Court Rules Many Missouri Felonies Be Reduced To Misdemeanors Due To Error

Missouri has a real mess on its hands. On Tuesday, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that, because of poor wording, the state’s criminal code that designated certain types of crime associated with stealing as felonies was written in such a way that they did not apply to the original statue on stealing. Apparently, way back in 2002, the state amended the criminal code and added the designation of Class B and Class C felonies to “any offense in which the value of property or services is an element”. Unfortunately, the statute that covers stealing makes no mention of the value of property or services, only “appropriate[ing] property or services of another.” This means that anyone who was convicted of one of these felonies since 2002 will have the opportunity to have that sentence reduced to a misdemeanor. As the Missouri State Public Defenders Office noted in a memo, “This has implications for the statute of limitations (one year on a misdemeanor).  This has implications for convictions used to enhance. This has implications for inmates serving sentences for felonies.” Unraveling all this for convictions under these felony statutes since 2002 is going to be a real chore. In addition, as the Defenders Office noted, there may also be repercussions for defendants who had their sentences for a subsequent crime upgraded because of the prior felony conviction, not to mention those who served jail time for a felony conviction under one of these statutes. How the state is going to compensate them is beyond me. But it won’t be pretty. Thankfully for the state, a new criminal code goes into effect in 2017 and these items have been fixed, although that also seems to have happened by accident as no legislator seems to have been aware of the problem in the first place.