COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

The Mid-Missouri PrideFest began on Saturday afternoon and will continue through Sunday, running from 12 p.m. to 10 p.m.

The event will result in several road closures and potential traffic disruptions in downtown Columbia throughout the weekend.

According to the Mid-Missouri Pridefest Emergency Plan, each street entrance will be barricaded to ensure safety during the event. Road closure signs will be placed near Park & St. James.

President of PrideFest Janet David re-assured that there are plenty of parking spaces available for guests.

“We are lucky enough also that Columbia College doesn’t mind that we use their lot,” Davis said. “So, if you get in here, there’s a great spot on 10th street right outside of Columbia College with lots of parking, and then the parking lots and garages are free on the weekend anyway.”

The festival also has an emergency procedure plan in place featuring over 20 staff members ready to assist if any issues were to arise, with eight specifically dedicated to security.

“We’ve never had an incident in the 24 years we’ve been hosting Mid-Missouri PrideFest but with the current climate, the city wanted to ensure we had the extra help,” Davis said.

Additionally, two MU Health Care trucks and the festival’s own first aid tent are on hand for emergencies.

“We have an emergency plan in place if we need it, and we’ve never had to use it. Knock something, knock on wood, I guess but they’re there if we need them,” David said. “And, we have our own first aid tent as well with carts and people and we actually have you know, a doctor in there as well. So if something were to happen, everything is really close.”

However, Davis said two incidents reported during last year’s festival. One involving a protester and the other, dealing with the response to the protest.

Davis said the festival will continue regardless of the weather because scheduling during the fall season, especially with MU football in season, is challenging.

“Once we pick a date everything else in September and October fills up so quickly that we would have to move it to the next year anyway,” Davis said. “So,we aren’t afraid of a little rain so it’s okay as long as it’s not lightning.”

CLINTON, Mo. (KCTV) – An attempt to avoid an animal on a rural road southeast of Clinton led to serious injuries for one driver over the weekend.

The Missouri State Highway Patrol indicates that around 8:15 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 27, emergency crews were called to the area of SE 300th and SE 431st Rd. with reports of a single-vehicle collision.

When first responders arrived, they said they found Morgan K. Wade, 21, of Clinton, had been driving her 2009 Hyundai Sonata south on SE 431st Rd., when she swerved to avoid hitting an animal.

State Troopers said the move caused Wade to hit a fence. She was taken to Golden Valley Memorial Hospital with life-threatening injuries. She was wearing a seatbelt at the time.

No further information has been released.

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Not to put too fine a point on it, but Mike Parson, the governor of the benighted state of Missouri, committed a murder on Tuesday. He allowed to state to kill a 55-year old man named Marcellus Williams in retribution for a murder that Williams almost surely did not commit. Parsons did so with the support of the carefully manufactured conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court, and against the opposition of, among other people, the local prosecutor, and the family of the victim. From Parson’s chair, it was an altogether imperfect crime.

On August 11, 1998, a former St Louis Post-Dispatch reporter named Felicia Gayle was brutally stabbed to death in her home. It was a terrible, messy crime scene thick with biological evidence. DNA abounded. There were bloody footprints all over the kitchen floor and bloody fingerprints everywhere else. The knife was still in the victim’s neck.

Williams, a career criminal who already was serving a long prison term for a robbery, was fingered for the crime by a jailhouse informant and a former girlfriend. The jury took less than an hour to convict Williams of the murder.

But…DNA. Years after the conviction, a test of DNA found on the murder weapon revealed that the prosecutors’ team had mishandled the knife. The only evidence on it was from their team. Seven years ago, then-Governor Eric Greitens, whom nobody ever confused with Clarence Darrow, was so shaken by this that he triggered an obscure Missouri statute and created a board of inquiry to study the evidence from the trial. But Greitens lost his gig due to a baroque welter of personal scandals. Upon ascending to the governorship, Parson simply dissolved the panel that Greitens had created and re-scheduled Williams’ execution, which took place this week.

When he dissolved the board of inquiry, Parson explained that the search for truth in the case of Marcellus Williams had gone on long enough to suit him. From the Washington Post:

“We could stall and delay for another six years, deferring justice, leaving a victim’s family in limbo, and solving nothing,” Parson said in a press release last year. “This administration won’t do that.”

Thus do we have yet another example that the death penalty is inconsistent with all the constitutional guarantees that exist in our criminal law, that it is a surrender to passion, and not to reason, that it is entirely an act of vengeance, not justice, and therefore, it is in every way anti-American. As Albert Camus wrote in 1957:

Whoever has done me harm must suffer harm; whoever has put out my eye must lose an eye; and whoever has killed must die. This is an emotion, and a particularly violent one, not a principle. Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature. If murder is in the nature of man, the law is not intended to imitate or reproduce that nature. It is intended to correct it.