Does the City of St. Louis owe anything to a man it accidentally kept locked in jail for eight months after the charges against him were dropped?
That’s the question now facing a three-judge panel on the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. But the city is fighting tooth and nail to argue it owes Michael Jones nothing.
Jones, now 75, was locked up in the since-shuttered Medium Security Institution, better known as the Workhouse, in 2013 while facing one felony and one misdemeanor charge. According to the suit he later filed, the charges against him were dismissed that November but he remained in jail until the following July.
It may sound shocking, but Jones wasn’t alone in being held long after his release date. In the last 10 years, at least seven people have remained in the city’s custody even though they were no longer facing charges.
One of the federal judges hearing the case last week blamed a breakdown of the system, not mere negligence.
"If this happens once, it is offensive," Judge Ralph Erickson told the attorney for the city, "but this happens multiple times and nobody cares enough? That is a problem....You ought to go back to whoever employs you and tell them there needs to be a policy."
The suit says that the jail continued to hold Jones even after the public defender's office notified jail staff he was past his release date.
Said Erickson, "This isn't some guy who sat there for three days. This is a person who sat there for months."
Yet attorneys for the city have argued that the city should be let off the hook in Jones’ lawsuit because of qualified immunity, a legal concept that protects government officials from lawsuits in certain situations, including ones in which officials couldn't have known they were breaking the law.
The city previously filed a motion to dismiss Jones’ lawsuit, but that motion was denied.
After the city appealed, Assistant City Counselor Abby Duncan argued the case last Thursday in front of a panel that included Erickson and two other judges. The three-judge panel has yet to rule on the matter.
Attorney Elad Gross was there arguing for Jones. He has represented six other men and women who were also held in the Workhouse and the City Justice Center between 2013 and 2019 after the criminal cases against them were dismissed. Some of those people were only locked up for a few days past their cases' dismissals, others for months.
The other six suits have settled, with the individuals generally receiving more settlement money the longer they were wrongfully locked up. Some have received approximately $100,000 from the city. Of the seven, Jones spent the longest period of time allegedly wrongfully incarcerated.
"His is the longest and I would anticipate that's probably why we're still fighting his case the most at this point," Gross says.
In court, Duncan told the judges she believes the problem has largely been fixed, replying to Erickson's criticisms by saying, "Many of those things you said have likely already been done,” she said.
Since 2020, according to city policies governing detainee release, jail procedure holds that when charges against a defendant are dropped by prosecutors, "the Circuit Attorney authorizes the release of inmates." In situations where a detainee is found not guilty, that responsibility lies with the courts.
Gross says he wasn't aware of anyone suffering the same situation as Jones in the past year or two.
"That could be a good thing that [now] maybe this isn't as much of an issue," Gross says.
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