St. Louis County Prosecutor Melissa Price Smith has dropped an attempt to throw a member of the county council out of office.
“The St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office has over 10,000 pending criminal cases, including 250 pending homicides. This is a civil matter,” Price Smith said Friday in announcing her settlement with Third Ward Councilman Dennis Hancock, R-Fenton. “My top priority is public safety, fighting violent crime, and advocating for victims. I will not allow my office to be used to settle political scores.”
In exchange, Hancock will pay his own legal bills incurred fighting the effort to remove him known as a quo warranto petition and has promised to never hire another relative. The county council had previously agreed to cover those costs.
Just a week before he resigned to be sworn into Congress, Price Smith’s predecessor, Wesley Bell, restarted the quo warranto against Hancock for hiring his stepdaughter as a legislative assistant, in violation of the state ban on nepotism. Bell had dropped a previous petition to do more investigating.
Price Smith said that investigation likely violated the rules of evidence the prosecutor’s office must follow and that there were “significant legal questions created by the St. Louis County counselor that could delay or even allow Mr. Hancock to win at trial.”
