The Missouri Supreme Court’s reversal of a circuit court’s judgment that denied an elected circuit court clerk’s request for injunctive relief paves the way for the court clerk to resume her duties at the Lincoln County courthouse.
Republican Kyla Allsberry was elected circuit court clerk in 2018 and sought injunctive relief that would have declared that Judge Patrick Flynn, a Democrat, overstepped his authority when he placed her on indefinite administrative leave and banned her from performing circuit clerk duties, which included stepping foot into the Lincoln County courthouse.
“The presiding judge is not authorized to take any action that has the practical effect of removing an elected circuit clerk from office,” wrote Judge Richard G. Callahan in the Sept. 14 high court opinion. “This court need not actually decide whether or under what other circumstances a suspension might be a permissible exercise of a presiding judge’s general administrative authority. Here, the suspension was a de facto removal and therefore was not authorized.”
Eisenberg
Allsberry has been removed from her elected duties since May 2019 and suspended for more than half of her four-year term in office.
“What’s surprising about the case is that something resembling open warfare had broken out between the circuit clerk and the presiding judge in that judicial district,” said attorney David Eisenberg of Baker Sterchi Cowden & Rice and editor of the firm's Missouri Law Blog. “We live in an era where people of opposite political persuasions can get crosswise with each other.”
Flynn removed Allsberry because she allegedly committed a misdemeanor in office, however, Allsberry has, to date, never been charged by any prosecutor or the attorney general.
Allsberry’s husband, Gregory Allsberry, a Republican, defeated Flynn in the 2014 general elections in which both were gunning for associate judgeship.
“Judges are really expected to stay above the political fray and court personnel as well but it may be that somehow what happened in the political process colored the feelings of the two protagonists here,” Eisenberg told the St. Louis Record.
Callahan’s per curiam decision stated that intense conflict between the two public servants escalated over the weeks and months and that there was evidence the parties’ acrimonious professional relationship and power struggle caused discord among the staff at the Lincoln County courthouse.
“This was obviously a heck of a mess and certainly you can see this gumming up the works in terms of cases being handled smoothly, seamlessly, and in a normal way for judges and litigants,” Eisenberg said. “You shouldn't have situations like this. People should behave better.”
Although court professionals view themselves as parties who should be above the political fray, Eisenberg said quite the opposite was happening at the Lincoln County Courthouse.
"The judge was extremely unhappy with the clerk and vice versa and somehow the two of them were not able to sublimate their personal feelings but you would like to believe that the judge would still decide cases on their merits," he said. "I would find it hard to envision what circumstances in terms of friction with the clerk would lead a judge to do something incorrectly prejudicially toward a litigant."