By Robert Patrick
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS, Mo. — Almost three months ago, a Cole County judge said that Missouri prison officials should knock 16 months off the 20-year sentence of a Missouri prison inmate.
But that inmate, Ricardo Elliott, formerly of St. Louis, says that officials are ignoring the judge’s order, and that he’s been kept in prison more than two months after he should have been released.
“I already won,” said Elliott, 44, in a phone conversation from the Boonville Correctional Center west of Columbia this week.
“They don’t even know the law,” he complained about prison officials. “They’re just doing whatever they want to.”
Elliott’s attorney, Ronald Ribaudo, said he’d been trying to speed the case through the legal system.
“And we finally get a trial and win and they don’t comply,” Ribaudo said.
“It’s frustrating for Ricardo. It’s frustrating for me because this case was filed a long time ago,” he said.
A prison spokesman refused to talk about the case or even say when Elliott is due to be released.
Prison officials are being represented in court by the Missouri Attorney General’s office. Lawyers referred a reporter’s question to spokeswoman Nanci Gonder, who declined to comment.
Ribaudo said that Elliott told him that officials were waiting on the outcome of an appeal.
“I don’t want to speculate about (officials’) motives,” Ribaudo said. “I can tell you I worked at the (attorney general’s) office for three years, and I can tell you 99 percent of the time they get it right.”
But, he said, most of the lawsuits are filed by inmates representing themselves, and many of the suits are tough to understand.
Officials are appealing their loss and claim in court filings that both the judge’s math and his legal reasoning were off.
Elliott has been behind bars since 1997 after he was arrested for shooting a man during a robbery in the Esquire Theater’s parking lot in Richmond Heights. The victim, 27, was shot in the abdomen and legs when he fought to keep his gold watch and bracelet, according to court documents.
In 1999, Elliott was sentenced in St. Louis County Circuit Court to 20 years in prison for assault, robbery and two counts of armed criminal action.
Elliott unsuccessfully appealed the conviction. He maintains he was innocent in the shooting.
Elliott had also been sentenced to 44 months in federal prison in 1997 after pleading guilty to being a felon in possession of a firearm on the night of the shooting. Elliott had a prior drug conviction from 1989, as well as one for second-degree assault.
Inmates are often awarded credit against their prison sentence for the time they spend in jail before they’re sentenced.
Elliott filed suit in July 2013 on his own, later hiring Ribaudo.
Prison officials awarded Elliott 262 days of credit in 2005, but changed their mind seven years later when he asked for more, according to the Sept. 29 order from Cole County Circuit Judge Daniel Green.
Elliott said he was credited for the time he spent in county jail, but not in federal prison. When he repeatedly asked to be credited, they warned him.
“They said, ‘You ask me one more time …’ and when I wrote ’em again and asked them, they took all my time away.”
Green’s order also says that officials awarded Elliott 163 days credit almost a year after he filed his lawsuit, and Elliott has “a reasonable fear that MDOC might change its mind again.”
The order also says that Elliott should be awarded time he spent in prison for a federal gun crime, as that conviction sprang out of the shooting, for a total of 16 months.
In legal filings, prison officials say that they’ve already awarded Elliott 190 of the 492 days that he’s seeking. They say Green’s interpretation of the law is incorrect about credit for the federal time.
Resolution of the case is unlikely anytime soon.
Even though Ribaudo successfully asked the appeals court to expedite the case, both sides were given 55 days after Jan. 13 to file competing legal motions.
Ribaudo says officials also could ask for an extension, further delaying the case.
Ribaudo said that Elliott’s only other option would be to seek a writ from an appeals court seeking to have Green’s order enforced. “Even in non-prisoner cases, those applications are usually promptly denied,” he said.