Messenger: A Missouri county’s broken system kept him free. Now he’s an accused cop killer.

HERMANN — Kenneth Lee Simpson wanted to die.

It was March 13, and the 35-year-old Eureka man was cornered in a Casey’s General Store in the Missouri River town of Hermann. Facing outstanding warrants for several crimes, Simpson wanted to commit “suicide by cop,” he later told police.

Instead, Simpson shot and killed Hermann police Sgt. Mason Griffith and severely wounded Officer Adam Sullentrup. Griffith was the ninth law enforcement officer to die in the line of duty in the U.S. in 2023, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page. He left behind a wife, 10-year-old son and 17-year-old stepson.

The shootings rocked the small town where Griffith served, but they also had an impact where Simpson spent most of his youth — about 30 minutes to the northeast in Warren County. There, Simpson had been in trouble since he was a teenager. He had several outstanding criminal cases, including weapons and drug charges. Some of his cases dated to 2017 and 2018.

The cases should have been adjudicated long ago. And if they had, Simpson might have been in prison instead of free, armed and in a position to kill a cop.

One of his neighbors told the Post-Dispatch earlier this year that, in a meeting with Warren County Prosecuting Attorney Kelly King, they predicted a tragedy would happen with Simpson.

“He’s going to do something really, really bad,” the neighbor said to Post-Dispatch reporters Katie Kull and Dana Rieck, recalling the meeting. “It’s going to be on the news in the evening and he’s going to be up there with his rap sheet, and everyone is going to be wondering how that guy was on the loose.”

Simpson’s case and plenty of others, from minor crimes to the most serious ones, are still on the dockets of the Warren County courts because of a broken justice system. It is plagued with delays that cause serious problems for people facing charges, but also for the cause of public safety. And as Simpson’s case shows, the impact of such a broken system can be felt beyond one county’s borders.

The Office of the State Court Administrator, an arm of the Missouri Supreme Court, keeps time standards on 10 different types of cases — civil and criminal — that local courts should meet. For instance, the state courts suggest 95% of felony cases be adjudicated within 14 months.

There are 46 judicial districts in Missouri; the 12th Judicial District, where Warren County sits, is one of nine that meet none of the time standards. The city of St. Louis is another one. In associate circuit court, where criminal cases begin, less than half of the cases in the 12th district are disposed of in six months or under. 

Defense attorneys in Warren County are increasingly challenging Presiding Circuit Court Judge Jason Lamb for the inability to get speedy trials for their clients. 

They are seeking those trials, they say, partly because King, known as a tough-on-crime prosecutor, regularly overcharges their clients with offenses the evidence doesn’t support and doesn’t offer plea bargains in line with the standards in most nearby jurisdictions.

It’s emblematic of what a national coalition of criminal justice groups calls “the trial penalty,” in which prosecutors use overcharging and the threats of long sentences to coerce guilty pleas.

When defendants instead decide to assert their constitutional rights to due process, the courts become clogged. Cases linger for months or years. Justice delayed becomes justice denied.

The results, as Simpson’s case highlights, can be deadly.

Backlog, delays, missing outrage

One of Simpson’s cases ended up before Judge Lamb shortly after he was elected to the bench, in November 2018. Lamb is from Mexico, Missouri, and is the former executive director of the Missouri Office of Prosecuting Services, which provides help to prosecutors statewide. The 12th Judicial Circuit covers Audrain, Montgomery and Warren counties.

Simpson’s felony weapons case was set for trial in February 2019. It was pushed back to July. Then it was rescheduled for February 2020. Simpson and his public defender were appearing for court hearings. At one point, according to court records, they were even ready for trial.

But the trial kept getting pushed back. 

Soon, Lamb realized he had inherited a problem. The courts were backed up, with several trials often scheduled on the same day but only one usually moving forward. That left many cases languishing.

Lamb says he started to devise a priority system to tackle the delays. But then the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and courts statewide were shut down. A couple of years later, they were holding hearings again, first via Zoom, and then in person, but the backups were even worse in Warren County. Meanwhile, Simpson picked up some more charges. They got stacked behind the ones that were still pending.

Lamb says there are about 400 outstanding cases that need to be worked through to get the court system caught up. Seven of those cases belong to Simpson.

That backlog tramples the constitutional rights of the people accused of crimes. It leaves victims waiting for justice. And it threatens public safety, when dangerous people are left “on the loose.”

The shooting of the Hermann officers came just a couple of weeks after a crime in St. Louis that caused a massive outcry — and also involved a defendant out on bond who was accused of injuring an innocent person.

In that case, Tennessee high school student Janae Edmondson was pinned by a speeding car driven by Daniel Riley, who was out on bond despite violating the pre-trial conditions in a robbery case dozens of times. Edmondson, who was downtown for a volleyball tournament, had both legs amputated after the injury.

There was widespread outrage against St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner. Indeed, Riley’s case had been delayed multiple times, like many cases in Gardner’s office, mostly related to her mismanagement.

Attorney General Andrew Bailey and others called for Gardner to resign, and Bailey later pursued legal action to oust Gardner. The move helped push her to eventually step down.

There are many differences in the Simpson and Riley cases, and a comparison between the two counties can be like apples and oranges. But when there is a backup in the courts because of a broken system, the result is the same. Judges can’t hold defendants in jail forever when their cases can’t be adjudicated. Simpson was free, in part, because the system failed to hold him accountable for his alleged crimes.

There’s another key difference between St. Louis and Warren County: the reaction. Why hasn’t Bailey, a former assistant prosecutor in Warren County, raised the issue about court delays leading to a dead police officer in Hermann? As attorney general, Bailey has now stepped in to handle Simpson’s murder prosecution himself. But where’s the level of outrage he directed toward Gardner? 

There’s plenty of it coming from Warren County defense attorneys, who are sounding alarm bells about the delays in justice. In the past few months, two public defenders have filed various legal documents about the failures to get speedy trials for their clients. Both of the attorneys — Chris Lozano of Chesterfield and Matthew Mueller of Columbia — have alerted higher Missouri courts to the issue.

They are slowly getting some relief, case by case, by either seeking a new judge or asking the Missouri Appeals Court to force Lamb to set trial dates.

But before they even get to trial, they argue, the local prosecutor is piling on charges in cases to pressure defendants into bad plea bargains.

Your right to a trial

Lozano says Warren County is emblematic of what happens when the “trial penalty” drives the judicial process. It is not uncommon for prosecutors to tell defendants that if they don’t take a plea bargain, they will face more severe charges and penalties. Judges play a role, too, in handing down sentences that seemingly punish defendants for exercising their constitutional rights to a trial.

Bobby Bostic is a poster child for this practice. In 1995, when he was just 16, he robbed people at gunpoint in St. Louis. He took his chances on a trial and lost. He was then punished big-time by the judge, who handed him a 241-year sentence. Bostic’s partner in the crime took a plea bargain. He got 30 years. The judge later realized the error of her ways and advocated for Bostic’s release. Lawmakers changed the law, making parole possible in Bostic’s case. He was paroled last year.

The right to a jury trial dates to the first Bill of Rights, and throughout much of American history, trials used to be much more common. Until the 1970s, for instance, somewhere between 15% and 20% of federal cases would end in a trial. State courts had similar practices, researchers found. These days, according to the American Bar Association, 98% of convictions are the result of guilty pleas, often forced by threatening defendants with much worse consequences if they don’t accept pleas.

The sharp drop in trials was fed in part by “tough on crime” policies in the 1980s and 1990s, which helped create America’s incarceration crisis. As the system produced more defendants than it could handle, filling jails and taxing the capacity of the judicial system, trials went by the wayside.

“As the tendency to criminalize more conduct and embrace increasingly harsh penalties over past decades has grown, the criminal legal system has become overtaxed and there has been mounting pressure on individuals charged with crimes to bargain away their constitutional right to be tried by a jury of their peers,” says Miriam Krinsky, a former federal prosecutor who is the executive director of nonprofit Fair and Just Prosecution. “This resulting near disappearance of jury trials has had devastating effects.”

This is particularly true for indigent defendants, as funding for public defenders has long failed to keep up with funding for prosecutors. And the entire legal system has turned a blind eye to public defenders being overworked and unable to properly defend their clients.

Krinsky’s organization is part of a bipartisan coalition called “End the Trial Penalty,” which includes the ACLU, the conservative nonprofit Right on Crime and several other criminal justice organizations. The group is seeking reforms that include urging prosecutors not to “overcharge” defendants and use pre-trial incarceration to help force guilty pleas.

There is a benefit to public safety by ending the trial penalty, says Marc Levin, chief policy counsel for the Council on Criminal Justice.

“Studies have found large disparities between plea offers and penalties after trial led innocent people to plead guilty, particularly when they are in jail awaiting trial and lack access to capable counsel,” Levin says. “This means that the true culprit of the crime remains at large, potentially continuing to hurt others.”

That sort of “overcharging” and a refusal to plea bargain in good faith is one of the reasons Warren County’s courts are clogged up, Lozano and Mueller argue.

King, the prosecutor, says she stands by her charging decisions and offers made during plea bargaining.

“My recommendations are based on the facts of the case, the defendant’s criminal history, and any other relevant factors, including the community standards of accountability in Warren County,” King said in an emailed response to written questions. She declined an in-person interview. 

Well, community standards are set in a couple of different ways. There are elections, in which King and Lamb run in. There are also trials, where a jury of one’s peers decides on guilt, innocence and the standard of punishment for crimes. 

And that’s where Mueller believes that King is misreading the community. In three of Mueller’s recent cases that actually went to trial, the juries or judge handed down guilty verdicts on lesser charges than the more serious felonies the defendants originally faced. In another case, just last week, a jury found one of Mueller’s defendants not guilty of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

That’s why the right to a jury trial is so important, Mueller says.

“I am not too worried about the prosecutor overcharging if I can get a quick jury trial and argue to the jury that this case is overcharged, and that the jury should return a verdict on a” lesser offense, Mueller says. “But if I don’t have the option of a trial available to me, then these other problems such as overcharging become much more serious because I cannot counteract them or defend against them.”

There is a sign on the second floor of the Warren County Courthouse, just outside Lamb’s courtroom.

“The Constitution promises us a trial by jury,” it reads, before explaining the Sixth Amendment this way: “The accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.”

For too many Warren County defendants, that promise has been broken.

Coming next week: What does it take to get a speedy trial in Warren County?