Is This Mis-souri The “Show Me” State
How a Missouri Man Could Die in Prison for Weed
At the sentencing Johnston asked the judge to be more forgiving this time, arguing under the mistaken belief that his client faced a 30-year “life” sentence with the possibility of parole.
“I think that 30 years in prison for that is not fair and just. I would urge the court to find some lesser or middle ground in a range that’s available to the court,” Johnston told the judge.
Mittelhauser disagreed and pressed Scott to impose the life sentence.
“I agree that a life sentence is harsh and burdensome,” Mittelhauser told the judge, “and I think that’s precisely why the legislature has prescribed it as a possible punishment for someone who finds himself situated the way Mr. Mizanskey does with a lengthy criminal history and possession of a large amount of marijuana.”
Scott sided with Mittelhauser and again sentenced Mizanskey to life in prison.
Today Mittelhauser remains the top prosecutor in Pettis County, and he has little sympathy for Mizanskey or Johnston and their claim that they didn’t realize the sentence was for life without parole.
“That was the gorilla in the room,” says Mittelhauser, who notes that Mizanskey could have accepted the 25-year plea deal. “He rolled the dice — and that’s his prerogative, to go to trial — but he did, and this is what happened.”
Ronald Reagan‘s War on Drugs was in full swing in 1989 when state senator Harold Caskey, a Democrat from the western Missouri town of Butler, cosponsored Missouri’s Prior and Persistent Drug Offender law. In hindsight, though, Caskey isn’t so sure that the law is a good one, especially considering Mizanskey’s incarceration.
“I can’t believe [life sentences for marijuana] was intended,” says the 75-year-old former lawmaker who retired from the state senate in 2004. “Looking back at it now, I wouldn’t vote for it. You see these states passing marijuana laws, and it indicates that marijuana is not as serious as it once was.”
Yet Caskey wasn’t alone at the time he sponsored Missouri’s three-strike law for drugs. In the crack-cocaine hysteria of the 1980s, politicians across the nation were eager to display their “tough on crime” bona fides.
“There was a sea change in the way that the public and politicians thought about crime in the 1970s and 1980s,” says Greg Mermelstein, a division director with the Missouri State Public Defender System. “These prior and persistent laws, by and large, were inventions of that era because there was a public perception — frankly, often wrong — that people were committing heinous crimes and receiving very short sentences. And as a result, there just became this tough-on-crime movement where everyone wanted to enact tougher laws to make sentences longer and longer.”
No state agency keeps tabs on how many Missouri inmates have received sentences of life in prison without parole specifically for nonviolent drug offenses. Riverfront Times could find only three Missouri prisoners besides Mizanskey who are currently locked away for life without parole under the Prior and Persistent Drug Offender statute. And all three of those were found guilty of meth charges.
Although life sentences are relatively rare, decades-long sentences for small amounts of drugs are not because the minimum sentence a judge can hand out under the statute is ten years.
“One of the major effects of the laws is that it always increases the punishment,” Mermelstein says. “And what happens is that, in individual cases, the punishment doesn’t always fit the crime.”
Examples include a man from the bootheel who earned a 25-year stint for selling $20 of crack to an undercover cop, and a St. Louis man slapped with a 15-year sentence for selling one rock’s worth of crack.
Advocates for reforming Missouri’s drug laws also point to the financial price of imprisoning nonviolent offenders. The annual cost to feed and house a Missouri inmate is about $22,000. Keeping Mizanskey locked up has already cost Missouri taxpayers more than $400,000. And they’ll likely be on the hook for a few hundred thousand dollars more to incarcerate him until his death.
But to the man who prosecuted Mizanskey, the sentence remains just.
“I do not think the sentence is excessive,” says Mittelhauser, who still remembers Mizanskey’s case, even if he’s a bit fuzzy on the details.
“Considering his numerous prior convictions involving the distribution of controlled substances and considering that he had a connection to, if not Mexico, at least the Southwest United States to bring in 100 pounds a week of marijuana to distribute, yes, I believe his sentence was a fair one.
(Mizanskey, for the record, was never on trial for 100 pounds of marijuana or any conspiracy to bring in that amount. There was also no evidence presented at his trial that he had connections to Mexico or the Southwest other than the fact the guy he gave a ride to was a Latino from New Mexico.)
If the Pettis County prosecutor were to try another case like Mizanskey’s, he would again aim for a life sentence without parole. That is, if anyone is foolish enough to take it to trial.
“I would hope I wouldn’t have to try a case like that in the future because the defense attorney would look at Mizanskey’s case and say, ‘This is what could happen,'” says Mittelhauser.
If Jeff Mizanskey were eligible for parole, odds are he’d get it.
In the visiting room of the Jefferson City Correctional Center, he sits at a table he helped make in the prison furniture factory. He has been employed there full-time going on sixteen years and has worked his way up to foreman at a wage of 73 cents an hour.
“We do the staining and the finishing,” Mizanskey says with some pride. “We did all the tables in this room.”
It is work he enjoys and is good at, according to letters of recommendation from his supervisors that Mizanskey carries with him in a manila folder.
He takes out more papers from the folder and spreads them across the table. They’re certificates for programs he has completed in prison. He’s taken classes on everything from understanding the impact of violence (“I’ve never been a violent person, but I figure there was something I could learn.”) to improving one’s self-esteem (“Just about everyone in here’s got low self-esteem.”).
“I think I’ve been through just about every program they offer in here,” says Mizanskey. “But it ain’t anything I had to do; it’s something I did myself because I thought it would help.”
But a clean prison record, steady work history and a willingness to take advantage of prison programs to better himself doesn’t take time off a sentence of life without parole.
It’s a frustrating situation not only for Mizanskey, but for his family as well.
Chris Mizanskey was thirteen years old when police arrested his dad outside that Super 8.
“We missed out on a lot not having him around,” says Chris of his dad’s prison term. “He always took us fishing and hunting, he made sure we went to school, he did all those things. If he was around, I wouldn’t have had to quit school and go to work. I think maybe I’d have a lot more going for me today.”
Chris still remembers sitting in the Benton County courthouse watching lawyers and judges talk about his dad being a big-time dope dealer.
“I knew then, even though I was just a kid, that my dad was getting a bad deal,” Chris, now 33, says. “They were trying to make him out to be somebody he was not.”
Now, with marijuana slowly being legalized around the country and a recent Gallup poll finding that 58 percent of Americans favor full legalization, Chris doesn’t understand why his father is still locked up.
Chris never intended on being a cannabis activist, but in 2011 a friend of his shared something on Facebook that offered a gleam of hope for his father to get out of prison. The advocacy group Show-Me Cannabis was organizing a ballot initiative to legalize marijuana in Missouri and release nonviolent offenders.
“I’ve never been a political person. I just kinda keep to myself,” he explains. “But I saw that, and I had no choice but to get involved.”
Chris spread the word to friends and helped gather signatures. The petition drive failed to garner enough support to get on the 2012 ballot, but in the process of organizing for the effort, the story Chris shared about his father reached Tony Nenninger, a Bourbon-based attorney and part-time marijuana-reform activist. Nenninger reviewed Mizanskey’s case and was shocked by what he saw.
“What they’re doing to Jeff is cruel and unusual punishment,” says Nenninger. “That’s really the only way to explain it.”
Unfortunately, Mizanskey has exhausted all his legal appeals. The only possibility of getting him out of prison would be convincing the governor to grant him clemency.
Nenninger began coordinating the clemency effort on a shoestring. In addition to visiting Mizanskey and filing paperwork on his behalf, he wrote blog posts for pro-marijuana websites to get the word out and got in touch with Show-Me Cannabis to encourage more people to write letters and donate funds to back the effort.
“His story is creating far more interest in and support for policies such as record expungement and even the release of nonviolent cannabis offenders,” says John Payne, executive director of Show-Me Cannabis, which last month hosted a town-hall meeting in Sedalia to bring attention to Mizanskey’s story. “Our prisons are overcrowded, and it’s just common sense that a nonviolent guy like Jeff should be released long before we ever consider paroling a violent offender.”
In the Jefferson City Correctional Center, Mizanskey doesn’t have a whole lot of contact with the outside world. He can’t read the blog posts or get the mass e-mails about his case. But he’s aware people are trying to persuade the governor to let him out, and it has given him a little bit of optimism — something he hasn’t had much of since discovering several years into his sentence that he was condemned to die in prison.
Concludes Nenninger in his letter to Nixon:
“We respectfully say to you, Mr. Governor, without hesitation or equivocation, that no conceivable good for our state can come from causing this nonviolent cannabis-only convict to die in prison and pray that you commute the sentence of this prisoner without undue delay.”
That letter went out last month. Mizanskey has yet to hear back from the governor.
“If he gives me a chance, he won’t be disappointed,” says Missouri Inmate No. 521900. “I’ll be one of his success stories.”