Court Opinion

ID: 9779525
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 22:05:11.999639+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:33:27.364954
License: Public Domain

WELLIVER, Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent.
This case was transferred for review by this Court after the Court of Appeals entered its memorandum opinion by order, Rule 84.16(b), and Simeone, Senior Judge, filed a concurring opinion as follows:
I concur, but make one additional comment:
It may seem strange to enter a summary order of affirmance in this case involving three convictions for first degree murder. But the facts and circumstances are so bizarre and sad that there is no need to detail the tragedies. It is clear that there is no error, prejudicial or otherwise. Although the appellant was found criminally guilty of the offenses, there is no doubt that she is in need of professional counseling and psychiatric help. I would respectfully urge the person in charge of the correctional institution to probe the facts involved and the personality of the defendant and utilize the provisions of § 552.050, RSMo 1986.
As much as I wish the statutes suggested by Judge Simeone could take care of the problem, they cannot. Section 552.050, RSMo 1986, provides for a 90-day commitment period in a mental hospital if the person in charge of the correctional institution has reasonable cause to believe that the inmate needs care in a mental hospital. At the expiration of the ninety-day commitment period, the inmate may be detained and treated involuntarily for up to an additional year under § 632.355 and 632.360, RSMo 1986. Section 632.360 provides for successive one-year detention periods as permissible to the same procedures used in the initial one-year detention period.
The statutes suggested by Judge Si-meone can only put appellant in a revolving door between mental treatment and imprisonment without possibility of probation or parole. Life commitment for mental patients is not treatment. Society abandoned and repudiated the warehousing of the mentally ill over twenty years ago.
It is impossible to look at this file without questioning why a prosecuting attorney would file first degree murder charges in this bizarre case. I can only conclude that the exercise of prosecutorial discretion is as bizarre as the facts of the case itself. You cannot help but ask why the chief prosecutor from such a large office would personally conduct this trial and do the things he did to get these three first degree murder convictions, when the newest, youngest and most inexperienced assistant in his office could have gotten three ordinary life terms either by plea or trial. No prosecutor was ever handed three more lead pipe convictions.
Yes, I am aware that the law is well established that the trial judge had discretion in ruling on appellant’s motion for a trial by jury. However, if the judge chose to force appellant to trial before a jury and thereby relieve himself of the responsibility of deciding her rights, then I respectfully submit that the bizarre facts of this case cast upon that judge and this Court a very special responsibility to lean over backwards to see that appellant had the fairest jury trial possible. Even a reading of the principal opinion leaves no doubt that the prosecutor fudged at every turn during the course of this trial.
I concede that in other and less bizarre circumstances, perhaps each individual point could have been ruled as ruled below and in the principal opinion. However, where this appellant and her counsel sought to place her at the mercy of the *27trial judge below because of fears of the way things happened in the trial, both that trial judge and we have an obligation to assure her the fairest trial possible. The accumulated error discovered by the principal opinion cries out for relief. The cause should be remanded for a new trial. Only by so doing can we assure that this bizarre case can fairly be processed in accordance with our criminal and mental health treatment laws.