St. Louis County prosecuting attorney Melissa Price Smith says her office is optimistic that in 2026 the county circuit court will move significantly more cases than last year—a feat that she says would be a boon to prosecutors, defense attorneys, and even people charged with crimes.
Price Smith’s plan is a logistical one: This year, the St. Louis County Circuit Court will have two grand juries a week, rather than one. Prosecutors winning an indictment from a grand jury, which is composed of regular citizens just like a normal jury, is one way to begin a case at the circuit court level. Better access to grand juries means that criminal cases can move through the system faster.
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Cosigning her efforts is the presiding judge of St. Louis County Circuit Court, Bruce Hilton. The two sat down together with SLM yesterday, which was something of a rare move for a judge and prosecutor to so avidly cosigning an initiative.
“If a positive change makes a difference to the justice system, then, yeah, let’s collaborate all day long,” Hilton says.
The dual grand juries actually got under way last September, and in just one quarter allowed the courts system to move 1,856 cases that year, as opposed to 1,426 the year prior—a 30 percent increase. Price Smith predicts that, in 2026, with dual grand juries running all year long, the courts system can adjudicate roughly 1,600 more cases than they would have otherwise.
Both Price-Smith and Hilton say that cases getting into the circuit level system quicker will prevent backlogs, which create more work for prosecutors as well as the public defender’s office and private defense attorneys. Discussions can occur sooner between the prosecutors and defense counsel about discovery, depositions, and trial preparation.
The goal, Hilton says, is not to have people languishing in legal limbo, but instead “have those cases either set for trial or disposed of. It’s a win-win for everyone.”
Says Price Smith: “This is going to benefit all across the board, including people sitting just waiting in the county jail. There is overpopulation, and it’s all of our jobs to help that overpopulation problem, but it’s also our responsibility to make sure violent offenders are off the streets.” Indeed, the county’s daily jail population has spiked since 2021, and according to the jail dashboard, now sits a little below 1300, which is not that far from its daily capacity of 1,400 people.
That number has, however, leveled off from its September 2 high-water mark of 1,334, and Price Smith suggests that is not a coincidence. She says he first petitioned Judge Hilton for a second grand jury last February. A few months later, he ordered the new process to get underway, though it took a few months after that to get it up and running.
The double grand juries will, alas, not speed up the process of civil litigation making its way through St. Louis County, which is currently chock full of lawsuits filed against Bayer by people claiming they were made sick by exposure to its subsidiary Monsanto’s weed killer RoundUp. “In all candor, we have, I’m gonna get this number wrong, over 2,200 Monsanto cases that take five weeks [each] to try.” says Hilton. “We wouldn’t be able to try those in our lifetime. Those create a bigger hurdle for my colleagues than anything else.”
Price Smith says that the change to the grand jury process was just one of several initiated by her office in the past year. Her Special Victims Unit has been newly focused on elder abuse, and her staff has also made a point of engaging with communities where there is currently a low level of trust with law enforcement.
