22nd Circuit Court

Tennessee teenager Janae Edmondson, who was seriously injured in a car accident in February and had her legs amputated, has filed a lawsuit against the City of St. Louis.

Kim Gardner’s abrupt resignation on Tuesday led to confusion about who was in charge of an office that had descended into chaos over the past two months.

Prosecutors, public defenders and others review the damage caused by the staffing crisis in the circuit attorney’s office and discuss how to move on after Kim Gardner leaves.

The case is set for a hearing May 30. This is the second time this week Gardner has been ordered to explain why prosecutors from her office did not show up in court.

St. Louis activists are demanding that judges and prosecutors rely on pretrial methods that don’t call for incarceration.

Judge Scott Millikan of the 22nd Circuit said the hearing was an attempt to bring order to the circuit. The prosecutor’s office has been plagued by recent staff turnover, with reports saying there are fewer than five attorneys handling serious felony cases.

“New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings, and that's the way I've got to look at life,” Johnson said. “I’m happy to have my life back, and I'm going to try to make the best of it.”

Judge David Mason says he’ll hold a hearing to announce his decision but has not yet set a date.

Cash bail has largely disappeared in St. Louis. Instead, circuit court judges are increasingly denying bond altogether, a new report from the Freedom Community Center found.

St. Louis attorneys and activists say judges are often denying defendants bond entirely after the Missouri Supreme Court in 2019 made it harder for courts to detain people on cash bail pretrial. “It’s a classic case of the system recalibrating and in some ways achieving many of the same results,” said Blake Strode, executive director of civil rights law firm ArchCity Defenders.