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Joe Jacobson and Erich Vieth were neighbors living near Tower Grove Park, though Jacobson has since moved to the Central West End. The two men are lawyers, so they pay close attention to the criminal justice system.

At the time, fairly early in the pandemic, some crimes, particularly homicides, were on the rise in the city. That coincided with the well-reported loss of seasoned prosecutors in the office of Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner.

Around that time, Gardner, a Democrat, pushed back on the idea that her office was failing to do its job. In media interviews, she said reporters weren’t sharing “our numbers� and “my prosecutor statistics.�

Jacobson had voted for Gardner twice. He wanted to believe the circuit attorney’s side of the story, and he figured there was only one way to find out what was going on.

“I wanted to know what the truth was, and I thought it would be pretty easy to look at the statistics she was citing and see what was really going on,� he says. “Erich had experience with making Sunshine Law requests, so we decided he would be my lawyer to make the request. I had no idea at the time that this would lead to a lawsuit.�

Jacobson emailed me this week to tell me about the lawsuit. He had read my column about Sunshine Law failures in St. Louis and a lawsuit filed by attorney Elad Gross to try to force the city to follow the law on open records. It’s not just the city, Jacobson said. Indeed, it’s not.

In April 2020, Jacobson and Vieth filed a records request with Gardner’s office seeking the crime statistics that her office keeps. They referred specifically to her statements about the numbers the media allegedly weren’t reporting. What were those numbers?

After multiple requests over a couple of months, they had received no documents. So the two attorneys filed a lawsuit trying to force the release of the numbers. It’s still pending. In legal documents in the case, the circuit attorney’s office blames the COVID-19 pandemic for delays and suggests that the Sunshine Law request was “vague and ambiguous� and “was designed not for legitimate purposes but solely to form a basis to file this lawsuit.�

It’s been like “pulling teeth� to get answers out of Gardner’s office during the lawsuit, Vieth says — so much so that last month Circuit Court Judge Jason Sengheiser issued an order to compel the circuit attorney’s office to produce some documents.

Sadly, this is par for the course for Gardner’s office. It’s at least the third time the office has been sued for Sunshine Law violations, including once by the Post-Dispatch. In that lawsuit, a judge ordered Gardner’s office to release the records sought — simple bills for outside legal and professional services. In another case, a judge fined Gardner’s office for failing to even respond to a Sunshine Law lawsuit.

Jacobson sees this as part of a nationwide breakdown of democratic norms. And it doesn’t help, he says, that Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican, has shown little interest in enforcing the Sunshine Law, one of the duties of his office.

Jacobson is disappointed that the city has Sunshine Law compliance problems, that the circuit attorney’s office also does and that the Missouri Legislature this year passed a law making it more difficult to see government documents that used to be posted online.

“Government records belong to the people and they should be made available quickly and easily on request,� Jacobson says. “I think that secrets generally reflect and reinforce bad government.�

There was a time, in 1973, when the Sunshine Law was passed, that Missouri politicians of both parties agreed with that sentiment. They put the words right into the law, where they still exist today, ignored by those who are supposed to be following it:

“It is the public policy of this state that meetings, records, votes, actions, and deliberations of public governmental bodies be open to the public unless otherwise provided by law.�

With so many private attorneys forced to go to court to get public officials to follow the law, Jacobson wonders whether the state needs a stand-alone office dedicated to enforcing the Sunshine Law.

It’s not a bad idea.

Tony Messenger • 314-340-8518 @tonymess on Twitter tmessenger@post-dispatch.com