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Missouri has a Constitution, it just doesn't seem to matter. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-07-02

Local governments have been breaking the law for years. It hasn’t changed.

Tony Messenger of the St. Louis Post Dispatch has written numerous articles about how rural courts violate the Missouri Constitution, but it still continues.

In ‘Profit and Punishment,’ Tony Messenger exposes how the justice system traps poor people

Brooke Bergen was caught stealing an $8 tube of mascara in Dent County, Missouri — and not only did she end up going to jail for a year for it, but she wound up with a $16,000 bill for her time in custody. Many people in Rural Missouri are dirt poor. People charged with minor misdemeanors in most rural counties of Missouri have been required to take off work and return to work every month and pay a monthly part of their fines. If they don’t have the money, even two dollars short, they are sent back to jail and charged hundreds of dollars for the cost of being in jail, and this cost is added to their fines. Messenger’s columns on the issue of debtors prisons won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. They also led to reforms in Missouri. In 2019, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that counties could charge board bills, but they could only use civil tools to collect them, not threaten further jail time. Spurred by Messenger’s reporting, the Missouri legislature codified that same idea into state law. ...the reforms only go so far ...a last-minute amendment to the Missouri legislation ironically added another $10 fee onto many court cases — for a supplemental fund to increase deputy sheriff salaries. And charging people for jail stays in Missouri remains not only legal but common practice in all but two rural counties.

St. Louis County is fragmented in many small to large municipalities, especially in North County when many areas are populated by People of Color. Many of the smaller municipalities have maintained their budgets primarily with traffic enforcement and property ordinances.

Some of the towns in St. Louis County can derive 40 percent or more of their annual revenue from the petty fines and fees collected by their municipal courts. A majority of these fines are for traffic offenses, but they can also include fines for fare-hopping on MetroLink (St. Louis’s light rail system), loud music and other noise ordinance violations, zoning violations for uncut grass or unkempt property, violations of occupancy permit restrictions, trespassing, wearing “saggy pants,” business license violations and vague infractions such as “disturbing the peace” or “affray” that give police officers a great deal of discretion to look for other violations.

When you get the police involved, it doesn’t matter if your warrant is for jaywalking or murder, you’re going to jail. You might say: everybody should obey the law. Who of you thinks POC get treated the same as people covered by white exceptionalism.

(The Washington Post) – On March 20 in the St. Louis County town of Florissant, someone made an illegal U-turn in front of Nicole Bolden. The 32-year-old black single mother hit her brakes but couldn’t avoid a collision. Bolden wasn’t at fault for the accident and wanted to continue on her way. The other motorist insisted on calling the police, as per the law. When the officer showed up, Bolden filled with dread. “He was really nice and polite at first,” Bolden says. “But once he ran my name, he got real mean with me. He told me I was going to jail. I had my 3-year-old and my one-and-a-half-year-old with me. I asked him about my kids. He said I had better find someone to come and get them, because he was taking me in.” The Florissant officer arrested and cuffed Bolden in front of her children. Her kids remained with another officer until Bolden’s mother and sister could come pick them up. The officer found that Bolden had four arrest warrants in three separate jurisdictions: the towns of Florissant and Hazelwood in St. Louis County and the town of Foristell in St. Charles County. All of the warrants were for failure to appear in court for traffic violations. Bolden hadn’t appeared in court because she didn’t have the money. A couple of those fines were for speeding, one was for failure to wear her seatbelt and most of the rest were for what defense attorneys in the St. Louis area have come to call “poverty violations” — driving with a suspended license, expired plates, expired registration and a failure to provide proof of insurance.

Now, State Republican Officials are violating the Constitution with the Citizen’s Abortion Rights Amendment.

Jay Ashcroft and Andrew Bailey are both violating the Missouri Constitution while conspiring to make sure that the citizen’s Abortion Rights Initiative Petition fails. First Ashcroft has created a Ballot Summary guaranteed to make the Petition fail.

ACLU calls ballot summary for Missouri abortion question ‘misleading,’ sues Ashcroft

A lawsuit filed Thursday in Cole County Circuit Court asks Circuit Judge Jon Beetem to toss a ballot summary prepared by Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and approved by Attorney General Andrew Bailey, both Republicans.

Here is the ballot summary written by our (Missouri’s) Secretary of State.

Ballot summary The text of the Ashcroft ballot summary challenged Thursday, for one of the abortion rights plans, asks voters if they want “to amend the Missouri Constitution to: • Allow for dangerous, unregulated, and unrestricted abortions, from conception to live birth, without requiring a medical license or potentially being subject to medical malpractice; • Nullify longstanding Missouri law protecting the right to life, including but not limited to partial-birth abortion; • Require the government not to discriminate against persons providing or obtaining an abortion, potentially including tax-payer funding; and • Prohibit any municipality, city, town, village, district, authority, public subdivision, or public corporation having the power to tax or regulate or the state of Missouri from regulating abortion procedures?”

Click on the above link to read the whole article, including how the Initiative Petition is really written. (Sorry, paywall)

ACLU asks judge to force state to finalize ballot summary for Missouri abortion amendment

Our (Missouri’s) Attorney General Andrew Bailey has figured out a way to disrupt the Initiative Petition process

Supporters need signatures from 8% of voters in six of the state’s eight congressional districts in order to get the abortion-rights measure on the 2024 ballot. But before they can begin, the ballot question needs to go through a process involving Fitzpatrick, Bailey and Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft.

Bailey has decided to grossly inflate the cost of implementing this amendment as a means to make it unaffordable.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/2/2178918/-Missouri-has-a-Constitution-it-just-doesn-t-seem-to-matter

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