Missouri
Capitol Perspectives: Ignoring Missouri's Constitution • Missouri Independent
![Capitol Perspectives: Ignoring Missouri's Constitution • Missouri Independent](https://missouriindependent.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/House-budget-20230328-scaled.jpeg)
As Missouri legislators begin their 2024 session, they might want to consider a recent Missouri Supreme Court decision striking down a significant bill lawmakers passed in 2022.
The decision, issued just days before the 2024 legislative session, invalidated the 2022 law because state lawmakers and the governor violated a pretty simple restriction in the state’s Constitution.
Lawmakers should not have been surprised. The constitutional restriction is completely clear and has been upheld in previous Supreme Court decisions.
The issue involves a prohibition on the legislature passing a bill that gets amended beyond the bill’s original topic. The Constitution provides that “No bill shall contain more than one subject which shall be clearly expressed in its title.”
Seems pretty simple. But lawmakers in the 2022 legislative session ignored that restriction as they have so often in the past.
The bill in question, HB 1606, began as a pretty simple proposal to expand the requirement for counties to publish annual financial statements in local newspapers.
But in the Senate the process went off the deep end adding a pile of unrelated issues.
Missouri Supreme Court strikes down law banning sleeping on public land
The final version included restrictions on local government banning sleeping or camping on sidewalks, requiring martial status on deeds, banning local governments from COVID-19 vaccines requirements for their employees, limiting property condemnation awards, restricting local government regulations on refrigerants, exempting World Cup soccer tournament ticket sales from the sales tax, expanding local government power to expand employee retirement benefits and a pile of other unrelated provisions.
This long list of unrelated issues illustrates how the legislature went off the rails.
In the closing weeks of a legislative session, it’s not unusual for legislators to attach completely unrelated issues pushed by various special interests and lobbyists.
But legislative leaders have not enforced the state Constitution’s requirement that a bill be limited to the original topic by ruling a bloated bill out of order.
Surprising to me is that the governor signed that 2022 bill the Supreme Court struck down when in the same year, Gov. Mike Parson had vetoed two other bills in which he cited violation of the single-topic constitutional requirement.
A 1997 Missouri Supreme Court decision cited the importance of the single-subject constitutional restriction because “these constitutional limitations function in the legislative process to facilitate orderly procedure, avoid surprise, and prevent ‘logrolling’ in which several matters that would not individually command a majority vote are rounded up into a single bill to ensure passage.”
Although the court allowed the law in question to stand, finding the bill related to a single subject, I found that comment insightful.
In the final weeks of a legislative session, the process to win approval in the second chamber can be almost like blackmail requiring agreement of the original chamber’s sponsor to accept the unrelated provisions added by the second chamber.
This absence of discipline enforcing the state constitutional restriction could become even worse in the 2024 legislative session when legislators push amendments unrelated to the original bill to gain bragging rights for their upcoming campaigns or at the urging of special interests.
That likely was the case with the 2022 bill in which the House passed a simple single-topic bill only to see the Senate bloat what began as a simple seven-page bill into a 64 page quagmire.
Legislative and gubernatorial violation of a state constitutional single-topic restriction extends well beyond the lawmaking process itself. It interferes with governmental transparency and can obscure your understanding of the actions of your elected officials.
A bill containing completely unrelated topics makes it almost impossible for voters to understand and more difficult for reporters to describe the bill in a simple sentence.
Beyond that, a bill with a nearly incomprehensible number of topics allows a legislative leader or local legislator to focus their descriptions on just the most politically popular element rather than all of the more complicated and controversial issues inserted into a bill.
With the impending 2024 primaries and general election, this legislative practice only serves to foster confusion and obscurity for voters.
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Missouri
Omaha metro residents weather flood as Missouri crests
![Omaha metro residents weather flood as Missouri crests](https://gray-wowt-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/JWUZV4PNFRGAZFQJK4P5DEOKDU.jpg?auth=311138e6e35be340d83eaf45937930de80b1a7b9143619fafed1cd06ee0c7254&width=1200&height=600&smart=true)
OMAHA, Neb. (WOWT) – The National Weather Service said the Missouri River crested at just under 33 feet Saturday morning.
So far, the Pottawattamie County Emergency Management Agency reported no updates in flood-related efforts since then.
They told 6 News their overnight crews encouraged several people to get out of the floodwater near the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge.
They weren’t alone.
Council Bluffs Police said they received a report of three people paddling upstream in a canoe beneath the pedestrian bridge.
Elsewhere, after this week’s high winds, the Omaha and Lincoln affiliates of the nonprofit group Rapid Response cut down and cleared out tree limbs for residents in the Florence neighborhood.
“They were a true blessing,” Lita Craddick said. “I was so amazed. I was so uplifted and I was overwhelmed almost.”
Craddick said she was faced with having to get estimates and not knowing what homeowner’s insurance would cover.
That was before Rapid Response swooped in.
“Such a blessing,” Craddick said. “I was just totally in shock. I’m like, ‘No way.’”
Rapid Response teams are still helping clean up debris from April’s tornadoes, and they’re planning to help out with flood cleanup after the waters go down.
But it was important for them to help Florence homeowners Saturday.
“We talk to so many people, have so much work to do, so many jobs to do,” said Beth Sorensen, director of the Lincoln affiliate. “So we have to kind of prioritize which ones we’re going to do first. And in this neighborhood, with all these limbs on roofs and things, this was the priority today.”
Rapid Response said it’s badly in need of volunteers, including experienced chainsaw and skid-steer loader operators.
If you would like to help out, click here.
Copyright 2024 WOWT. All rights reserved.
Missouri
Sandra Hemme spent 43 years wrongfully imprisoned. Missouri would pay little if she is freed
![Sandra Hemme spent 43 years wrongfully imprisoned. Missouri would pay little if she is freed](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/04ed2e5/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1200x630+0+23/resize/1200x630!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi0.wp.com%2Fthebeaconnews.org%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2024%2F06%2FCopy-of-Story-Lead-Art.jpg)
After serving 43 years in prison for a murder case hinged on things she said as a psychiatric patient, Sandra Hemme could be cleared of the killing and freed in less than three weeks, by July 14.
For that, Missouri state law promises $100 a day for each day of her life lost to prison on a wrongful conviction. For Hemme, who was first convicted in 1981 for the 1980 killing, that’s roughly $1.6 million.
Some critics say that’s too little for 43 years. If her case had been in federal court, she would be in line for about a third more. In Kansas, nearly twice as much. In Texas, the money would have been more than doubled.
Livingston County Circuit Judge Ryan Horsman ruled in mid-June that the state must free Hemme unless prosecutors retried her in the next 30 days. Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said shortly after the ruling that his appeals division would look into whether to challenge the judge’s decision.
The judge ruled that prosecutors presented no forensic evidence or motive linking Hemme to the killing of library worker Patricia Jeschke in St. Joseph, Missouri, in November 1980.
Rather, the case relied on what she said in a psychiatric ward in a St. Joseph hospital. At the time, she said conflicting and impossible things. At one point, she claimed to see a man commit the killing, but he was in another city at the time. At other times, she said she knew about the murder because of extrasensory perception. Two weeks into talks with detectives, she said she thought she stabbed Jeschke with a hunting knife, but she wasn’t sure.
Hemme’s lawyers accuse a now-discredited police officer of her murder. In a rare departure from its policy a year ago, the attorney general’s office didn’t object to a hearing to explore a wrongful-conviction claim.
If she’s cleared, Hemme’s case would mark the longest known wrongful conviction of a woman in U.S. history.
Her compensation for those years in jail will not be a record.
Caps on wrongful-conviction compensation vary widely across the country. In federal cases, the limit is $50,000 for every year someone’s wrongly held in prison plus $100,000 for every year on death row.
In Washington, D.C., the cap is $200,000 a year. Connecticut pays as much as $131,506. Nevada has a sliding scale that pays $100,000 a year on cases of 20 years or more.
Kansas pays $65,000 for each year. In more than a dozen other states, the rate runs from $50,000 to $80,000. Of states that set limits or promise compensation, Missouri’s $36,500 a year is low.
The National Registry of Exonerations counts 54 people convicted of crimes in Missouri who have been exonerated since 1989. Only nine of them got payouts from the state. Missouri is the only state that gives wrongly imprisoned inmates compensation if they were proved not guilty by DNA analysis.
Gov. Mike Parson vetoed a bill in 2023 that could have provided inmates proven not guilty with a larger compensation up to $179 a day, allowed prosecutors to seek judicial review of past cases and created a state special unit to help prosecutors with investigating cases.
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
Missouri
Single-vehicle crash ends in fatality after car flips near rural Missouri highway
![Single-vehicle crash ends in fatality after car flips near rural Missouri highway](https://gray-kctv-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/JBDLJUKJ5BFZNEP2QR2F55J454.jpg?auth=6e2a72399e083f6de8b54a18e98a7328f8378ee4886bcfe5d2333ae5a484d1d6&width=1200&height=600&smart=true)
HENRY CO., Mo. (KCTV) – A single-vehicle collision ended with a fatality over the weekend after a car flipped onto its top on a rural Missouri highway near the Harry S. Truman Reservoir.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol indicates that around 11:20 a.m. on Saturday, June 29, emergency crews were called to the area of Route U and SE 580 Rd. with reports of a collision.
When first responders arrived, they said they found a 2005 Pontiac Grand Prix driven by Steven F. Albin, 67, of Clinton, Mo., had run off the right side of the roadway and then hit a ditch and a culvert.
Troopers noted that the impact on the culvert caused the vehicle to flip onto its top. Albin was pronounced deceased at the scene. No further information has been released.
Copyright 2024 KCTV. All rights reserved.
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