Missouri House Democrats responded to the 2023 State of the State Address delivered today by Governor Mike Parson. House Minority Leader Crystal Quade (D-Springfield) spoke and fielded reporters’ questions:
RAP Act would govern when lyrics, other art can be evidence in criminal trials
Some people in Missouri’s prisons are there after a jury considered the lyrics they wrote or listened to when weighing their guilt. One House member thinks courts should have to consider whether lyrics or other artistic expressions are relevant to a case before they are allowed in a trial.
House Bill 353 would lay out when such expressions could be introduced to a jury and require that a hearing be conducted to see whether they meet that criteria.
The Restoring Artistic Protection (RAP) Act, as it’s being called, is sponsored by Representative Phil Christofanelli (R-St. Peters).
“We want artists to not be afraid to engage in their full scope of expression when they’re creating music in our state,” said Christofanelli. “It’s really a First Amendment issue because we don’t want to have a chilling effect through state action on the expression of artists in our community.”
Christofanelli said many judges are already doing what his bill would require because they recognize that things like lyrics are often used to prejudice a jury.
“[Prosecutors] introduce that they have sung or rapped about unsavory things in the past so obviously they must have engaged in whatever crime they’ve been currently accused of,” explained Christofanelli. “But certainly if it’s the case that they’re actually singing about literal representations of things that they’ve done in the past, well then that would be relevant. I think that as long as we have a gatekeeper to make sure that that sort of evidence doesn’t reach the jury unfairly I think that it will be okay.”
Under HB 353 before song lyrics, literature, visuals, or any other form of art could go before a jury as evidence against a defendant prosecutors would first have to convince a judge that it was relevant to the crime.
Supporters say in more than 500 cases in the U.S. have lyrics played a part in criminal trials.
Christofanelli said one of the entities he has worked with in deciding to file HB 353 is Warner Music, which owns labels including Elektra Records, Reprise Records, Warner Records, Parlophone Records, and Atlantic Records.
Missouri House opens 2023 session
The Missouri House on Wednesday opened the first regular session of the 102nd General Assembly. Here are some scenes from the first day:
House plan would protect those calling for help in college hazing incidents
After some college students in Missouri and elsewhere in the U.S. have suffered permanent physical damage or even died following hazing incidents, one state lawmaker is proposing a law he thinks could help to protect students in this state.
Many of the incidents that have received attention in the news in recent years have involved excessive consumption of alcohol. After once such case last year at the University of Missouri a freshman was left blind and in a wheelchair and 11 of the brothers in the fraternity to which he was pledging are facing criminal charges.
Representative Travis Smith (R-Dora) said hazing is not what it was when he was a student at MU.
“Hazing back then basically was you had a lot of these people coming in from high school that were big man on campus … and it was a lot like the military. It was designed to break you down and build you back up.” Smith says hazing has become something different, and it starts with the fact that alcohol being outlawed altogether on many college campuses, “and what a lot of these kids are doing is getting hard liquor and drinking it as quickly as possible.”
Smith’s proposal, House Bill 240, would protect from being charged with hazing anyone who calls 911 to report a person in need of medical assistance, or who remains at a scene to assist such a person until emergency personnel arrive.
Smith believes with his bill in place students who have drank too much could get life-saving care faster.
The legislator says it’s important to remember that these students are young and situations like these are frightening.
Smith has prefiled HB 240 for the session that will begin January 4.
Extension of restitution to all wrongly convicted prefiled for 2023 session
People convicted of felonies in Missouri but proven innocent by DNA evidence can be paid $100 for every day they were incarcerated after their conviction. People proven innocent by any other means get nothing. At least one Missouri lawmaker will try to change that in the 2023 legislative session.
Kansas City Democrat Mark Sharp filed on Thursday House Bill 113 to extend restitution to anyone exonerated for a felony in Missouri.
Sharp said the idea continues to have bipartisan support.
Similar legislation was approved by two House committees in the session that ended in May by a combined vote of 24-1, but it was never brought up on the House floor for debate.
Sharp said the amount of harm done to a person and their family by a wrongful conviction goes well beyond the inability to have a job during their incarceration. It can involve difficulty finding work and housing after release, lingering issues that could require medical treatment and counseling, and relationship issues.
“This can devastate an entire generation, or several generations in the family when the head of a household or a man or a husband or a wife or a father or a mother or a daughter or a son, for that matter, is put away wrongfully, and for them to walk away with nothing just isn’t right,” said Sharp. “If somebody wasn’t able to receive all the restitution payments, those payments need to be then deferred to someone else in that family. This needs to be a full payout.”
Sharp hopes the legislature would also look at some point into increasing the restitution amount from $100 for every day of imprisonment.
“It probably doesn’t go far enough, honestly. I would hope that at some point we could have a robust discussion about what that payment should look like,” Sharp said. “It’s not going to break the bank … this is something that happens very rarely and when it does we need to pay them accordingly.”
Missouri’s restitution statute has been under more scrutiny in recent years as more attention was paid to the case of Kevin Strickland. He was released from prison a year ago after serving 42 years of a life sentence for murder before being proven innocent, but because he was not exonerated based on DNA evidence he received no compensation from the State of Missouri.
Thursday was the first day legislators could prefile bills for the new session, which begins January 4.
House proposal would require licensure of religion-based boarding houses
Representative Sarah Unsicker (D-Shrewsbury) was joined this morning by Representative Ingrid Burnett (D-Kansas City) and Emily Adams to talk about House Bill 15, which would require that all residential care facilities – such as care homes for children – be licensed by the state, including those run by religious orders.
The bill is in response to instances of abuse in Missouri, such as those coming to light from the Agape Boarding House in Stockton. Adams was a victim of abuse at a facility in Mississippi that was run by a couple who later operated a facility in Missouri.
House sponsor of ag tax credits ready for special session
Governor Mike Parson is calling legislators back to Jefferson City in two weeks for a special legislative session to address a number of proposals to support the state’s farmers.
The governor in July vetoed a bill that included the extension or creation of tax credits benefitting urban and family farms, biodiesel producers, retailers of biodiesel and higher ethanol blends, meat processors and others. The governor said the two-year expiration proposed by the legislature for those credits wasn’t long enough, especially given that the legislature passed and he signed incentive programs with six-year sunsets for non-ag interests.
Representative Brad Pollitt (R-Sedalia) carried that package of ag legislation, House Bill 1720.
Pollitt said giving farmers economic support is now more important than ever.
“We don’t want to go back to what happened in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s in agriculture and I think these tax credits could be a great help to the agriculture folks in the State of Missouri,” said Pollitt. “That’s when a number of farmers went out of business because interest went up. Right now I think our fuel’s tripled or at least [two-and-a-half times as expensive], the input cost on fertilizer has [more than] doubled, so the input cost, no matter what you do in agriculture, has went up immensely … this is all contributing to a situation that could get bad.”
Tax credits always face a lot of opposition for a variety of reasons. Pollitt said he supports ag tax credits especially because when family farms go out of business, it is unlikely they will return.
At least one of the tax credits that HB 1720 would have extended, for the Missouri Agricultural Small Business Development Authority, has already lapsed, and Pollitt said it does need an extension of more than 2 years.
The governor also called on the legislature to pass a plan to reduce income taxes for Missourians. Pollitt is supportive of that as well. All in all he believes this special session will be doing the work citizens want their legislature to do.
The special session will begin September 6.
Panel on veteran suicides hears from family of one fallen soldier
House members are concerned about the mental health of veterans in Missouri, and by how many of the state’s veterans have committed suicide. The House Interim Committee on Veterans’ Mental Health and Suicide held Wednesday its first of four scheduled hearings, this one focused on what is already available and what is being done to offer help to veterans.
The committee’s chairman, Representative Dave Griffith (R-Jefferson City), is a former U.S. Army 8th Special Forces Group Green Beret. He said part of his goal with the committee is to generate awareness of the issues veterans are facing and how they can be helped.
In discussing how serious is this issue in Missouri, the Department of Mental Health’s Veterans Services Director, Jon Sabala, told the committee that in 2019 the national veteran suicide rate was 31.6. Missouri’s rate was 43.4.
Missouri Veterans Commission Executive Director Paul Kirchoff agreed that the state’s rate is among the worst in the country.
In talking about what various agencies are doing to offer help, Kirchoff said the Commission launched in 2021 the Veteran’s Portal, which lists hundreds of available resources for veterans and their families.
“As you can see, the top left [on the website] is mental health. It’s one that we know is a priority so it is prominent on our portal. This is at veteranbenefits.mo.gov and to date … we’ve had over 20,000 hits on that site. It’s not enough. We need more. We need more veterans, we need more families to know about this and know that it is a site that they can go to reach resources that they need.”
Devin Norton is the director of the veteran treatment program at Signature Psychiatric Hospital in Kansas City. She told the committee that current or former military personnel seeking help often find barriers that prevent or delay treatment.
“For example I have a veteran right now that is going through the program and he was hospitalized for suicide ideation in March … and has been working since March to ge approval from the Veterans Administration to come in for treatment, and he just got it two weeks ago,” said Norton. “His risk factors present for completion of suicide were very high: No support system; long history of trauma; several deployments; no current providers, so he was very high risk.”
Norton said this individual successfully entered treatment because he was persistent, but said many veterans don’t know how to advocate for themselves and don’t trust the system with which they must deal.
The committee closed Wednesday’s session with testimony from the family of Lieutenant Colonel Matt Brown. Brown was a loved and well known husband and father of three. He served in the Army National Guard which included a 14-month deployment to Afghanistan in 2009, and was about to take command of the 203rd Engineer Battalion. He took his own life in November of last year.
Brown’s wife, Kelly, spoke to the committee in the hope of using her family’s experience to break the stigma associated with mental health and to play a role in preventing more such tragedies.
She said the stigma surrounding mental health issues must be addressed as a root of the problem.
Brown’s daughter, Bailey Blackman, told the committee that she never expected her father to take his own life.
The committee will meet again in August.
Income tax cut, reform likely topics in expected special session
A tax break for most Missourians and a restructuring of the state’s income tax brackets will likely be considered by legislators in a special session that Governor Mike Parson (R) is expected to soon call.
That’s according to House Budget Committee Chairman Cody Smith (R-Carthage), who says he’s looking forward to seeing what the Governor outlines in a plan to be aimed at helping Missourians facing high prices and high inflation. The top Democrat on the Budget Committee, Peter Merideth (D-St. Louis), says he wants a plan that goes beyond changing income taxes, so that all Missourians would be helped; not only those who pay that.
Governor Parson earlier this month vetoed a proposed $500-million tax rebate plan sent to him by legislators in May, saying he prefers a permanent tax cut. He has said he will call for a special session of the legislature to consider that cut.
Smith, who spearheaded that tax rebate plan as the best proposal thought possible at the time, said he would also prefer a permanent cut. He spoke to Parson on Tuesday to get a better idea of what the governor might propose.
“We are busy now collaborating with the senate and the governor himself to try to find a starting point and then from that point the legislature will take over and will hopefully put forth a good product, at the end of the day, for the governor to sign,” said Smith. “It’s important that we try to keep this simple and try to make it as impactful to as many Missourians as possible. I think the income tax is the best way to do that, and trying to simplify the tax code in the process I think is also a worthy goal.”
Merideth said he and fellow Democrats were glad that the rebate plan was vetoed, but he’s concerned that a cut to the income tax won’t help the Missourians who need help the most.
“That said, our income tax brackets are completely out of date. We haven’t had updated brackets in like 100 years. Democrats have actually long advocated for updating those to a more progressive tax rate structure. Now, we have yet to see what that proposal’s going to look like but there’s a path that we could get on board with,” he added. “Democrats are generally supportive of relief for those that make the least and generally resistant to relief for those that are doing just fine, at the expense of our long-term budget.”
Smith agrees that the state’s brackets are outdated and should be revised, if not eliminated, and doing so would help all income earners.
Merideth thinks permanently cutting the income tax right now is not a good idea. He said the state is in a great position with revenue right now, but the next time there’s a downturn, cuts made now could put the state in a bad position.
The governor has expressed confidence that Missouri’s good fortune will continue, and Smith agrees.
“I would guess that we may have a general revenue surplus in excess of $2-billion by the time we come back to the next legislative session and that is just unprecedented … we’ve got federal money set aside for Medicaid, we’ve got general revenue dollars sitting in the state’s treasury for all purposes, and I think there’s never been a better time to cut taxes and still be able to protect the priorities that we have in the budget,” said Smith. “I think we’re probably looking at 3 to 5 years where we are very well situated even after a tax cut.”
Smith said while the state is enjoying increased revenues and never-before-seen surpluses, Missourians are dealing with high inflation, high gas prices, and other factors that are causing many to struggle. He said this is the right time for the legislature to do something to help.
Merideth said he and other Democrats would also like to see the legislature talk about things besides the income tax, such as eliminating taxes on groceries and other essentials.
The governor has said he is also planning to have the legislature consider six-year extensions to tax credits under the Missouri Agriculture and Small Business Development Authority. He vetoed a bill that would have extended them by two years.
Dates for a special session have not been set.
House bill signed into law that could put more traffickers behind bars
A new state law could lead to more prosecutions in Missouri of human traffickers.
Governor Mike Parson (R) recently signed into law House Bill 1472 to change in state law definitions related to currency and money laundering. That might not sound like trafficking legislation, but advocates say it is.
“Remember, for traffickers human trafficking is about making the highest profit possible with the lowest risk to get caught by law enforcement. This is the key. For that reason traffickers need to find ways to eliminate anything, any ways that could lead law enforcement and authorities to them … or be used as evidence,” said Doctor Shima Rostami, Executive Director of Gateway Human Trafficking based in Chesterfield. “For that reason virtual currency and engaging peer-to-peer mobile payments has been playing a great role for payments concerning trafficking operations lately, and because the laws haven’t been updated … to help prosecutors and law enforcement use the evidence they can gather from these forms of transactions, it’s been very difficult for prosecutors and law enforcement to follow the footprints of traffickers in trafficking operations.”
Dr. Rostami says prosecutors are often left with no evidence aside from the testimony of victims, and victims often refuse to testify. This can be for many reasons stemming from their experience, including traumas they suffered or because trafficking organizations may still have leverage over them such as threats against their families or even holding family members hostage.
She offered examples, including that of a victim who was kidnapped as a child and is now an adult. Over the course of her experience she was raped more than 24,000 times.
Dr. Rostami said these situations made it more important that Missouri’s law be updated so that evidence of virtual money laundering can be used at trial.
HB 1472 adds to state law definitions for “cryptocurrency,” “financial transaction,” and “transaction;” and replaces the definition for “currency” with one for “monetary instruments.” It was sponsored by Representative Patricia Pike (R-Adrian), who has worked on several trafficking issues during her 8 years in the House. She said those continue to be important in Missouri because its location makes it important for trafficking.
The House voted 141-2 to send that bill to Governor Parson.