Unfair fight for Missouri inmates trying to keep their money

Earlier this month, she wrote to the court with a question. This was not his drug case, but a case in which Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is trying to seize $19,232.30 from the sale of a property. Honkomp received the proceeds from the real estate sale after his incarceration.

“I have not been provided with an attorney or informed of the status of this case,” Honkomp wrote on June 10. “I don’t know how to proceed in this matter, but I desperately need to know what is going to happen.”

The answer was given in court Tuesday by an assistant attorney general, Savannah Austin. “She is not entitled to a public defender or any type of free attorney,” Austin told Cole County Circuit Court Associate Judge Christopher Limbaugh during a hearing in Jefferson City.

The hearing took place without Honkomp. Robert Rulo, John Gay and Michael Hollowell also did not attend similar hearings Tuesday. In each case, Bailey seeks to seize the property of a person incarcerated in a state prison, using a law called the Missouri Incarceration Reimbursement Act (MIRA).

Of all the names cited by the judge during Tuesday’s series of hearings, only one was present in the courtroom. Last year, Daniel Wayne Wallace’s mother died. He missed the funeral because he’s in jail in Bowling Green for assault. While there, he received a check for $12,000 from his mother’s estate. Bailey tries to take it.

It’s an unconstitutional decision, said Clayton’s attorney, Bevis Schock. He was at the Cole County Courthouse Tuesday representing Wallace. He’s asking the judge to issue an injunction and stop the state from using the reimbursement law to take money from inmates.

One reason the law is unconstitutional, he said, is the violation of due process: cases are being brought when the defendant doesn’t even have a lawyer. In MIRA cases, unlike other types of cases, the burden of proof is shifted to the defendants. They must show why they shouldn’t turn over their assets to the state.

Most defendants are arguing their cases from their jail cells, without lawyers. Because these are civil cases, defendants don’t have the Sixth Amendment right to a lawyer. And unlike in criminal cases, judges aren’t bringing defendants to court or even allowing them to watch the proceedings via Zoom.

Such cases “shock the conscience,” Schock wrote in Wallace’s case, citing multiple violations of the U.S. and Missouri constitutions.

Missouri attorneys general from both political parties have used the MIRA law since the late 1980s to seize inmates’ property. Similar laws were passed around the same time in other states. They were a response to the 1980s war on drugs and the “tough on crime” policies that created the mass incarceration crisis in the United States.

Lawmakers agreed to put more people in prison, but when it came time to pay the bill, they didn’t have the courage to raise taxes. Instead, they added fees to the system and found other ways to collect money from defendants, creating a new poverty crisis.

This massive incarceration crisis is still ongoing. On the day Schock visited Missouri’s capital to fight an unconstitutional law, the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative released one of its regular reports comparing U.S. incarceration rates to those of the rest of the world.

Only three countries – El Salvador, Cuba and Rwanda – have higher incarceration rates than the United States. Missouri places 713 people in prison per 100,000 residents, one of the highest rates in the country, although it has declined in recent years. Almost every state in the United States puts more people in prison, at a higher rate than almost every other country in the world, and it’s not even close.

Various studies, including one from Loyola University Chicago in 2017, suggest that the nation’s high incarceration rate has little effect on crime rates. So what do we get in return?

We have an attorney general trying to take $12,000 from Wallace. It’s his deceased mother’s money, and it could help him support his wife and child, as well as build a life for himself when he gets out of prison.

“There is no circumstance in which the law can be constitutionally enforced,” wrote Schock and his fellow attorney handling the case, Dave Nelson of Belleville, Illinois.

The next hearing in Wallace’s case will take place in September. If Wallace wins, the other MIRA cases would likely disappear.

Until then, Honkomp and others like her will remain desperate for answers that aren’t coming.