The St. Louis jail has found yet another way to interfere with the work of attorneys who have clients locked up inside.
The latest policy implemented by administrators at the City Justice Center is one that lawyers say unnecessarily complicates their efforts to deliver legal documents to clients inside the troubled facility. It concerns the “paper pass,” a narrow opening in the booths where attorneys speak to clients through glass.
The pass allows a few sheets of paper to be transferred back and forth. Or at least it does if it can be opened. For the past few weeks, it’s been locked.
“If you need someone to sign a document, how do you do that?” says defense attorney Terry Niehoff.
The paper pass policy, which appears to have taken effect April 1, comes on the heels of the jail putting new prohibitions on lawyers bringing phones into the facility, a move that some lawyers believe was retaliation for them going public with concerns.
Attorney Susan McGraugh says she first noticed a sign announcing the paper pass policy on Monday. Because she wasn’t able to bring her phone in to snap a photo of it, she jotted it down verbatim.
"Any documentation for detainees must be left at the reception desk to provide to the detainee,” it reads. “The paper pass will not be opened for any reason.”
The notice, signed by St. Louis Corrections Commissioner Jennifer Clemons-Abdullah, went on to say that if the reception desk wasn’t staffed, paperwork for detainees could be left in a dropbox.
McGraugh says she has real concerns about such an indirect method of getting legal documents to her clients in the jail.
Among them is the fact that a lot of times multiple people charged in connection to the same case are in jail together. One detainee may be testifying against another, and the wrong eyes seeing paperwork outing a person turning state's witness could put their safety in jeopardy.
"I have concerns about the confidentiality of just leaving documents and trusting that my clients are going to get them and no one else is going to open it," she says.
McGraugh adds there are more fundamental issues as well. "I have clients who are illiterate," she says. "And if I just hand them something, they're not going to be able to decipher it."
A statement by Department of Public Safety Monte Chambers explains the administration’s thinking: “Cell phones were prohibited by anyone, including attorneys, inside secured areas inside of the City Justice Center in January 2024. However, after a petition was presented to the Board of Alderman Public Safety Committee, a compromise was reached that allowed attorneys to have cell phones while meeting with clients beginning April 1, 2024.
“However, to maintain stringent security measures against contraband, which can include items as varied as unauthorized electronic devices and substances such as K2, the passing of physical papers between attorneys and their clients during visits remains prohibited. The Division of Corrections remains committed to the safety and security of all detainees inside of CJC.”
McGraugh balks at that explanation. She says the "paper pass" is the width of about five sheets of paper.
"You cannot fit a telephone or electronics through that slot. It's very, very thin," she says.
Attorney Nick Zotos says that under this new rule, he can’t even pass a client his business card to give them his phone number.
“Someone had the idea this would solve a problem rather than create a problem,” he says.
Zotos says that paper can be handed back and forth at what are called full contact visits, when detainees and their attorneys are able to meet in a room together. But these types of visits take longer to arrange. They’re also more subject to jail staffing, long an issue at the facility and likely only to get worse with budget cuts headed the jail’s way.
“They can’t do the job they’re supposed to do,” Zotos says of jail operations writ large.
His comment is reflective of the increasingly heated relationship between the jail administration and the attorneys who need access to the facility to do their jobs. In the past several months, attorneys have been so alarmed by what’s going on in the jail they’ve skirted policy to go public with evidence of detainee neglect. In response, the jail has doubled down on its prohibitions and censoriousness.
In January, after an attorney shared a photo of a detainee with an untreated hernia that had swelled to the size of a cantaloupe, the jail banned lawyers from bringing in phones. (Those restrictions have since been eased, to an extent.) Earlier this month, attorney phones were banned in a separate area of the jail directly connected to the courts after McGraugh shared with the media a photo of a detainee lying in his own excrement there.
Zotos blasts the jail administrators’ reaction. Rather than own up to the fact they aren’t taking good care of detainees, Zotos says they just “blame Susan for taking the photo.”
As for the paper policy, all three attorneys whom the RFT spoke to for this story were adamant that the work around suggested by the jail — leaving court documents with the reception desk — was no workaround at all.
“You can leave paperwork at the front desk,” Niehoff says. “But the Justice Center is run by the expletive-deleted, expletive-deleted laziest asses you’ve ever met. So who knows when it’s getting in.”
We reminded Niehoff this is an alt-weekly and we could print the profanity.
He said to leave it as is.
“I want people to pick their own expletives," he says. "Any one they choose will be right.”
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