JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — A Missouri Senate panel on Thursday terminated a proposal one county prosecutor called the “Make Murder Legal Act.”
The official name of the measure is Senate Bill 666, which the sponsor, Sen. Eric Burlison, R-Battlefield, said he didn’t choose.
Members of the GOP-controlled Senate Transportation, Infrastructure and Public Safety Committee failed to advance the bill out of committee on Thursday.
Burlison, however, told the Post-Dispatch that he could bring the measure back as an amendment to other firearms legislation he’s sponsoring.
“There are multiple ways to pass language,” Burlison said.
The legislation would’ve established a presumption that a defendant acted reasonably in self-defense when they use force against another person.
“I refer to it as the ‘Make Murder Legal Act,’” Stoddard County Prosecuting Attorney Russ Oliver, a Republican representing the Missouri Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, said in a Senate committee hearing last week.
“What we are doing with this bill is ... basically saying the 6,500 assaults that are committed every single year in Missouri — that every single one of those are automatically presumed to be self-defense,” Oliver said.
Burlison said the claims are overblown.
“Some of the things that have been said are just absolute hyperbole,” said Burlison, who is running for U.S. Congress. “The label is just really over the top.”
St. Charles County Prosecuting Attorney Timothy Lohmar, a Republican, said currently, if prosecutors believe a homicide is unjustified, the person is charged with murder, for example. Provided there is some degree of evidence, Lohmar said the defendant can assert self-defense at trial as an affirmative defense.
He said the legislation would create “pretrial immunity hearings” during which a defendant would be able to make a self-defense claim. The state would then have to prove “by clear and convincing evidence” the defendant isn’t immune from prosecution.
“Anybody who uses a weapon to murder another individual, or to kill another individual, if they claim self-defense, the law enforcement potentially is handcuffed from even arresting that person,” Lohmar said.
During the hearing Thursday, Sen. Brian Williams, D-University City, called Burlison’s bill “one of the most offensive pieces of legislation I have ever seen in my life. It’s a personal attack on me. It’s a personal attack on people who look like me,” said Williams, who is Black. “I try to think of words to describe it and the only word I come up in my mind is this bill is complete bullshit.”
Burlison and other proponents of the measure said the state needed to edit its “castle doctrine” to avoid overzealous prosecutions.
Mark McCloskey, a St. Louis attorney who with his wife, Patricia, waved firearms at racial injustice protesters in 2020 outside their home, spoke in favor of the measure. The McCloskeys pleaded guilty to misdemeanors last year related to the incident.
“The bill before the Senate now turns the castle doctrine into a bar to prosecution,” McCloskey said at the hearing last week. “We were shocked to find out when we were charged that the castle doctrine can only be raised as an affirmative defense.”
Gov. Mike Parson, a Republican, later pardoned the couple. Meanwhile, the Missouri Supreme Court this week placed the couple’s law licenses on probation for one year.
Burlison said he is open to discussing changes in the proposal.
“My intent was to simply avoid what happened in St. Louis with the McCloskeys,” Burlison said. “I’m all ears.”
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