By Susan Weich
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS, Missouri — The attorney for a man whose prison sentence mistakenly was delayed for 13 years is asking for a hearing to seek his client’s immediate release.
Patrick Megaro says Cornealious “Mike” Anderson was in no way responsible for the clerical error that resulted in him not being jailed swiftly, according to a court filing Thursday.
Anderson was sentenced to 13 years in prison for a St. Charles County armed robbery in 2000, but he was out on bail while his case was appealed.
When the appeal failed, Anderson was never ordered to jail.
He became a carpenter, got married, had four children and started his own construction business.
Last summer, just about the time Anderson would have finished serving his sentence, someone at the Department of Corrections noticed the error.
Marshals found Anderson in Webster Groves, at the address listed on his drivers license, and sent him to prison to serve the 13 years.
He is serving his sentence at the Southeast Correctional Center in Charleston, Mo.
Megaro said because Anderson stayed out of trouble when he was released, he fully complied with the conditions of his bail. Megaro’s filing asks that Anderson be given credit for the time he was waiting for an order to return to court; this would satisfy his sentence.
Megaro was responding to Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster’s filing in the case Tuesday. It rejected Megaro’s request that Anderson be released from prison, but offered another approach — bringing action against the director of the Department of Corrections — that could lead to Anderson’s release.
Megaro’s latest filing says that approach wouldn’t work. Koster’s office could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Megaro maintains that making Anderson serve his sentence 13 years after the fact is a violation of Anderson’s rights and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
His response cites a 1912 case that favored dropping a judgment when “society could derive no good from it’s enforcement.”
He states that jailing Anderson now “would be taking a good person out of society and making him bad.”
He also cited an online petition drive on change.org that has collected about 27,000 signatures of support for Anderson’s release.
Further he stated that the victim of the crime, a Burger King worker who was held up by Anderson and another man “has come forward and publicly stated that he believes it would be an injustice to force Mr. Anderson to serve his sentence.”