Garrabrant says he’s enjoyed his work here with high-quality judges and law enforcement

John Garrabrant, who has served as Ozark County Prosecutor for the last five years, has transitioned into a temporary role as an assistant prosecutor for the month of December, which will be followed by his retirement at the beginning of the year. 

Garrabrant and newly appointed Ozark County Prosecutor Matthew Weatherman were sworn in Dec. 1 by Ozark County Clerk Brian Wise at the Ozark County Courthouse. 

Garrabrant was appointed by then-Gov. Jay Nixon in 2016 to fill the vacancy of longtime Ozark County Prosecutor Tom Cline, who retired from the position after 22 years with about 19 months remaining in his term. Garrabrant served the remaining time in Cline’s term and was re-elected in the 2018 General Election, beating out Republican challenger John Russo in the Republican primary that year. 

Garrabrant says he’s not interested in practicing law after his retirement but does hope to fill his time with various volunteer work. 

“I don’t have children of my own, but I am appalled by crimes against children – physical and sexual abuse. And I’ve always had a soft spot for the young victims in many of the cases I’ve been involved in,” he said, referring to a stack of photographs on his desk of child victims whose cases he’s been involved with during his 30-plus-year career in the legal system. 

He says he plans to volunteer for organizations that are aimed at helping victims, maybe including Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) and the Batterers Intervention Program (BIP). He also said that, although he thinks he may be too old for the job, he’s always wanted to be a sheriff’s department dispatcher. 

“It’s kind of like they say about pilots… eight hours of boredom interspersed with four seconds of terror,” he said, describing the job. 

Hit the ground running

Garrabrant says he’s chosen to serve as an unpaid assistant prosecutor through the month of December as a way to help Weatherman have an easier transition into the role than he did after his appointment. 

When Cline retired in 2016, the governor was responsible for filling the vacancy. The process only allows the governor to accept applications for the appointment when the position is completely vacant, meaning Cline had to leave before the lengthy process began. So there were several weeks when there wasn’t a full-time prosecutor in the county.

“There were two and a half months that the position was vacant before my appointment,” Garrabrant said. “Tom [Cline] left in May, and I started July 16.”

In the interim, Douglas County Prosecutor Christopher Wade served temporarily as a special prosecutor in Ozark County on top of his full-time prosecutor duties in Douglas County.

“He had his own county, so it was a real hardship on him,” he said. 

Garrabrant said he was forced to hit the ground running as soon as he started. He recalled his first day with a laugh. 

“I hadn’t been down here in a long time, and I was coming down [Highway] 5 from Rolla. It took longer than I thought. I wanted to be down here on time, so I was bending a speed law,” he said. “Then I got stopped by a trooper just south of Ava.”

Garrabrant said the officer asked where he was going in such a hurry.

“I said, ‘I’m going to court,’” Garrabrant said. 

The officer asked Garrabrant if he was the new prosecutor, and Garrabrant confirmed that he was. The trooper let him go with a warning and a stern directive to slow down.

Garrabrant complied with the officer’s demand and drove under the speed limit the rest of the way to the Ozark County Courthouse in Gainesville.

“So I get here, and I was a couple minutes late. I walk in, and I thought it was going to be something like, ‘Hey, welcome to the circuit. This is so-and-so…’ But no. I walk in, and Judge Carter looks straight at me and says, “Oh, Mr. Garrabrant, what are the state’s thoughts on this case?’ I just looked at him and said, ‘I don’t know.’”

Garrabrant then approached the prosecution table, where fellow prosecutor Wade was awaiting. 

“I walked up to him. He shakes my hand then promptly walks out the door,” Garrabrant said. “It was like being thrown in the deep end.”

Working with sheriffs, deputies and Gay

Garrabrant said that once he got settled in after Law Day, he walked to his office, where he met Gay Strong, who has worked in the prosecutor’s office for nearly 30 years for three different prosecutors. 

Garrabrant said he wasn’t sure how to take Gay’s personality at first, but after about a week he told her, “I think we’re going to get along all right after all.”

It turns out, he was right. Now, leaving the office, Garrabrant says he’s especially thankful to have had Gay working alongside him during his tenure here. 

“She’s been an invaluable asset to me,” he said. “Gay is truly an Ozark County person and a very good judge of character. Sometimes I’ll be getting lied to, and she’ll come in and tell me.”

Garrabrant says that although Gay is not one to take the credit, she’s often responsible for keeping all the wheels of the office turning smoothly. 

“She’s been here so long, and many things work as well as they do because of her. I think the way rural prosecutors work… she exemplifies that process. She’s a very compassionate person and has a real feel for this county. She wasn’t sure she was going to get along with me in the beginning, but we worked very well together,” he said.

Garrabrant said he also feels honored to have worked with former Sheriff Darrin Reed and current Sheriff Cass Martin, as well as the deputies he’s encountered while he’s been here. 

“I really enjoyed working with Darrin Reed, who I thought was just a stand-up guy – a hardworking guy, and he really had his heart in the right place,” he said. “There were also a couple of his deputies, Curtis Dobbs, Winston Collins and Vesa Phelan… for as little as they got paid and the kind of stuff they went through, and the quality of work they produced, I think this county was really blessed to have them.”

Garrabrant said he hasn’t had as much interaction with Martin and several new deputies who joined the ranks of the Ozark County Sheriff’s Department when Martin was elected last year. 

Garrabrant also praised the judges he’s worked with here. 

“I can’t say enough good things about the quality of the judiciary in this county right now. I think Judge Carter is a hardworking, smart judge. I think Judge Gross has stepped into those shoes very ably. He’s a smart guy and doesn’t take himself real seriously but takes the job very seriously. You have great judges here,” Garrabrant said. 

A smoother transition

Earlier this year, as Garrabrant began to contemplate retiring mid-term, he remembered his own rough-and-tumble beginning and decided he wanted to find a way to make the transition smoother for his successor. Garrabrant found that instead of going through the lengthy process of having the governor appoint a new prosecutor, which would likely leave the prosecutor’s position vacant again for several months, an appointment can be made by the circuit judge under a Missouri Revised Statute that has been standing since the 1930s. 

Circuit Judge Craig Carter was on board with the idea of a smoother transition and announced in October that he’d be accepting applications for the appointment through Nov. 5. Weatherman applied for the appointment, as did Gainesville resident John Russo; however, Russo later withdrew his name from consideration, citing an issue with how the appointment would affect his current retirement benefits. 

On Nov. 12, Carter announced Weatherman would be the new Ozark County prosecutor, beginning his duties Dec. 1. 

Garrabrant offered to serve as assistant prosecutor through December to get Weatherman up to speed on some of the more notable cases in the county. 

Covid difficulty

Among the more challenging aspects of his work in Ozark County was figuring out the logistics of how the prosecutor and other court employees would keep the wheels of justice moving while keeping people safe during the covid-19 pandemic. 

“It became difficult on a lot of levels. Just going to court every week, just associate court was difficult,” Garrabrant said. “Judge Gross was limited to having 12 people in a courtroom at a time. They made everyone else wait somewhere else, and our courthouse has no assembly area. So people were just standing outside waiting their turn to go in.”

Garrabrant said that Circuit Clerk Becki Strong and her office was instrumental in helping the covid-regulated court sessions run as smoothly as they could, often  going up and down the staircase dozens of times during a court session to call names of the defendants the judge was ready to see. 

“And jury trials are horrible. Jury duty in itself is a hardship on a lot of folks, but when you’ve got to sit around waiting to get in…. The burden on Becki Strong’s office is horrible,” he said. “They have to find a place to have the trial, do jury selection, get it set up, ensure they can record the hearing and make a record – and all while keeping people safe. It’s just been very difficult.”

Garrabrant said the county hasn’t tried many cases during the pandemic.

Another difficulty has been the emphasis on and use of technology – which has been a great platform for allowing hearings to be held without people being in the same room, therefore reducing the spread of germs; but at the same time it has also been a struggle.

“Internet in Ozark County isn’t great. We had a problem just last week when Judge Bock was here. I was, until recently, appointed as a special prosecutor with John Tyrell on the Colby Rey case, and we had a hearing Monday. John Terrell tried to hook up on WebEx, and it wouldn’t work. So we had to just have him on speakerphone,” he said. 

“It’s been a real drain on the sheriff’s office as well because we don’t have a real good connection between the jail and courthouse,” Garrabrant said. “So we’re dragging prisoners back and forth for hearings [instead of doing virtual hearings], and they had a covid infection there for a few weeks in the female prisoners. So it’s been a burden on everybody.”

Maybe the most prominent difference between Garrabrant’s job pre-covid and post-covid is the lack of face-to-face discussions and interactions.

“It’s had a fundamental effect on the way we practice law… I come from a time when you’d walk into the prosecutor’s office with an armful of files, and you’d sit down with a cup of coffee and talk about the files… talk about cases face to face, which I always prefer,” Garrabrant said. “Well, they don’t even do it by telephone anymore. Everything is done by email and… it’s impersonal. I don’t care for that. It’s one of the reasons I’m retiring.”

Plea negotiation, a necessary tool

Garrabrant says if there’s anything he wished local residents understood better about the prosecutor’s duties it’s the heavy caseload and logistics of a single attorney prosecuting hundreds of cases a year. 

“Folks aren’t particularly concerned about what prosecutors do or what judges do until it affects them; either they’re a victim or they have someone in their family who’s accused of a crime,” he said. “There’s very little perception of the amount of cases that come through the office. Everything is funneled through the prosecutor,” Garrabrant said, explaining that his office is responsible for cases that come through the Ozark County Sheriff’s Department, Missouri State Highway Patrol, Missouri Department of Conservation and other law-enforcement agencies in the county. 

“Folks get a little upset because cases are moved through plea negotiation. With the way our legal system works right now, plea negotiations… if we didn’t do those, it would grind to a screeching halt,” he said. “I think we’re close to 400 numbered cases this year. Out of that, in the age of covid, realistically two or three will get tried,” he said.

He explained that most of the rest of the cases are processed by offering a plea negotiation deal in which the defendant pleads guilty to the charges in exchange for a moderate sentence.

“You have to take into consideration when you’re negotiating with defense counsel, ‘What drain is this going to have on the resources in my office and how many cases can I try?’ With a full-time prosecutor, a single prosecutor, working in an office, I think we would try between eight and 12 jury trials a year,” he said, adding that  some of the strain has to do with the rules of discovery becoming more laborious.

“It always seems disingenuous to me that the public defender will get up and argue to a jury that the state has these unlimited resources. In Ozark County, that isn’t the case. In fact, the public defender has better resources than we do – and they’re doing depositions on run-of-the-mill possession cases, where I’ll have to take a day out to have a criminal list and have an officer come in to have their depositions taken. I just don’t have time to do that,” he said.

A believer in treatment court

Garrabrant said he’s aware that some people are upset that drug offenders often get probation instead of a prison sentence. 

“We don’t have the resources, either in the prosecutor’s office or in the courts, to try all those cases. Nor do we have the resources in the Department of Corrections to lock these people up,” he said. “And anecdotally, after doing this for 30 years, I can say locking people up for those things doesn’t get what you want. You’re not going to lock them up forever. You’re going to want them to become productive at some point, be able to work and take care of their families. And how we do that is through treatment,” he said. 

Garrabrant is a big believer in drug court systems, like the one in Ozark County.

“We’ve had some failures, but we have more people graduate successfully who do not re-offend than those who do re-offend… If they make it through the program, they have a pretty good chance of staying clean,” he said.

Garrabrant says the drug court program is a five-phase program that lasts a minimum of one year, although he’s seen one defendant take two and a half years to complete it. 

“The people who are involved in the treatment court take it very seriously. Judge Carter is great. Judge Gross is great. The folks with [Probation and Parole] are involved. Counselors are involved. Private probation officers are involved. [Local attorney] Linda McKinney serves, and she really puts her heart and soul in it. She serves in all three counties,” Garrabrant said. “It is truly a treatment court.”

Garrabrant says that drug court participants begin in a “very restrictive” phase one.

“They are seeing a counselor a couple or three times a week. They’re limited in where they can go, what they can do. They have curfews,” he said. “They’re subject to [jail sentence] sanctions for violations… things like not being employed, not complying with the treatment program, including counseling, using [drugs] again.”

Violation punishment is a graduated sanction system with each violation causing harsher consequences. 

The court also uses a 120-day drug treatment program in the Missouri Department of Corrections for some cases. 

“It’s one of the things this circuit does better than other circuits I’ve been in, and again I think that’s because we have judges who work hard. If someone is on bond supervision [by Court Probationary Services] – I can’t say enough good about the officers we’ve had on CPS – they report to the judges. If we have a methamphetamine offender who is on supervised bond, they’re coming in twice a week for random drug tests. If they’re ‘hot,’ there will be a violation report that day, and Judge Carter or Judge Gross will usually issue a warrant that day. Those folks are going to spend seven to 10 days in jail for getting high,” he said. 

Garrabrant says in other circuits surety bonds are offered, which are usually obtained from a bondsman company.

“The bondspeople are not supervising those defendants like the supervision we’ve got here,” he said. 

Ozark County usually has 10 to 12 people enrolled in drug court, but Garrabrant says he thinks the programs are underfunded and underutilized. 

In addition to drug court, Garrabrant says he’s also seen great results from long-term, faith-based drug-treatment programs. 

“My opinion is that it’s the best bang we get for the buck. The one I’m most familiar with is Care Center [in Mountain Home, Arkansas],” he said. “I was involved with the Ozark County Substance Abuse Task Force, and a few of us went down and toured the facility in Mountain Home. They have a failure rate of around 50 percent, but their recidivist rate for those who complete the program is under 10 percent,” he said. “It’s a tough program. It’s at least a year long, and for the first nine months, [participants] are controlled. They live in a dormitory. They work every day, go to counseling. It’s very faith based, a program where people are educated that they need to surrender themselves to a higher power. And in my estimation, it’s very effective.”

Strong people

Being Ozark County’s Prosecuting Attorney “has been a very good experience for me. The folks in this county are different. They’re very independent minded. And they don’t just talk the talk. They walk the walk,” Garrabrant said. “The other day, I was coming to work and some guy had lost a 6-foot-by-6-foot trash dumpster off the back of his tailer in the middle of Highway 160. As soon as I saw it, I stopped and tried to give him a hand, but it was too heavy for the two of us to move. But the next car coming through, he just hops out and helps us move it from the road,” he said. 

Another instance when he saw Ozark County’s kindness occurred a few years ago.

“My car broke down, and I was sitting on the side of 160 waiting for AAA for about two hours, and there were at least half a dozen people who stopped and asked if they could lend a hand,” he said. 

But likely the biggest show of community support was during the aftermath of a historic flood in 2017.

“Boy, the people in this county came together to help one another. It was just amazing. And a lot of people, particularly my friend Dan Israel, and Winston Collins too, were named volunteers of the year with the state because they really went out of their way to help,” he said. 

“When they went out to deliver water to people, a lot of folks said, ‘No. Take it back. We can take care of ourselves. Someone else needs it more than I do.’ These folks down here take care of themselves,” he said. “And that’s not universal. It’s unique to Ozark County. These are strong people.”