Missouri Criminal Defense Law Blog

Even though a search a couple's Missouri home did not turn up any evidence, the 57-year-old husband was still sentenced to serve more than 22 years in a federal prison. The sentence stems from drug charges related to the making of methamphetamine.

According to a special assistant U.S. attorney, the government started to suspect that the 57-year-old was making meth. This came after he was already on the government's radar after previously serving time for attempting to manufacture the drug.

A 23-year-old man was arrested and placed in jail on a cyber crimes warrant for allegedly asking inappropriate sexual requests to a person he believed was a 14-year-old Missouri teen. However, it turns out that the person he was chatting with online was not really a teenager, but rather was an undercover investigator from the Boon County Sheriff's Department Cyber Crimes Task Force. Now the 23-year-old is facing rather serious sex crimes charges.

According to authorities tied to this case, the cyber crime investigation started in September 2011 when the investigator acted like a teenage girl. This "teenage girl" was supposedly contacted in an internet chat room by the 23-year-old.

A longtime employee of a greater St. Louis, Missouri, metro area bank will spend more than five years in prison after she pled guilty to stealing millions of dollars from the bank. The 57-year-old woman conducted an elaborate scheme to steal the money over several years, but she will now have to forfeit her ill-gotten gains.

The woman had worked for Jersey State Bank in Jerseyville, Illinois, since 1976 and had worked her way up from assistant cashier to executive vice president. However, the riches she had acquired were not due to her success as an employee but rather to bank fraud, a charge to which she pleaded guilty in federal court last fall.

Having your driver's license revoked is already inconvenient enough. However, now the Missouri of House of Representatives is set to consider a bill that would further toughen the penalties for repeat drunk drivers. The bill has already gained approval from the Missouri Senate on a 29-5 vote.

Currently, Missouri drivers who have lost their license due to a drunk driving conviction are still allowed to drive a vehicle in certain situations, such as going to work or school, to a provider of ignition interlocks, to addiction treatment programs or for medical treatment. Additionally, courts can also deem other situations necessary, and therefore grant additional driving privileges.

Late last month a 22-year-old Columbia, Missouri, man was found dead in his home from an apparent heroin overdose. And while it does not seem that anyone forced him to use the drug, the 36-year-old who is being accused of providing the man with the heroin is now facing a felony level drug charge.

The Missouri man was found deceased in his home on Jan. 27. According to police, he had puncture wounds in his wrist and arm, which leads them to believe he died from an overdose. However, the case did not end there, as investigators obtained a warrant to be able to search the deceased 22-year-old's phone records. From there, text messages were found between the man and the 36-year-old.

The Missouri Supreme Court recently ruled that police officers in the state need to first get a warrant before forcing a suspected drunk driver to submit to a hospital blood draw to test for alcohol. The only time that a warrant would not first be needed, would be in cases where the driver could escape, destroy evidence or is considered to be a danger to life. In those situations, a blood draw can still be done without a warrant.

The recent case before the Supreme Court stemmed from a 2010 traffic stop in Missouri where an officer was accusing a man of driving drunk. The man was pulled over at 2:08 a.m., and during the traffic stop, refused to take a breath test. After his refusal, the police officer brought the man to a hospital, where his blood was taken at 2:33 a.m. The claim was that this was an unconstitutional search since a warrant was not first obtained.

Quite often we tend to think of violent crimes as being the ones where people are sentenced to serve long prison sentences. However, the truth is that white-collar crimes can result in very lengthy prison sentences too.

An example of this is the fact that a 72-year-old Missouri man, who is already serving time in prison for white-collar crimes, could end up spending the rest of his life in prison if he is convicted on more counts related to mail fraud and money laundering.

After seven years of being behind bars, a Taney County man - who's always maintained his claim of innocence - may finally be getting the break he's been looking for, as his conviction was overturned.

The case against the 36-year-old Missouri man went back to March 2004. At that time, he was charged with a sex crime after a pre-teen claimed to have been touched inappropriately by the man. After being charged, he has his day in court, and after just a mere 20 minutes of deliberation, the jury found the man guilty. He was subsequently sentenced to serve 12 years in prison.