The Kansas City Star, Aug. 19
Ricky Kidd lost 22 years behind bars. How can Missouri say he’s owed nothing?
A judge ruled Wednesday that a man convicted in a 1996 double homicide is innocent. The judge’s order said evidence points to the true perpetrators of the crime. BY MONTY DAVIS
Where were you 22 years ago? What have you done since?
Ricky Kidd is an innocent man who spent all those years in a Missouri prison - and, outrage upon outrage, has nothing to show for it.
Missouri can and must do more for innocent people who have been wrongfully incarcerated. Missourians should demand it as a moral imperative.
Like Kidd, who was released from state prison Thursday after serving 22 years for a Kansas City robbery and double murder he had nothing to do with, the vast majority of Missouri’s exonerated inmates are flatly denied compensation for society having locked them up unjustly.
Ludicrously, state compensation is extended only to the roughly one-third of exonerated inmates who are cleared through DNA evidence. All others, some two-thirds of those wrongfully imprisoned, are ineligible for compensation.
Moreover, law enforcement officers are granted qualified immunity from lawsuits, meaning only their most egregious acts are fair game in a civil case. As for prosecutors, they have absolute immunity from being sued.
Last year, Kansas became the 33rd state to agree to compensate those wrongfully convicted. The national Innocence Project called the Kansas act “one of the strongest laws in the nation providing state compensation for innocent people who were wrongfully convicted.”
First there’s the better compensation: The Kansas law provides exonerees $65,000 for each year of imprisonment. If Kidd had been a Kansas inmate, that would amount to about $1.4 million. If he qualified for compensation in Missouri - which he doesn’t - Kidd would have received a meager $50 a day, or just over $400,000.
Then there’s the help offered to get exonerees back on their feet: Kansas now provides them with social services that include assistance with housing and tuition, counseling, health care and financial literacy. Missouri does not.
Indeed, Ricky Kidd was working with family and friends Friday to somehow piece his life back together, beginning with the cumbersome task of getting IDs.
Nor is there much after-incarceration help for the innocent from the private sector. Thankfully, there is the After Innocence organization based in Oakland, Calif., with ties to the Kansas City-based Midwest Innocence Project that freed Kidd. After Innocence director Jon Eldan told The Star his organization has put Kidd and other area exonerees in touch with free dental care, as well as health and legal services.
Thank goodness for nonprofit organizations such as these, which deserve public support. But with 430 Missouri inmates alone on the waiting list at the five-state Midwest Innocence Project, more needs to be done. Can society really be content with passing the hat to compensate innocent people we’ve wrongly put in prison?
It won’t be cheap to do it right. By Midwest Innocence Project estimates, Missouri still has 1,200 or more innocent inmates among its 30,000-some prison population. But really - $50 a day? As Midwest Innocence Project Executive Director Tricia Bushnell asks, “Would you put yourself in prison for $50 a day?”
Missouri also must alter the law to extend compensation to all those exonerated, not just those freed by DNA evidence. It’s a cruel, arbitrary and morally indefensible line that leaves two-thirds of those exonerated out in the cold. “Ricky Kidd’s is a case that should really help change that,” Eldan said.
This society - meaning every one of us - owes the wrongfully imprisoned much more than sparse, begrudging or nonexistent compensation for the time stolen from them and the torment put upon them.
And while it’s necessary to protect prosecutors from torrents of frivolous inmate claims, civil immunity must be stripped away in cases of abject prosecutorial malpractice.
Prosecutors rightly have immense power. But it cannot be absolute.
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The Jefferson City News-Tribune, Aug. 16
Does Galloway have a shot?
Nicole Galloway made her gubernatorial bid official Aug. 12. In a two-minute video, the state auditor cast herself as a corruption-fighter who has uncovered $350 million in government waste.
She said her audits have led to dozens of criminal charges, and she criticized a law recently signed by Gov. Mike Parson that bans most abortions at the eighth week of pregnancy.
Her announcement sets up a likely 2020 general election with her and Parson as the respective Democrat and Republican candidates.
Of course, in this political town, the question on everyone’s lips is: Does Galloway have a chance?
Missouri, after all, is a red state. The governor, the House, the Senate and all statewide officeholders except for Galloway are Republicans.
That doesn’t bode well for the challenger, and neither does the fact that Parson has outpaced her in funding. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported as of June, she had raised about $232,000 to Parson’s nearly $1.7 million.
That’s a huge gap. And in politics, the winner of the money race is often the winner at the ballot box.
Galloway was appointed to the office of state auditor in 2015. She won the seat in 2018, but she won by less than six points against a weak opponent.
At this point, most political observers have to believe Galloway faces an uphill battle.
However, she does have some things that could go in her favor, including the fact she’s been aggressive in her current job. For her gubernatorial campaign, she’s already embracing her watchdog role.
“Dark money flows from corporations and lobbyists,” she said in her video announcement. “The governor takes their money then does their bidding. Nothing gets done for you.”
That anti-establishment, anti-status quo message seems to borrow from the playbook that helped President Donald Trump and then Gov. Eric Greitens win their respective seats in 2016.
Another factor in the race could be the 2020 presidential campaign. A big Trump win likely would help other Republicans on the ticket, while a Democrat win would do the same for their party.
Parson clearly has the early lead in the race, but we’ve just seen the kickoff in a four-quarter contest. There’s a lot of game yet to be played.
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The St. Joseph News-Press, Aug. 17
Our Opinion: The endangerment of common sense
If you could catch a glimpse of any wild animal, a bottom-feeder in the depths of a muddy river wouldn’t bring as much cachet as an eagle soaring in the sky or a wolf moving mysteriously through rugged woodlands.
But the pallid sturgeon has a few things going for it, starting with longevity. The species has existed since the days of dinosaurs and still looks like something from “Jurassic Park,” with its flattened, shovel-shaped snout and slender tail armored with bony plates instead of scales. The sturgeon may have spent thousands of years lurking in the bottom of the Missouri River, but it rose to prominence when it was listed as an endangered species in 1990.
This endangered status sparked intense efforts to save a species that few modern humans have ever seen. Critics argue that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has turned the Missouri River into a pallid sturgeon laboratory, to the detriment of farmers and property owners along the river. This is a popular view, but blame really rests with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which dictates the Corps of Engineers’ actions in an attempt to save the pallid sturgeon and other endangered species.
Now, the Department of the Interior intends to inject some sanity into the nation’s premier wildlife conservation law. The agency proposed a revision to the Endangered Species Act, including a directive to look at economic costs when considering whether a species merits protection. Howls of protest followed, as if bald eagle barbecues and grizzly bear coats are next.
This is the kind of hyperbolic exaggeration that makes it hard to get anything done in Washington. A similar extreme position infuses the gun debate, where any suggestion of control is dismissed immediately as a first step toward a totalitarian government confiscating firearms.
It seems like quite a leap, but at least gun owners have the Constitution in their back pockets. A statute, like the Endangered Species Act, is more easily amended.
With this in mind, Missouri’s lawmakers, farmers and property owners should watch closely these proposed changes, given how efforts to save the pallid sturgeon led to a changed river that’s now more prone to serious flooding.
A change in the Endangered Species Act might not affect river management, since economic costs would not be weighed retroactively. That’s good news for the bald eagle and the grizzly bear, but it still gives a ray of hope to those who have seen how much damage this bottom-feeding fish has caused along the Missouri River.
A common sense revision doesn’t have to be a wholesale destruction of a law intended to save animals. Sometimes, hyperbole is as bad as a lie.
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