Efforts to update Missouri’s criminal code have stalled in the state Senate, where Senator Tom Dempsey declared the bill is dead for this legislative session. The legislature will adjourn on Friday.
The criminal code is a compilation of the state’s criminal violations and punishments that are attached to those crimes.
Patrick Starke is the president of the Missouri Bar Association, who helped write the bill. He said the criminal code is just “too big of a whale for the legislature to swallow” in the last few days of the session.
“This is very large. It’s very complex in that it changes hundreds of statutes and I can appreciate that the folks in the Senate want to deliberate about it a little longer than they were afforded the opportunity to do so,” Starke said.
Starke said he will work with each of the state’s Senators in the coming months to help them understand the new criminal code proposals. This is the second consecutive year the criminal code bill died at the end of the session.
“I think it’s going to come back next year in some fashion,” Starke said. “All I’ll say is that, I guess you plow the ground and next year you come back and it’s hopefully not quite as challenging to plow the same ground and hopefully we’ll get it through among the first things next year.”
Missouri’s criminal code has not been reorganized since 1979.
