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Rural Missouri County Still Paying for Rogue Sheriff
Written by DOYLE MURPHY
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Long after he was forced out of o ce and sent to federal prison, the bills from ex-Mississippi County Sheriff Cory Hutcheson’s reign keep coming — and they’re not cheap.
Attorneys for the county in the Bootheel of Missouri filed a motion last week in hopes of capping the latest settlement — tied to a wrongful-death suit brought by the family of Tory Sanders — at 2 million.
Sanders died in 201 in the county jail after Hutcheson and a crew of jailers dogpiled on top of him, kneeling on him at times in a case that drew new attention last summer following the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota.
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, following the lead of his predecessor Josh Hawley, reviewed the case and declined to file criminal charges against Hutcheson. But the civil lawsuit continues. If a federal judge agrees to the 2 million proposal, the county will likely save some money. The family is seeking . million in addition to the 00,000 that the city of Charleston (where Hutcheson ran a notorious jail) has already agreed to pay in Sanders’ death.
The city and county have paid more than 00,000 to settle Hutcheson-related suits brought in response to the alleged abuse of two other detainees — a woman who died of a fatal overdose while jailers mocked her and, in a separate instance, a pregnant inmate who lost her baby when jail staff refused her pleas for medical
Ex-Sheri Cory Hutcheson walks into the federal courthouse in St. Louis. | DOYLE MURPHY
treatment.
The city and county don’t admit wrongdoing in any of the cases.
Hutcheson started as a sheriff’s deputy in 200 and eventually rose to the jail’s administrator. He clashed with the sheriff and was fired or quit, depending on whose version you believe, in 201 . He wasn’t gone long. He challenged the sheriff in the election that year and won, taking over as sheriff in January 201 .
Hutcheson was already under investigation by the FBI at the time. He had been illegally tracking the cellphones of various people, including his former boss, state troopers and a judge, according to investigators. He was eventually arrested while in o ce on charges related to the phone tracking and a separate incident in which he was accused of manhandling and filing false charges against an elderly hairdresser who’d had a dispute with one of the sheriff’s relatives.
Facing nearly two dozen criminal charges in state and federal court, he pleaded guilty in 201 to a count of federal wire fraud in connection with the phone tracing and was sentenced to six months in prison. His legal troubles had already forced him out of the sheriff’s o ce by then, but the
Among many other cases, Hutcheson had been illegally tracking the cellphones of various people, including his former boss, state troopers and a judge, according to FBI investigators.
fallout from his time with a badge is ongoing.
In 201 , Mississippi County agreed to a 0,000 settlement with Tara Rhodes, who in 2014 begged for five days to be seen by a doctor as she struggled with complications of her pregnancy in the jail. She was eventually transferred across the state to a women’s prison, where staff quickly realized something was wrong and sent her for medical care. Doctors found the baby was protruding and stillborn. Hutcheson, who was then the jail administrator, was one of the defendants in the suit.
He was also named in a suit brought by the family of Somer Nunnally, a 21-year-old mother of two who was dangerously high on prescription pills when she was arrested in 201 . She cried and begged for help in the jail, but jailers and cops only laughed at her, the suit alleged. She died on the floor of her cell. Charleston and Mississippi County settled in 201 for 2 0,000.
The Sanders case is still pending. He was never charged with a crime during his fatal stay in Mississippi County but sought out police after getting lost driving from his home in Nashville toward Memphis. He is believed to have been suffering a mental-health episode and refused to leave the jail. Police and jail staff clashed with him periodically throughout the day, and Sanders was tased multiple times and pepper sprayed before Hutcheson and his subordinates pounced on him in a final confrontation.
Three medical examiners later attributed his death to “excited delirium,” a controversial condition that numerous experts doubt exists. A fourth doctor hired by the family disagreed and concluded he’d likely asphyxiated as his assailants pressed down on his neck.
Lawyers for the family, Hutcheson and the county have been going back and forth over the settlement. The county’s motion suggests they had a deal for 2 million, but Samuel Wendt, who is representing Sanders’ mother, has challenged that. Wendt didn’t respond to a request for comment from the RFT, but he told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch there was no deal yet and the county was trying to avoid paying an additional 1. million.
Emails between the attorneys, included in the county’s filing, indicate the 2 million was the limit of the county’s policy with the Missouri Public Entity Risk Management Fund. The 1. million would go through a separate policy. n
Plan to Eliminate 98 Open Police Positions Advances
Written by DANNY WICENTOWSKI
With the backing of Mayor Tishaura Jones, St. Louis’ top budget board approved an amendment that seeks to reallocate 4 million of the police department’s budget, including the elimination of 9 unfilled positions.
The amendment to the city’s spending plan — which still needs to pass a final vote in the Board of Aldermen — would not remove any active o cers from their jobs, but reflects what the mayor’s o ce calls “an opportunity to ensure that the right resources are distributed to the right call.”
“For many years the budget has not supported the needs of the people and that’s why we’re seeing record numbers of homicides and other acts of violence,” Jones said in a statement after last week’s meeting of the Board of Estimate and Apportionment.
“What we’ve been doing doesn’t work,” Jones’ statement continued. “This revised budget will start St. Louis on a new path to tackling some of the root causes of crime.”
The 4 million diverted from unfilled police positions represents a small fraction of the department’s annual budget of more than 1 0 million, but it’s a big step for the new mayor’s agenda: In the campaign, Jones often critiqued the city’s yearslong efforts to shore up police staffing, arguing that more cops were not always the answer to crime while urging the city to instead “put the public back in public safety.”
While Jones-the-candidate partially embraced the goals to “defund the police,” she used terms like “reenvisioning” to describe ways of reshaping the department, including a platform that argued that some emergency calls would be better be handled by social workers or a combination of o cers and mental-health professionals.
Jones’ campaign speeches are now much closer to real policy. While cutting nearly 100 unfilled positions, the new budget retains funding to fill 0 remaining o cer vacancies. The budget will kick in at the start of the next fiscal year on July 1, 2021.
Without 9 empty police positions to account for, here’s where the 4 million will go, according to the mayor’s o ce: 1. million will be allocated to the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. 1 million towards victim support services, including supporting funeral expenses, medical needs, childcare, mental-health support, case and crisis management, as well as trauma-informed support. 1 million towards increasing the capacity of health and human services to support the unhoused. 00,000 towards a rmative litigation, directing the city counselor’s o ce to provide legal support to the Civil Rights Enforcement Agency.
The amendment passed 2-1 during last week’s meeting of the Board of E A, with both Jones and Comptroller Darlene Green approving — but the board’s third member, Aldermanic President Lewis Reed, said he couldn’t support cuts to the police department’s budget without knowing more about how the change would affect police operations and the department’s reliance on overtime.
“It’s hard to tell how we’re going to make up for the purchasing of fewer work hours,” Reed said.
Jones referred Reed’s concerns to police Chief John Hayden, who said that he supports “the mayor’s notion” that the department’s resources tied to unfilled o cer positions “could be utilized somewhere else.”
Operationally, Hayden said removing the nearly 100 unfilled positions wouldn’t affect the department’s crime-fighting capabilities because those positions have been empty for years and represent a “theoretical group of people.”
“If someone would say ‘how does the amendment affect your current operations,’ it actually wouldn’t affect current operations at all,” Hayden added, “Because they’re people I don’t have.”
Hayden acknowledged that the department had spent years attempting to fill its empty o cer positions, but explained that even with the Missouri legislature’s abolition of police residency requirements, St. Louis has only been able to “keep up with attrition.”
“I haven’t been able to fill these spots,” Hayden said, concluding that the proposed cuts “wouldn’t prevent us from hiring more o cers.”
The proposed budget now moves to the full Board of Aldermen, potentially setting up a showdown between the backers of Jones’ policing reform and Board President Reed, who was defeated by Jones in St. Louis’ March mayoral primary. n
Chief John Hayden says the change wouldn’t a ect department operations. | DANNY WICENTOWSKI
More Students Cheat in Virtual Classes, Missouri Researchers Find
Written by DANNY WICENTOWSKI
An ongoing study from Missouri State University suggests that the pandemic-era move to virtual instruction led to an increase in cheating — a result that surprised MSU faculty member James Sottile, who conducted a similar study in 2010 that yielded different results.
In the previous study, Sottile, a professor in educational psychology, analyzed responses from 635 undergraduate and graduate students, finding little difference between the self-reported cheating behavior during online and virtual classes. At the time, the survey responses indicated students who did cheat were slightly more likely to receive answers from a friend during an online test than one conducted in a physical classroom.
But as the pandemic hit, and courses shifted online in 2020, Sottile says he and his research partners wondered if the dynamic had changed. In February, he surveyed 698 college students with questions about their cheating behaviors since the pandemic.
“We found that about 20 percent more students admitted to cheating during the pandemic, which is very surprising, and kind of scary,” he explains. “When you look at the moral development research, what we find is that people cheat for a reason. ‘Will it benefit me?’”
It’s more than that: Sottile notes that whether a student cheats is also a matter of opportunity — and that’s what he believes has changed the most in the last decade.
“When we started getting into it, I was surprised by how there’s been a huge industry in cheating through tech. There’s a lot of resources that students now have the opportunity to use in order to cheat, and that has greatly changed within the last ten years.”
It’s not just Googling answers on your phone during a test, or asking a friend for previous years’ assign-
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VIRTUAL CHEATING
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ments: Sottile points to the popularity of homework-help websites like Chegg, which allows students to pose questions to the site’s experts, or the industry of ghostwriting services that provide unique papers and assignments in specialized courses, offering paying cheaters the opportunity to avoid being spotted by antiplagiarism programs.
Earlier this year, in a separate study published in the International Journal for Educational Integrity, researchers at Imperial College London found a nearly 200 percent increase in the number of questions posted to Chegg. The study’s authors noted, “Given the number of exam-style questions, it appears highly likely that students are using this site as an easy way to breach academic integrity by obtaining outside help.”
Sottile points to several possible variables that could increase cheating. Along with the expanded access to online resources and quick-searching internet speeds, universities struggled to pivot to online classes, leaving teachers overworked and lacking familiarity with the tools meant to aid in busting cheaters and plagiarism.
On the other hand, students may simply feel safer about taking the risk to cheat when their teacher isn’t actually in the room.
Sottile and his researchers are in the midst of analyzing data from the third set of survey responses from students about their cheating behavior. He’s hoping the results provide more specific insights into how students’ moral behaviors have changed as their opportunities to cheat have expanded — and with educational institutions weighing blended classrooms and hybrid models of instruction, those opportunities won’t simply disappear with the end of the pandemic. n
It’s easier to cheat, and more students are doing it, a new study found. | COTTONBRO/PEXELS
COVID-19 Restrictions Eased in City and County
New rules allow full capacity, 3 a.m. last call for bars, restaurants
Written by DOYLE MURPHY
More than a year after the first COVID-19 shutdowns in the St. Louis metro, the city and county have issued new orders to allow restaurants and other businesses to fully reopen — with a few caveats.
St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones and County Executive Sam Page announced the end of capacity restrictions during a joint press conference on Monday morning.
“Today, we’ve come together to take the next step in reopening St. Louis city and county,” Page said during the livestreamed news conference.
Along with the lifting of capacity limits, bars will be able to push back closing time to a.m. again.
Page and Jones cautioned that this isn’t a full return to normal but said the county and city have been able to make progress toward that goal thanks to compliance with previous orders. Businesses will still have to follow social distancing measures, such as spacing tables six feet apart. So restaurants won’t be allowed to pack people in like the pre-pandemic days just yet. Masks will still be required.
There is also the issue of staffing. Restaurant employees who were either laid off or, if they kept their jobs, found themselves working under extra-chaotic conditions and the added threat of catching the virus have been slow to return to an industry where low pay and a lack of health insurance have been the default. Even at the previous capacity of 0 percent, restaurants and bars have struggled to find enough workers. Jones and Page say they are syncing the city and county rules so that businesses and customers won’t fall under differing orders as they flow back and forth across municipal borders.
The new rules follow a rise in vaccinations, especially for those and older. In the city, a quarter of all residents are fully vaccinated and 4 percent of those and older are fully vaccinated, according to the New York Times vaccine tracker. In the county, the numbers are 1 percent and 9 percent.
The rules in the city and county were among the strongest in the state. Along with capacity limits, the two governments implemented mask mandates. Page noted that Missouri Gov. Mike Parson left it to individual municipalities to sort out their own rules instead of creating a unified state approach. A study released eight months into the pandemic showed that strategy led to a sharp contrast in the spread of the COVID-19 in counties that had mask mandates and neighbors that did not.
Jones and Page urged people to continue being cautious and to get the vaccine if they haven’t already. There is plenty of supply throughout the region, including a mass vaccine site that is operating a.m. to p.m., seven days per week at the Dome at America’s Center ( 01 Convention Plaza) and taking all comers for first and second doses of the Pfizer vaccine.
For those who can’t leave their homes to get the vaccine, the St. Louis Fire Department is making house calls to administer shots. To set up an appointment or get more info, call 14- 12- 91 . n
