Now, as the governor makes weekly news by signing bills from the recent legislative session, we have a slate of new laws and punishments we shall be living under.
Unfortunately, the new stuff is often reactionary tinkering. By that, I mean two things:
making crimes of every human vice; and
punishing small crimes as if they were big [...]

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When I was a prosecutor, we had a form that we filled out whenever we decided not to file a case. There was a list of official reasons, from which we were expected to choose the main reason why the case was not being filed.
There were the usual choices you might expect, like:

insufficient evidence
witnesses not [...]

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It’s always stimulating to look over the summary of the bills passed by the legislature each year. It’s a mix of legal and financial tweaks, pet projects, appropriations, memorials . . . well, here it is (some bills still await the governor’s signature):
Click Here–> Bills passed - 2008 session
Some highlights include:
SB 991 - Establishes [...]

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A new case out of the Missouri Court of Appeals, State v. Ross is another in a series of Highway Patrol cases where the defendant was charged with drug possession after an illegal detention and search of his car. The surprise is not that patrol officers have done this, but that there are prosecutors who–to [...]

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