For Keith Carnes, three extra days in prison was three too many

For three days after the Missouri Supreme court ordered Keith Carnes released from prison, and after the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office decided not to retry him, he remained behind bars.

Add that time to the 18 years Carnes had already served for a murder he has long maintained he did not commit. Even one more day was one day too much.

On Friday, the county prosecutor’s office dropped all charges against Carnes and filed dismissal papers late that afternoon. His mother, his family and his friends came together to watch him walk out of the South Central Correctional Center in Licking, Missouri. He should have done so at the latest by Saturday morning.

Does it not matter to the state of Missouri that it’s a violation of a person’s rights when they are held in prison well beyond the time they are legally free to go? Officials at the south central Missouri prison said they did not receive the “appropriate” notification to release Carnes until Monday and couldn’t “begin the release process without the official notification.”

The prosecutor’s office waited until about 3:30 p.m. to file the dismissal.

They delayed filing to first notify the family of the man Carnes was accused of killing. “We were not just sitting on our hands,” said Mike Mansur, spokesman for the prosecutor’s office.

Yes, there are two families to be considered. But the holdup meant Carnes and his family were left waiting for days for his release.

“It is spiteful and malicious,” said Valerie Burton, who has worked with the nonprofit Miracle of Innocence to free Carnes from prison. Burton was outside the prison in the rain with Carnes’ mother, who is ill and had left her medication at home because she expected to return to Kansas City with her son Friday evening. That didn’t happen until Monday afternoon.

Carnes, 52, was convicted in 2006 of armed criminal action and first-degree murder in the killing of 24-year-old Larry White, who was shot to death in a Kansas City parking lot.

Earlier this month, the Missouri Supreme Court determined an eyewitness account was not disclosed to Carnes’ defense team, in what is known as a Brady violation. As a result, the court threw out Carnes’ convictions and gave prosecutors 30 days to retry him, which they decided not to do because of “insufficient evidence.”

Carnes’ case was handled by then-assistant prosecutor Amy McGowan. McGowan also prosecuted the case of Ricky Kidd, a Kansas City man who spent 23 years behind bars for a double murder he did not commit. Kidd was exonerated and freed immediately in 2019.

The Midwest Innocence Project accused prosecutors of withholding evidence when Kidd was tried, including depositions taken in McGowan’s office that could have been used in Kidd’s defense.

To his credit, Carnes remained sanguine about his situation. Although he was frustrated about being held in prison for an extra three days, he said that after 18 years, it was not that big a deal.

But it is a big deal, and it shouldn’t happen, says Chris Iliff, legal director at Miracle of Innocence. It is not right for correctional facilities to just say, “No big deal. He’s been here 18 years, what’s two or three more days? I’m going home for the weekend.”

Unfortunately, Iliff said, this kind of violation of rights is not unusual. “It keeps happening,” he said. “I think it is just negligence based on not caring,” he said. “The system dehumanizes people.”

Releases due to exoneration or technicalities do not happen very often; usually people are paroled out of prison or released after finishing their sentence. Their release date is set. Paperwork is completed ahead of time. They’re handed their belongings and freed.

But exonerations are ”happening with more frequency than ever before because hundreds of lawyers are … giving people a level of representation never available to them before,” Iliff said.

Carnes may end up filing a lawsuit against the Kansas City Police Department and the Jackson County prosecutor’s office for violating his constitutional rights during his trial, Iliff said.

He probably won’t be suing the department of corrections for the three days he was wrongfully held, even though as Iliff said, “that case would be a slam dunk, because there’s no good excuse they could give for not releasing him right away.”

This should not happen to others in the future. But it will, without a policy assuring that when a person is ordered immediately released from prison, every effort is made to expedite the order.

This story was originally published April 12, 2022 at 3:30 PM with the headline "For Keith Carnes, three extra days in prison was three too many."