year.

Seeking to keep the budget stable since taking office in January, Kelly twice thwarted efforts by the Republican-controlled Legislature this year to reduce taxes. However, problems have arisen on the spending side of the state’s ledger: The budget that lawmakers eventually approved this year was relatively generous, leaving it unclear how far into the future the new spending can be sustained.

Projections from the Legislature’s nonpartisan research staff show that spending will outpace revenue under the budget covering the fiscal year that begins in July. The researchers predict that the same will be true in following years, making future budget shortfalls inevitable unless lawmakers raise taxes or pull back on spending. The most optimistic scenario has at least a small shortfall developing in 2023.

“The trend is certainly negative,” said state Senate Majority Leader Jim Denning, a Kansas City-area Republican. “Gov. Kelly will have one more year of easy budgeting, but her third year as governor, we will find out just out how deep her leadership skills are.”

The budget outlook didn’t stop Denning and other top Republican lawmakers from pushing for tax cuts this year. They argued that it’s unfair for some businesses and individuals to automatically pay more in state income taxes because of the changes to the federal tax code at the end of 2017. But even as the extra burden hit taxpayers this spring, the prospects of future budget problems undercut their efforts.

Kelly and other Democrats invoked Brownback’s tax experiment, in which the state slashed income taxes in 2012 and 2013. Big budget shortfalls prompted lawmakers to raise the state’s sales tax, divert funds from highway projects, reduce contributions to public pensions and tighten spending on social services, all while facing multiple court orders to boost spending on public schools.

Voters came to view the experiment as a failure, and bipartisan supermajorities repealed most of the tax cuts in 2017 over Brownback’s veto.

The history helped Kelly politically when she vetoed Republican leaders’ more modest tax bills, keeping a few GOP moderates in her fold to prevent her actions from being overridden.

However, the researchers’ projections are dampening state officials’ relief over Friday’s Kansas Supreme Court rulingthat state public school spending will be sufficient under a new education funding law. They could also hurt Kelly’s push to win passage next year of a plan to expand Medicaidcoverage for up to 150,000 more adults and efforts to increase spending on prisons, higher education and social services, which all received significant increases this year.

The most optimistic projection assumes that unanticipated tax collections this year will continue into the future even as spending outpaces revenue by at least $200 million every year, leaving the state with a $153 million shortfall for 2023. Under a more pessimistic revenue scenario, the state would see a shortfall of nearly $100 million in 2022.

Kelly has chastised GOP leaders for pursuing tax relief and rejecting her plans to give the state more budget breathing room by revising payments to the state’s public pension system.

She said during a recent interview that spending increases this year were warranted to repair a state government harmed by Brownback’s tax experiment, adding, “There is still a lot of work to do.”

“We might not have the amount of revenue that we need to pay our bills in 2023,” Kelly said. “I wanted to have the cash on hand to ride us through that storm if that storm comes our way.”

Top Republican lawmakers defended their push for tax relief this year, saying they wanted to move quickly enough so that the state wouldn’t start collecting its “windfall” this spring.

“Tax policy is one of things you look at as you look at trying to figure out how to make your economy grow and thrive,” said Senate budget committee Chairwoman Carolyn McGinn, a Wichita-area Republican.

The state’s tax collections have exceeded expectations in 23 of the 24 months since Brownback’s tax cuts were reversed. Tax collections were $158 million ahead of expectations through May and, for the budget year that ends this month, are on pace to grow by nearly 6.4 percent. Cash reserves, meanwhile, are projected to hit $978 million by the end of the month.

The Department of Revenue doubts that the tax collection surplus will be ongoing. State officials and economists also believe that the national economy will slow down in 2020 or 2021, said Steve Stotts, the department’s taxation director.

“A recession is on the horizon sometime,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Troy Waymaster, a Republican from western Kansas. “We don’t know how bad it could be.”

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JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — Missouri’s case for not renewing the license of its lone remaining abortion clinic includes a claim that three “failed abortions” there required additional surgeries and another led to life-threatening complications for the mother, according to a now-sealed court filing that Planned Parenthood alleges state officials made public in violation of patient privacy laws.

The documents, a letter and statement of deficiencies the Department of Health and Senior Services sent Friday to the St. Louis Planned Parenthood clinic provide the most specific details to date about a state investigation that triggered a licensing dispute now playing out in court.

Should the St. Louis facility be closed, Missouri would be the first state without a functioning abortion clinic since 1974, the year after the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide, according to Planned Parenthood.

State attorneys filed the records in court after the organization sued last month in an attempt to continue providing abortion, despite the health department’s refusal to renew its license amid an ongoing investigation.

Anti-abortion group Operation Rescue put the health department records on its website before St. Louis Circuit Judge Michael Stelzer sealed them Monday per a request by Planned Parenthood to shield confidential health information. A spokesman for Republican Gov. Mike Parson verified the accuracy of those documents to The Associated Press.

Jesse Lawder, a spokesman for Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri, said the state violated patient-privacy laws by releasing the records. He didn’t immediately comment further.

According to the documents, three patients remained pregnant after surgical or medical abortions and required follow-up surgical abortions, a health standards and licensure official wrote Friday to Planned Parenthood. One of those patients developed sepsis after the second surgical abortion, according to the letter from agency official William Koebel.

Koebel wrote that a fourth patient was hospitalized with life-threatening complications following an abortion at 21 weeks of pregnancy.

Medical residents performed some of the abortions at issue and have refused interviews with the health department, according to the agency. Part of the agency’s concern, Koebel wrote, is that the residents were not properly supervised.

Planned Parenthood has said that the residents and several other physicians are not staffers and some no longer practice there, so the organization can’t force them to cooperate. Two on-staff doctors agreed to speak with investigators.

But Koebel warned that it’s “imperative” that Planned Parenthood address the agency’s concerns about interviews with the other physicians.

“Refusal of health care providers to cooperate in the Department’s investigations thwarts the Department’s ability to conduct meaningful review of troubling instances of patient care, and obstructs the Department’s ability to ensure that problems will not be repeated,” Koebel wrote.

The judge has set a Friday deadline for the health department to decide whether to renew the clinic’s license, which was set to expire May 31. Stelzer has allowed the clinic to continue providing abortions as the legal challenge plays out in court.

The fight over the clinic’s license comes as lawmakers in many conservative states, including Missouri, are passing new restrictions that take aim at Roe. Abortion opponents, emboldened by new conservative justices on the Supreme Court, hope federal courts will uphold laws that prohibit abortions before a fetus is viable outside the womb, the dividing line the high court set in Roe.

Parson signed legislation on May 24 to ban abortions at or beyond eight weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions for medical emergencies but not for rape or incest. Efforts to put the new law to a public vote are tied up in court .