Andrew Lester could face life in prison for shooting Ralph Yarl. What to know about charges
READ MORE
Ralph Yarl shooting
After a Kansas City teenager was shot and injured for going to the door of the wrong house, outrage followed in Kansas City and across the country.
Expand All
Days after the shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl after the teen rang the wrong doorbell in Kansas City’s Northland, prosecutors charged a Clay County man with two felonies.
Yarl was picking up his younger siblings and mixed up Northeast 115th Terrace and Northeast 115th Street. When the teen rang the doorbell, instead of being greeted by his twin brothers, he was shot in the head, and then shot a second time.
The suspect, 84-year old Andrew Lester, faces one count of assault in the first degree and one count of armed criminal action. Both of these are felonies, and the assault charge is considered a class A felony because it caused “serious physical injury.”
First-degree assault is Missouri’s name for the charge other states call attempted murder, a local criminal defense lawyer told The Star. That means there is no separate attempted murder count that Lester could have been charged with.
“It’s the highest level offense in the state of Missouri,” Clay County prosecutor Zachary Thompson said during a Monday press conference.
Combined, these charges carry a maximum sentence of 45 years, or life in prison, according to the prosecutor.
Some have called for Lester, who is white, to face hate crime charges as well, arguing that the shooting was racially motivated. Yarl is Black.
“Clearly, race was a factor in this shooting. Therefore, it is my hope that federal hate crime charges will also be filed against Andrew Lester,” said Gwen Grant, president and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Kansas City. “He has not shot any white people who rang his doorbell.”
Clay County prosecutors decided against pursuing hate crime charges on Monday, but it’s still possible for Lester to face additional federal charges.
Yarl, an honor student at Staley High School, was released from the hospital on Sunday and is recovering from his injuries at home.
Lester surrendered and was booked into Clay County jail on Tuesday afternoon. Shortly after, he posted bond and was then released from the jail in the same afternoon.
Here’s what the charges against him mean, and what we know so far.
What does first-degree assault mean in Missouri?
Assault in the first degree is Missouri’s equivalent of an attempted murder charge, Gladstone criminal defense attorney Kevin Jamison told The Star Tuesday.
“Other states call it attempted murder, we call it first-degree assault,” he said. “It’s the same charge.”
This crime is typically considered a class B felony in Missouri, but can be elevated to a class A felony if “the person inflicts serious physical injury on the victim.” That’s what happened in this case.
Charging documents released Monday argue that Lester committed this crime when he “knowingly caused serious physical injury to (Yarl) by shooting him.”
According to Missouri criminal codes, “a person commits the offense of assault in the first degree if he or she attempts to kill or knowingly causes or attempts to cause serious physical injury to another person.”
According to charging documents and prosecutors, the punishment for a class A felony ranges from 10 to 30 years, or life in prison.
“It was appropriate for the prosecutor to charge him and the only tragedy was that it took so long for them to charge him,” said Ben Crump, a national civil rights lawyer who is working with the Yarl family.
“You can’t send a message to society that it’s okay to shoot Black people in the head just for ringing your doorbell.”
What does armed criminal action mean in Missouri?
The second felony charge builds off the first because the assault charge was committed using a firearm.
According to Missouri criminal code, anyone who commits a felony in the state using a “dangerous instrument or deadly weapon” is also guilty of armed criminal action.
The sentence for this crime ranges from three to 15 years in prison if it is a first-time offense and if the weapon was owned legally.
The law states that this sentence will be “in addition to and consecutive to” any punishment for the crime itself.
That means if Lester is found guilty of both felonies, the sentences will stack on top of each other.
We don’t have any evidence that Lester has been found guilty of a felony before, or that his gun was illegally owned. However, if this felony is a second offense or if it was committed with an illegally-owned weapon, the minimum sentence jumps to five years. If both these conditions are true, the minimum sentence jumps to 15 years.
Why wasn’t the suspect charged with a hate crime?
At a news conference Monday, Thompson, the Clay County prosecutor, acknowledged that race was a factor in Yarl’s shooting but declined to elaborate on the specifics of the case.
“There was a racial component to the case,” Thompson said.
Missouri law allows the state to add “hate offense” charges to certain felonies which “the state believes to be knowingly motivated because of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation or disability of the victim.”
These charges can be class D or E felonies depending on the circumstances. A class D felony can add up to seven years to a prison sentence, while a class E felony can add up to four years.
Thompson told reporters that hate offense charges have a “lower range of punishment than what the defendant is currently charged with,” and suggested that the charge couldn’t easily be stacked on top of the existing charges.
“At that point you would be talking about double jeopardy issues,” Thompson said.
The federal government can also file hate crime charges.
“They could, but they generally don’t,” Jamison said. “If he’s convicted of this, it’s punishable by 30 years to life. So it’s not like he’s going to get out and do other things… they don’t have to step in when the case is already being handled at the local level.”
Recent FBI data reveals that Missouri has been seeing a rise in hate crimes in recent years, with the highest number ever reported in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. Kansas City leads the state in reported hate crimes, the majority of which are racially motivated.
Of the 119 racially motivated hate crimes reported in Missouri in 2021, 63 were committed as a result of anti-Black bias, the FBI data showed.
Why wasn’t the suspect charged with attempted murder?
The charge that other states call attempted murder is called assault in the first degree in Missouri, Jamison told The Star.
“The heaviest charge they could file on him is the first-degree assault,” he said.
The Star’s Glenn Rice, Luke Nozicka and Anna Spoerre contributed reporting.
Do you have more questions about the Ralph Yarl shooting or Missouri criminal law? Ask the Service Journalism team at kcq@kcstar.com.
This story was originally published April 18, 2023 at 11:11 AM.
.jpg)
.jpeg)
