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The Clayton attorney made the two-hour drive to the Cole County Courthouse, one he’s made multiple times in the past year. He hoped it would be the last one in a while. He represents four clients who were sued under the Missouri Incarceration Reimbursement Act, a law that allows the state’s attorney general to seize assets from prison inmates, ostensibly to help pay for their prison expenses.

Many of those inmates, like Daniel Wayne Wallace and Jessica Noel, received fairly small amounts of money when a parent died while they were in prison. Wallace got an insurance check for $12,000 when his mom died. Noel received $18,000 in the same circumstance. She’s out of prison now and could really use the money to help her take care of her three children and rebuild her life in Iron County.

Schock believes the law is a mean and unconstitutional money grab. In March, the Missouri Legislature agreed with him. It passed a bill that repealed the MIRA law, which had been in place since the late 1980s. Gov. Mike Kehoe signed the bill a couple of weeks after it passed. So Schock filed motions to dismiss all his cases.

With the state’s elected representatives deciding it was no longer good policy to take money out of the pockets of people confined in prisons, justice demanded that those outstanding cases be dropped, he argued.

Not so fast, said the office of Attorney General Andrew Bailey. The AG’s office filed motions saying the repeal of the law — which won’t be official until Aug. 28, when new laws take effect in Missouri — has no impact on the pending cases.

The state planned to go forward. That’s what the attorneys for the state told Schock and Judge Christopher Limbaugh on Tuesday.

“It is startling to me that the attorney general would take the position that even though this law has been repealed, these cases should go forward,� Schock said. “It’s a miscarriage of justice.�

Dismissing the cases would be much easier, he said.

In fact, the attorney general’s office offered an example of that on the same day. Before Schock’s cases came up in court, Limbaugh called the case of State vs. Lequwon Hill, a Kansas City man who had been in prison on a robbery charge. Hill was one of the last people sued under the MIRA law, allegedly because he had $70,000 in a bank account. But before the case made its way to Limbaugh, the bank responded to a subpoena and suggested that somebody should check their math. Hill, who was already out of prison after serving 120 days of shock time, had only $7 in his account.

The state dismissed the case. And just like that, it went away.

The state could do that on all pending MIRA cases, Schock argued. A couple of hours after the court hearing, the argument appears to have sunk in.

On Tuesday afternoon, Bailey’s deputy chief of staff, James Lawson, told me that all pending MIRA cases would be dismissed. He said the cases had been under review once the law got repealed and it took a while to get that communication to the assistant attorneys general working on the cases.

For Noel, who has been out of prison barely a month, the money will help with a job search and with taking care of her children as she continues to unravel her mom’s estate.

“I’ll be so happy to have this behind me and it’s no more than a memory of a lesson learned in life,� she told me.

The attorney general’s office, meanwhile, says it still plans to try to collect outstanding MIRA judgments that have already been issued.

That means the law’s repeal will be of little solace to some of its victims, including the three clients that attorney Irene Karns represents. Karns, a Columbia attorney who was in the courtroom Tuesday, has also been trying to get the MIRA law declared unconstitutional. She represents Kristen Milum, Ronnie Pope and Chris Brownfield, whose cases were already decided by Limbaugh. The judge used his discretion to let them keep about half the money Bailey was trying to seize from them.

But the rest, like the hundreds of thousands of dollars taken from inmates over the years, is gone. The discrepancy — some inmates forfeit all their money, Milum loses half, Noel gets to keep all of hers — highlights one of the problems with the law that both Schock and Karns raised in court documents. The law’s application has always been arbitrary, at best.

But its harms are real, with people who have few assets often losing them just as they prepare to re-enter the world outside a prison cell.

Noel was stressed all day Tuesday, after Schock told her what happened in court. She felt better when I told her the attorney general later decided to dismiss her case.

Now she waits, hoping the courts can work quickly to send her money back.