Messenger: An unfair fight for Missouri inmates trying to keep their money from the state (2024)

JEFFERSON CITY — Tonya Honkomp is in prison in Vandalia, Missouri. She is serving a seven-year stint on a meth charge out of St. Francois County.

Earlier this month, she wrote the court with a question. It wasn’t about her drug case, but one in which Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is trying to seize $19,232.30 from the sale of some property. Honkomp received the proceeds from the real estate sale after she was in prison.

“I have not been given an attorney or told the status of this case,” Honkomp wrote on June 10. “I am unsure of how to go about things regarding this matter but am in desperate need of the knowledge of what will take place.”

Her answer was provided in court Tuesday by an assistant attorney general, Savannah Austin. “She’s not entitled to a public defender or any sort of free counsel,” Austin told Cole County Associate Circuit Court Judge Christopher Limbaugh in 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 is seeking to seize assets of a person incarcerated in a state prison, using a law called the Missouri Incarceration Reimbursem*nt Act (MIRA).

Of all the names called by the judge in the series of hearings Tuesday, only one had a presence in the courtroom. Last year, Daniel Wayne Wallace’s mom died. He missed the funeral because he is in prison in Bowling Green on an assault charge. While there, he received a $12,000 check from his mother’s estate. Bailey is trying to take it.

It’s an unconstitutional taking, says Clayton attorney Bevis Schock. He was in the Cole County Courthouse on Tuesday to represent Wallace. He’s asking the judge to issue an injunction and block the state from using the reimbursem*nt law to take money from inmates.

One of the reasons the law is unconstitutional, he argues in court filings, is a violation of due process; cases are going forward when a defendant doesn’t even have an attorney. In MIRA cases, unlike other types of cases, the burden of proof is shifted onto the defendants. They have to show why they shouldn’t hand over their assets to the state.

Most of the defendants are fighting their cases from prison cells, without an attorney. Because these are civil cases, the defendants don’t have a Sixth Amendment right to an attorney. And unlike criminal cases, judges don’t bring the defendants to court or even let them view the proceedings via Zoom.

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

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

Lawmakers were fine putting more people in prison, but when it came time to pay the bill, they didn’t have the stomach for tax increases. Instead, they added fees to the system and found other ways to collect money from defendants, creating a new crisis of poverty.

That mass incarceration crisis is still with us. On the day Schock went to Missouri’s capital city to fight an unconstitutional law, the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative issued one of its regular reports comparing incarceration rates in the U.S. to the rest of the world.

Only three countries — El Salvador, Cuba and Rwanda — have higher incarceration rates than the U.S. Missouri puts 713 per 100,000 people in prison, one of the highest rates in the country, though it has dropped in the past few years. Nearly every state in the U.S. puts more people in prison at a higher rate than nearly every other country in the world, and it’s not even close.

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

We get an attorney general trying to take $12,000 from Wallace. That’s money from his dead mother, and it could help him support his wife and child, as well as set up a life when he gets out of prison.

“No set of circ*mstances exists under which the statute may be constitutionally applied,” wrote Schock and his fellow attorney on the case, Dave Nelson of Belleville, Ill.

The next hearing in Wallace’s case is in September. If Wallace wins, the other MIRA cases would likely go away.

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