‘I know every fact’ of KC cop who shot Black man, says Baker. It’s Parson who does not | Opinion

News alert: Missouri Gov. Mike Parson has decided that once upon a time in the Show-Me State, there was a prosecutor who was not in full possession of the facts before sending a man to prison.

Not surprisingly, in Parson’s mind, this historic outlaw outlier is Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, who in 2021 prosecuted Eric DeValkenaere, the first Kansas City police officer ever found guilty of killing a Black man, 26-year-old Cameron Lamb.

Attorneys for DeValkenaere’s family submitted a request for clemency to Parson’s office last month. Parson says he hasn’t yet decided how he’ll respond, but “the one thing that bothered me more than anything about that case,” he told KCMO talk radio host Pete Mundo on Wednesday, “was the way the prosecutor handled that in Kansas City, by the accusation she was making about guilt or innocence without actually even knowing the facts herself.”

Huh? Prosecutors, it’s true, do tend to make accusations. Very often, they are about guilt rather than innocence.

But “without actually even knowing the facts herself” is out-of-nowhere talk coming from someone who obviously doesn’t know the facts of this case himself.

Baker was at the scene of the crime on Dec. 3, 2019.

She saw Lamb’s lifeless body right where DeValkenaere shot him, nine seconds after arriving at his home in response to a call about a car that a police helicopter had seen speeding. When DeValkenaere rolled up on that house, he knew nothing else.

Baker followed every aspect of the case from the moment of Lamb’s shooting. She knows what temperature it was that day, and why Lamb, who was backing into his basement garage when he was shot, could not physically have been holding a gun at the time DeValkenaere claims that he shot him in self-defense, to save the life of his partner, Troy Schwalm.

“I know every fact of this case,” Baker told me on Wednesday night.

3 governor-appointed judges: Lamb not holding gun

At his trial, DeValkenaere testified that he had to rush in because “we had a reasonable suspicion that crime was afoot.” He had to go in, too, he said, because Schwalm already had, and “I’m not going to leave him in there by himself.”

If he had stopped to get a warrant, what crime would it even have been for, a prosecutor asked him. He didn’t know what might have been happening, he said. “That’s why we didn’t” get a warrant, DeValkenaere said.

He never should have drawn his gun. Even Schwalm said that he saw no gun in Lamb’s left hand. Which is not surprising, since Lamb was not only right-handed, but had limited use of his left hand after having been shot in the index finger in 2015.

Lamb’s roommate, Roberta Merritt, testified that she had seen Lamb’s gun on the basement steps a few feet from where the shooting occurred, right before police arrived. Prosecutors said that the gun found just underneath Lamb’s left arm, which was hanging out his truck window when he died, had been planted there, though they could not say by whom.

Phone records showed that Lamb was on a phone call, on the cell he was holding in his right hand, at the time he was shot.

If you don’t believe Baker’s team’s findings that the gun must have been planted, then maybe you will believe the downright blistering ruling of the three judges appointed by — my goodness, by Mike Parson — that the victim did not have a gun in his hand when he was shot.

In the appeals court’s ruling, the judges upheld the trial judge’s findings that DeValkenaere and Schwalm had violated Lamb’s Fourth Amendment rights by running onto his property without a search warrant, that DeValkenaere had acted with criminal negligence and that the circumstances did not justify the use of deadly force.

So again, who is it who does not know the facts?

‘Convicted because of the political side’

Parson, who is a Republican, does not question the findings of the trial judge, or of the three judges who heard the appeal, but only of Baker, who happens to be a Democrat.

Parson told Mundo that “you don’t ever want anybody convicted because of the political side of things.” Baker, he said, “set a poor example of setting the stage and making this more of a political issue when she should be doing what’s right by the law.”

Parson, who has never contacted the family of the victim, who after all is Lamb and not DeValkenaere, is the one who is making this political.

And there are Missouri prosecutors Parson has defended who unlike Baker really have not been in full possession of the facts when they sent someone to prison.

Remember when Kevin Strickland served 43 years for a triple murder that he did not commit? Parson fought his release to the end.

First, Parson said that pardoning someone who’d been sleeping on a cot in a cage since he was a teenager was just not a priority for him. Then, he said he was not “willing to put other people at risk” by freeing someone against whom there was no evidence. At the time, Strickland was a 62-year-old man who used a wheelchair.

Back then, a spokeswoman for the governor said Parson just couldn’t in good conscience second-guess a court, since he believes “we must give great deference to the judicial process.”

Sometimes, anyway.