MLM Counties News. Notices. Need-to-know Information.

A recent telephone scam led by scammers identifying themselves as public defenders hit very close to home for Missouri’s top public defender.

Tagged with: Cat Kelly phone scam public defender

U.S. v. White Calf (MLW No. 61938/Case No. 09-3653 – 13 pages) (U.S. Court of Appeals, 8th Circuit, Riley, J.)

A sex offender who won a $25,000 verdict from a federal jury last month has been committed as a sexually violent predator.

A judge Tuesday sentenced former Cape Girardeau attorney Joe Buerkle to seven years in prison for stealing $325,000 from a client trust fund. Buerkle’s law office in Jackson, pictured here, was shuttered after the 2005 breakup of his former firm. File photo

A federal jury has awarded $25,000 to a sex offender who accused a state mental health facility of mishandling a rape he says he suffered at the facility.

Montgomery v. Wilson, et al. (MLW No. 61830/Case No. WD71398 – 13 pages) (Missouri Court of Appeals, Western District, Pfeiffer, J.)

Another sex offender moving through the state’s sexually violent predator process told a federal jury in St. Louis last week that a resident at the SVP facility in Farmington brutally raped him.

Tagged with: 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals civil rights Missouri Department of Mental Health U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missour

Judge J. Miles Sweeney listens to testimony at a hearing in November in Greene County Circuit Court. Sweeney, appointed as a special master to a case about the Missouri State Public Defender’s right to refuse new cases in overloaded offices, proposed redoing the state’s criminal code. File photo by Mark Schiefelbein

Melinda and Seth Moser watch media interviews in November after arguments before the Missouri Supreme Court on custody of their adopted child, Carlos.

In a 4-3 ruling that runs nearly 100 pages, the majority threw out a Jasper County judge’s order terminating the parental rights of a Guatemalan woman and handing her son, Carlos, to a Carthage couple.

Tagged with: adoption Breckenridge foreign adoption Stith WolffSC

A St. Charles jury has cleared an Ob-Gyn doctor of negligently performing a hysterectomy on a woman that left her with a painful vaginal fistula.

The first federal rice trial of the new year settled for $873,000.