James Scott, who has spent 33 years in prison for causing the Great Flood of 1993, faces a parole hearing next week — his first since he was sentenced at age 24.
Now 56, Scott has spent the past three decades in the Jefferson City Correctional Center. During those years, his conviction has been overturned, he has been retried for his crime and he has been reconvicted.
Throughout, he has maintained his innocence. Since he became eligible for parole in 2011, he has waited for a hearing without success.
After being rescheduled multiple times, the hearing is now set to take place at 8 a.m. Wednesday in Cole County Circuit Court.
Scott was 24 in 1993 when he joined a sandbag crew near Hannibal to help control the rising floodwaters.
On July 16, as he was loading bags onto a massive levee, he discovered a breach. He threw a few more bags around the trouble spot and tried to summon help from a National Guardsman. Finally, he decided there was nothing he could do and walked away.
At 8 p.m. that day, the levee failed and the Mississippi River burst through its main stem. A barge crashed into a gas station and set off an explosion. Smoke could be seen for miles.
People were stranded on both sides of the river, and the town was submerged in water. Days later when everything was tallied, at least 14,000 acres of farmland had been swamped and every bridge in the area was gone.
No one lost their life in this levee breach near West Quincy, Missouri, but it ultimately cost Scott his freedom.
He was accused of tampering with the levee infrastructure and prosecuted under a 1979 Missouri law that makes it a crime to purposefully cause a catastrophe.
Whether Scott is guilty remains a polarized issue.
During his trial, prosecutors argued that he had removed or cut the plastic sheets protecting the levee and dug through the sand to make a channel for the floodwaters.
A 1993 federal investigation concluded that the levee failed at one of its strongest points after an inspection just two hours earlier. Witnesses also testified that Scott had even boasted about breaking the levee, and a criminal record of arson and burglary arrests did not help him.
Among the skeptical is Adam Pitluk, an MU journalism graduate and professor in South Carolina who wrote “Damned to Eternity: The Story of the Man They Say Caused the Flood” in 2007 to examine Scott’s case and dispute his conviction.
In 2022, I narrated a VICE News documentary called “Overlooked” that told Jimmy’s story to more than 5 million viewers. In a commentary that ran in the Missourian on June 3, Pitluk wrote:
"I coined a term for what happened to him: Midwest river justice. It describes what happens when a community devastated by catastrophe needs someone to blame, and the criminal justice system obliges."
Pitluk has argued that there was no physical evidence leading to Scott's conviction and testimony by soil scientists pointed to unrelenting water pressure on an already weakened levee as the cause.
Pitluk is representing Scott's family at the Wednesday hearing since his own parents and brother have died.
According to Pitluk's in his commentary, the parole board is not being asked to exonerate Scott or to relitigate the case.
"They are being asked whether a 56-year-old man convicted on circumstantial evidence under a law used only once in Missouri history by a jury in a flood-damaged town after prosecutors broke the rules the first time around — whether that man should be allowed to go home."