Missouri has a new law that allows some people convicted of some crimes to regain voting rights by having their criminal record expunged. A bill passed by the legislature in 2016 went into effect January 1 allowing people convicted of non-Class A felonies to go to court and ask that their slates be wiped clean. There are limits. Only one felony and two misdemeanor criminal records can be expunged. A person cannot file for expungement for three years after completion of a misdemeanor sentence. A convicted felon has to wait seven years. The law is more complicated than this explanation but that’s the general idea. It applies only to state crimes.
At the heart of this new law is an important question: How long must a person face punishment AFTER that person has “paid his/her debt to society?” The new law does not grant this mercy to people involved in violent offenses, sex crimes, and other more serious crimes. They cannot regain their civil rights, ever. But the new law offers new opportunities for many.
We want to focus on one person today, a circumstance brought about by a recent podcast we did for the Missouri Bar about this new law and a conversation we recently had with a fellow lobbyist about a former major political figure who was convicted in federal, not state, court.
Many folks can forgive others for some crimes eventually. But when a public official violates the public trust, there often is no sympathy shown long after they have completed their prison term. Their crime probably did not result in physical harm to anyone. No blood was spilled. No violence occurred except the breaching of public trust. But the breaching of public trust is so abhorrent in our society that it seems to be unforgivable, a violation that wipes out memory or acknowledgement of long years of accomplishments.
Case in point: Bob F. Griffin, the man who was Speaker of the House for fifteen years, far longer than anyone else before and far longer than we will ever see as long as term limits exist.
We bring this up because we’re nearing the end of writing the next book about the history of our Capitol, and we are struggling with how to describe one of the most historical figures in the history of the Missouri legislature. He resigned before his final term as Speaker expired and three years later was sent to federal prison for mail fraud and bribery, offenses connected to his role as Speaker of the House. President Clinton commuted his sentence in 2001. Griffin is 83 now. It soon will be twenty years after his release from prison. We have not spoken directly to him for a long time but friends say he maintains he pleaded guilty only to keep other friends from being punished as harshly as he was.
At the State Historical Society in Columbia we have dozens, hundreds, or oral history interviews, many of them with former legislators.
One of them, a Democrat as was Griffin, recalled: “Bob Griffin did a lot for the State of Missouri and I always thought he was fair. Now I’m sure there are others who will tell you that — but that kind of works both ways. I thought he did a good job. Good political person. He had a way about himself of communicating with you. He was never intimidating or belligerent…He never once asked me to pass a bill out of committee.”
Another, also a Democrat, said, “I think that he brought progress to the Missouri House. I think that he is a responsible, through his leadership, for the passage — through his chairman or through other legislators — for very progressive legislation and laws.”
A former Republican floor leader remembered, “I became good friends with Bob Griffin after that, because of working together with him…I think that Bob did a very good job. Bob was fair. He was fair to all concerned, and he was not “blind in the right eye” where he would [not] recognize Republicans.” Republicans, in the minority then, occupied only a few rows of the House to the right of the Speaker’s dais.
But Griffin did have his contemporary critics. One Republican commented, “Bob was as big a crook as there was in the country. He got caught and he got by with this for a long, long time, but that was the way we—that philosophy is why the Republicans got control.”
And a fellow Democrat: “I had trouble with Bob Griffin. I was too independent for him. Bob was a very strong leader. An effective leader. I remember him calling me into his office when I was a freshman to vote for something. And I told him I wouldn’t do it. You know, there was a price I paid for that. I didn’t get a chairmanship as early as other people in my class.”
It was Griffin who broke up a large appropriations committee into five smaller appropriations committees focusing on specific issues that forwarded their recommendations to the House Budget Committee that drafted the final House version of the budget—a system that remained in one form or another until 2017 when a single 35-member appropriations committee was created with members serving on smaller subcommittees. Some women representatives interviewed recalled Griffin elevated women’s role in the house leadership. Certainly, his home town of Cameron profited from his term in the speakership. It got two new state prisons.
Griffin’s lasting legacy in the capitol—other than the House Budget Committees—is the Hall of Famous Missourians. After a group of legislative wives raised money to install the first four busts, the project languished until Griffin began holding fund-raising golf tournaments to place more busts there. Speakers since have honored other Missourians but no speaker has honored more than Bob Griffin.
And that brings us to this: While Griffin was speaker, some of his friends—we are told—raised money to have a bust made of Griffin. But that bust has never been placed in the Hall of Famous Missourians. There are some people enshrined there who are not 100% pure and at least one who is hardly a Missourian. But it’s unlikely we will see the bust of Missouri’s longest-serving Speaker of the House in the Hall of Famous Missourians. A suggestion has been made that it be installed in a corner of a side gallery in the House, near the photographs of previous speakers (Griffin’s picture is on the wall with the others), or perhaps put in the Speaker’s office. But Griffin was a Democrat who, in the end, brought disgrace to the office of Speaker, and it is the end rather than the years preceding it that make the bust such a problem. Republicans are firmly in control of the legislature now, making public honoring of a Democratic politician a stretch. And a Republican Speaker surely would face severe questions from his caucus about honoring a Democrat, particularly one who, in the end, cast a lingering shadow on the office.
Expunging the record is far easier than expunging political memory. Maybe someday the bust will find a home—maybe in the Cameron City Library, a city where Bob Griffin Road runs under Highway 36.
Bob Griffin was no saint. But, on balance, was he such a sinner that nothing else matters? Or is breaking the public trust one of the ultimate crimes for which there can be no expungement, no forgiveness? Ever.
Perhaps he is proof of the truth of Shakespeare: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”
Or should the words of American writer and historian James Truslow Adams prevail:
“There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.”
?