Kansas City Star. October 3, 2022.
Editorial: Questions in murder case shows need for eyewitness identification reform in Missouri.
Nathan Hawkins has never denied fatally shooting Eric Cooper in Monroe County nearly 25 years ago. The 42-year-old Missouri man was 19 when he was convicted of first-degree murder and armed criminal action. Thanks to the testimony of Donald “Uncle Mo” Smith, the only eyewitness to the shooting, a Monroe County jury rejected self-defense claims and found Hawkins guilty of his crimes. He has been in a Missouri prison since.
Hawkins’ attorney, in an appeal, argues that the testimony by the single witness that sent the teenager to prison for life was flawed. And in 2019, the witness signed a sworn affidavit providing new, potentially exonerating information.
Whether the testimony – plus a newly available blood-spatter analysis that also raises doubts about the prosecution’s case – means Hawkins was wrongly convicted is now for the courts to decide. But the flimsy nature of the testimony again shines light on the unreliability of eyewitness identification in criminal cases – a problem more and more states have moved to remedy. Missouri is not one of them.
Numerous studies have found eyewitness testimony error-prone. Perjury and false accusations were found in 57% of exoneration cases, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
Missouri lawmakers need to consider proposals, like these from the American Psychological Association, that can help prevent the kind of miscarriages of justice that Hawkins and his attorney allege.
According to court records, Hawkins admitted to firing one shot from a front porch while Cooper was in the front passenger seat of a parked vehicle outside a Monroe City, Missouri trailer park home. Cooper died from a bullet wound to the head.
Hawkins’ attorney argues in legal documents recently filed with the Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District that if the jury had heard the fuller testimony of the lone witness, as sworn to in the affidavit, it might have come to another conclusion in deciding to send the teenager to prison for life.
Our interest in the Hawkins case is not to determine guilt or innocence – we don’t know if Hawkins was justified in using deadly force to kill Cooper in 1998. Under ordinary circumstances, a jury’s verdict is entitled to respect. But we also know that prosecutors relied heavily on the single eyewitness testimony of Smith – since significantly expanded – to convict Hawkins.
At trial, Smith testified he was in the driver’s seat of the car, with Cooper sitting next to him in the passenger seat, when he heard a “boom,” according to court documents. Monroe County prosecutors argued that Cooper was not a threat to Hawkins, according to court documents.
In 2019, Smith signed a sworn affidavit making clear, however, that when Cooper was shot, he was in the middle of turning to his side, as if he might have been reaching for a weapon. Hawkins’ lawyer says that’s enough to give jurors a reasonable basis to believe Hawkins’ claim of self defense. Smith did not provide that information at the 1999 trial, Kevin Schriener wrote.
Twenty years later, he added to his story. “The victim Eric Cooper was turned around in the seat with his body angled towards the back seat when he was shot by Nathan Hawkins,” Smith wrote in the affidavit, a potentially important detail omitted during testimony. “When the victim was shot he slumped over leaning sideways.”
In addition, a forensic expert hired by Hawkins concluded it was possible that Cooper, the victim, was turned in a manner consistent with someone reaching for something, like a weapon, Schriener wrote in legal arguments.
In 2020, the American Psychological Association recommended several policies and procedures to reduce the rate of eyewitness misidentification. Missouri has been slow to move on any of them, including creating rules to prevent convictions based on a single witness who lacks credibility. After Cooper was shot, Smith hid a gun belonging to Cooper and later sold it, Schriener claimed in legal documents.
Hawkins’ case illustrates the complexity involved with eyewitness testimony. Prosecutors called the killing a hit or an execution, according to court records. A jury agreed. But was it? “At trial, I had little evidence to support my claim of self-defense,” Hawkins said in an interview with the editorial board. But he said now he does have evidence to support his claim.
A jury’s rejection of self-defense claims is seldom reversed in court, although the two new pieces of evidence suggest Hawkins could have acted out of fear for his life. What happens when the state’s only eyewitness to a murder adds significant, and potentially exonerating information to his testimony and a forensic scientist concludes the state’s theory doesn’t match with evidence collected from the scene?
The appellate court should consider the new evidence and new testimony from the state’s main witness in the Hawkins conviction. But whether that’s grounds for a new trial or not, the case makes clear how flimsy eyewitness testimony can be, and how big a role it can play in deciding a case.
Twenty-five states have a model eyewitness identification policy on the books, according to the Innocence Project. Missouri needs to join them.
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St. Louis Post-Dispatch. October 3, 2022.
Editorial: Schmitt, Parson and the smelly-pig gift that keeps on giving
The campaign rhetoric is heating up in the Missouri U.S. Senate race, once again with Attorney General Eric Schmitt on the defensive over his support for a bill years ago that opened the door for Chinese companies to buy up Missouri farmland. Though his supporters say it’s much ado about nothing, the bill he backed as a state senator has had some serious knock-on effects for rural Missourians — the very people he is counting on for support.
The attacks on Schmitt over China first surfaced during his heated primary race against former Gov. Eric Greitens, who challenged Schmitt’s tough-on-China claims by noting Schmitt’s vote supporting an important Senate agriculture bill in 2013. Buried deep in that bill was an allowance for foreign companies to purchase agricultural land in Missouri provided the total land under foreign ownership didn’t exceed 1% of all the state’s agricultural land.
Both Schmitt and then-state Sen. Mike Parson, now the governor, supported the bill. It seemed pretty innocuous at the time. But what happened afterward says everything about their utter disregard for rural Missourians when it comes to protecting corporate interests.
The bill cleared the way for Hong Kong-based WH Group to buy up 146,000 acres of rural land. Americans know that company as Smithfield Foods, operator of industrial pig farms, called concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, that have a well-deserved reputation as major polluters. Smithfield owns 11 of the state’s largest CAFOs. The pigs stink up the air for miles around, and their waste fouls water tables and streams. In March, Smithfield was cited by the state for dumping 300,000 gallons of pig waste into local streams in northern Missouri. The state fined the company a pinky-slap of $18,000.
Parson is one of the biggest champions of these obnoxious, polluting operations. He signed a bill that revoked local governments’ ability to reject the placement of CAFOs in their communities. And Schmitt, Mr. Get Tough on China, has done nothing to defend the rights of rural Missouri communities when these big polluters come to town. But he did sue China for the coronavirus.
Maybe Schmitt just failed back in 2013 to recognize the potential complications of the innocuous-looking bill he supported back then. But he certainly knew the ruinous effect of the CAFO law on rural property values and quality of life. And yet, in 2019, he came to the defense of industrial pig farmers.
China is really just a red herring in this debate. The real issue is quality of life and the smelly industrial pollution that Schmitt and Parson have forced on rural communities across the state. Those residents are among the strongest backers of the Republican Party. And to thank them for their support, the state’s two most prominent Republicans have placed a nice gift of perpetual pig poop in their backyards.
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St. Joseph News Press. September 30, 2022.
Editorial: Tax cut benefits all of Missouri
A big part of the debate over Missouri’s income tax cut revolves around how much the state stands to lose.
That is the wrong question.
The debate should be framed around how much individuals stand to gain from retaining more of their hard-earned money.
So when people say the state is losing millions of dollars, don’t buy it. What they really mean is the wheels of government are losing millions of dollars in grease. The government’s loss is the individual’s gain, in this case a gain of $1 billion for Missourians.
The Missouri General Assembly passed a $1 billion income tax cut Thursday, voting to lower the top rate from 5.3% to 4.8%. Additional cuts would phase in until the rate hits 4.5%. To get to the highest tax rate, you need to make more than $21,000.
This is an appropriate move at a time when the state is sitting on record amounts of revenue.
Opponents will point to Kansas and that state’s budget crunch under former Gov. Sam Brownback, but they fail to note that the Sunflower state got into its budgetary pickle not from cutting income tax but from creating a special zero percent rate for LLCs, S-Corps and other pass-through entities. As the Show-Me Institute notes, when this move encouraged tax avoidance through reclassification, state revenue plummeted.
Missouri doesn’t fall into that trap with its more straightforward income tax cut. The bill that passed represented a compromise with House Republicans who wanted to go further and eliminate the corporate tax, a proposal that makes sense from a business-attraction sense but couldn’t win the support of moderates who wanted to balance tax relief with careful stewardship of the budget.
In cutting income tax rates, Tennessee emerges as a better comparison than Kansas. The Volunteer state has no income tax and consistently produces better growth in its gross-domestic product, year over year, than neighboring Missouri. You can’t blame that on palm trees and beaches.
This tax cut doesn’t necessarily make Missouri an economic juggernaut, but it puts money where it should be, into the hands of the people who earned it in the first place. It will unleash more spending, investing and innovating, all of which is good for Missouri.
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