{"id":181227,"date":"2016-08-24T18:32:00","date_gmt":"2016-08-24T23:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/08\/24\/oops-6\/"},"modified":"2016-08-24T18:32:00","modified_gmt":"2016-08-24T23:32:00","slug":"oops-6","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/08\/24\/oops-6\/","title":{"rendered":"Oops!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It turns out that because of sloppy law writing in Missouri, <a href=\"http:\/\/talkingpointsmemo.com\/muckraker\/missouri-supreme-court-stealing-felonies\">theft is no longer a felony in the Show Me State<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">On an opinion that went largely unnoticed, the Missouri Supreme Court issued a ruling Tuesday that had the effect of making most stealing offenses no longer felonies thanks to an apparently inadvertent change to state law way back in 2002. The far-reaching decision sent criminal defense attorneys across the state scrambling.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The case \u2013 <i>State v. Bazell<\/i> \u2013 was brought by a woman who had been convicted of multiples felonies for stealing firearms, among other things, in a burglary case. The court said the firearm felonies should be knocked down to misdemeanors because a portion of the state&#8217;s criminal code designating certain types of offenses as felonies is written in a way that doesn\u2019t make it applicable to the state\u2019s definition of stealing itself.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cIf the words are clear, the Court must apply the plain meaning of the law,\u201d the opinion said. \u201cWhen the meaning of a statute is clear, the Court should not employ canons of construction to achieve a desired result.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Subparagraph 3 covers a whole assortment of stealing crimes, including the stealing of explosives, credit cards, motor vehicles, property deeds, anything worth between $500-$25,000 and in any case in which the suspect physically takes something from the victim\u2019s person. Additionally, subparagraph 8 \u2013 which designates stealing anything worth more than $25,000 as a Class B felony \u2013 has similar language, and thus is no longer applicable as well, public defenders believe.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Because of Tuesday\u2019s ruling, anyone who was charged with a felony for those kinds of crimes has a chance to get it brought down to a misdemeanor, as long as it\u2019s for a crime after 2002, when the language was added, Flottman said.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Son of Missouri Harry S Truman must be spinning in his grave.<\/p>\n<p>Son of Missouri Mark Twain must be laughing somewhere.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It turns out that because of sloppy law writing in Missouri, theft is no longer a felony in the Show Me State: On an opinion that went largely unnoticed, the Missouri Supreme Court issued a ruling Tuesday that had the effect of making most stealing offenses no longer felonies thanks to an apparently inadvertent change &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[987,972,1020],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fail","category-justice","category-legislation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181227"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181227"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181227\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}