Justice Backlog At Lake Of The Ozarks: Jails Are Crowded And Jury Trials Are Rare In Camden County

Justice moves slowly in Camden County.

Last year, the Camden County Prosecutor’s Office disposed of more than 2,000 cases. That's a big number. But meanwhile, new cases kept pouring in, as the court system struggled with a serious bottleneck.

“Disposing of” a case, Prosecutor Richelle Grosvenor explains, is when a case comes to an end. It can be resolved through a guilty plea, a trial, or charges being dismissed by a judge or dropped by the prosecution.

And while her team was busy disposing of those 2,000 cases, 2,300 new cases were added to the docket. As of February 16, 2026, there were 4,821 open criminal cases in Camden County, with 8,714 total charges (an average of 1.8 charges per case).

Grosvenor, who took office at the beginning of 2023, lauded her six assistant prosecutors: on average, each is responsible for 500-600 cases at any given time. Most of those cases will involve plea deals, but for the many that are headed towards trial, her team has to be ready to prosecute them… even though the defendant often bows-out with a guilty plea at the last moment.

“Prosecutors spend their time getting ready for trial, and repeatedly — this just happened last week — the case was set for trial, and the defense said they were going to plead,” she said.

Her prosecutors know that’s just part of the job, but she laments the way it devours her office’s already stretched team’s resources. “That is the thing that keeps me up at night. My team loses time with their family. They have to cancel doctor’s appointments because they’re busy… We simply don’t have enough people managing the caseload.”

In 2020 and 2021, the pipeline of cases hit a catastrophic logjam due to Covid disruptions and shutdowns; more cases kept coming in (people didn’t quit breaking the law, it turns out), but fewer cases were moving through the system.

As a result, it’s not uncommon in Camden County right now for a defendant to be facing charges that were filed four years ago. However, Grosvenor said, “We are making great strides compared to the Covid backlog.” Her optimism stands in spite of the fact that the county added more cases than it cleared in 2025. Still, she says, the caseload growth rate is slowing, and she's hopeful her office can reverse the years-long growth trend soon.

More Judges & Prosecutors

A larger team of prosecutors would help, Grosvenor says, but that would only expand one area of the justice pipeline; the real backlog comes in the courts.

Sometimes that’s due to the limited number of judges and courtrooms; other times, it’s because defendants (or their lawyers) know how to work the system. Grosvenor says she’d like to see reform in the treatment of bond hearings. There’s no limit to the number of bond hearings a defendant can request, she said. Grosvenor says that not only taxes her team but is also “very unfair to the victims,” who may have to come back and testify at hearings again and again.

“We have numerous court appearances every week to keep people in jail,” she said. “And the defendant, based on how our judges see it, gets unlimited bites at the apple. Their attorney can file a notice regarding bond and put it in front of any judge.”

A similar principle applies with continuances (requests for delays). Historically, prosecutors tend not to protest requests by the defense for a continuance; if the defendant wants to stay in jail longer while they get their defense together, the thinking goes, why stand in their way? But Grosvenor says in the interest of keeping the case pipeline moving, her team plans to hold the defense’s feet to the fire and push back against unnecessary delays.

She explained, “We decided that we were going to be way more intentional. Way more specific on how we were setting cases for trial, and that has worked really well in 2025 in terms of saying, ‘We're prepared, defense attorney,’ and holding that defendant's feet to the fire, so that that delay is not an option anymore.”

A designated drug court has been operating since 2017, dealing exclusively with low-level drug offenders. But Grosvenor had hopes for a bill passed by the Missouri legislature in 2025 that would have created a Treatment Court Commissioner, who would have operated as a judge specifically for drug cases in overburdened counties. Governor Kehoe vetoed that bill.

More Dismissals

Grosvenor caught heat during her first weeks in office, as word spread that her team was cutting cases. One of the highest-profile cases ever in Camden County — the case of real estate agent LeighAnn Bauman, who was charged with conspiracy to murder her mother-in-law, and whose case (and flamboyant style) caught the eye of People magazine — was dropped in the final days of 2022 — technically before Grosvenor took office. But it was a precursor to a series of dismissals.

The community was shocked. And when some accused Grosvenor of flippantly flushing serious cases, she responded that while the charges had indeed been serious, they would have been almost impossible to prosecute.

It was not about giving criminals a free pass, she says. Rather, it was about not wasting time on cases that had been investigated and handled so poorly that her office had almost no chance of a successful prosecution. In 2025, Grosvenor went public with her frustration over what she called poor investigations of past cases, particularly in the Camden County Sheriff’s Office. Those arrests had been made under a prior sheriff and prior prosecutor; Grosvenor says she’s been working with Sheriff Chris Edgar to improve the arrest-to-conviction pipeline, ensuring if the county is going to expend resources on arresting and jailing suspects, the prosecutor’s office has what it needs to get a guilty plea or conviction. And in a prior interview, Edgar told LakeExpo his office has made "tough decisions on personnel because of prior issues." He says his team has since "corrected every one of the actions that were issues."

More Trials?

With thousands of active criminal cases in Camden County, in all of 2025 the county courthouse only hosted three jury trials. So how about having more jury trials?

It sounds good, in theory: after all, most folks imagine a courtroom trial when they think of the justice system. But in practice, it’s almost impossible. “If every inmate demanded a jury trial and nobody else got arrested for five years, it would still take five years to catch up,” Grosvenor said, doing some rough case-math aloud.

Why not more trials?

This is where the justice bottleneck really shows up.

Missouri’s 26th Circuit consists of five counties:

• Camden

• Laclede

• Miller

• Morgan

• Moniteau

The circuit has three judges and seven associate judges. The former handle large cases and major felonies; the latter handle most misdemeanors and lower-level felonies, in addition to civil litigation. Those three circuit judges travel the district on a “circuit,” handling cases and presiding over trials. And each county is allotted a certain number of trial weeks per year. Last year, Camden County got 12.

It takes a week to prosecute just one major case, Grosvenor said; some weeks they can squeeze in two.

So going into a trial week, her team prioritizes a lengthy list of trial-ready cases, because the all bets are off when Monday comes: it’s a known phenomenon that when defendants see the jury pool and sense, “It’s really happening,” they’re often willing to switch their plea to guilty.

With that case disposed and the clock on trial week ticking, Grosvenor says, her team looks to the next case on the list, and the next, and the next. But lining up expert witnesses and getting people scheduled to show up at the trial is tough enough for one case; it’s extremely difficult to get expert witnesses on “standby,” just in case the trial where they’re needed happens to get priority that week.

Often, due to that swirling combination of factors, a trial week passes without a trial happening. So Grosvenor’s team uses the opportunity to run as many hearings and cases through that judge’s courtroom as they can.

More Jail Beds

Meanwhile, the county jail is nearly at-capacity… and that’s during the sluggish winter months. Sheriff Chris Edgar says in the summer, as millions visit the Lake area, the jail often has more inmates than beds.

But Grosvenor sees a full jail as a sign her team is doing its job.

“We want criminals in custody!” she said, pointing out her prosecutors spend enormous amounts of time arguing for tough bond terms to try and keep suspects in jail. “The amount of time we spend on bond-related issues, keeping people in custody, is a huge way we keep our community safe.”

But she adds she’s all for funding a larger jail, “Camden County built this jail in 2000… you think we don’t have more crime now?” she posed rhetorically. “We need more beds.”

What’s Changing

Grosvenor thinks a successful prosecutor isn’t just good at arguing cases; they must also be good at managing cases across a whole team of prosecutors. And she says when she took office in 2023, she found a poorly-managed prosecutor’s office. That’s at least in part due to the fact that the county had not had a prosecutor serve a full four-year term for nearly a decade. Over the last 10 years, two prosecutors have been appointed to judicial posts mid-term, and another — Caleb Cunningham — was appointed to the prosecutor’s seat after it was vacated by Heather Miller (now a judge). Grosvenor defeated Cunningham in the 2022 election, and now she wants to clean house.

So between changes she’s implementing and improvements in the justice system more broadly, Grosvenor says she’s optimistic the county can get justice moving and get defendants to a speedy conclusion of their charges.

Critically in her office, Grosvenor says she has completely overhauled the case management system.

“So, when we started, one of the first things I did was, before me, they divvied cases up by alphabet, which is crazy to me. So if a murder comes in and it's your [turn, alphabetically], you're doing a murder. You're doing a kid case… And I'm like, what the heck?”

Now, cases are being assigned to prosecutors based on their strengths and preferences. She’s confident that will produce better — and more expedient — case outcomes. “We prioritize the right outcome. And that is what prosecutors end up doing when they are under-staffed,” she said, acknowledging the reality that a glut of criminal cases means pressure on the prosecutor’s office to press the defendant for a plea deal. “Taking a case to trial takes tremendous resources,” she added.

Beyond the prosecutor’s office, the county has been allotted more trials weeks beginning in 2026: this year, Camden County will receive 18 trial weeks, with the opportunity to have a “senior judge” (one who has retired but is still eligible to handle case overflow), who will come into help process the massive number of cases.

While Grosvenor knows she hasn’t made everyone happy, she says she’s committed to the job and thinks county citizens will like the results of a prosecutor who is able to serve an entire term… or — she hopes — more than one.