Teresa Hensley, Democratic candidate for Missouri attorney general, spoke Monday night to the Callaway Democratic Club at the Callaway Electric Cooperative.
Hensley, who has spent the last 10 years as the Cass County prosecutor in northwest Missouri, also spent time during her early career traveling to smaller counties working with the people who resided there.
"I've worked in smaller counties, and I've represented real people. I know their problems," said Hensley speaking to the breadth of her experience in her 24 years of practicing law.
It is this experience that Hensley believes sets her apart from her challengers.
"The Missouri attorney general's office should be a law office first," she said. "Politics should be secondary."
During her time as the Cass County prosecutor, she oversaw 21 murder convictions and 10 manslaughter convictions. She is dedicated to getting the bad guys off the street. She said she held a hard line against violent crime during her tenure. She said she is dedicated to justice.
But in that light, she also knows that some crimes are not committed by hardened criminals, but by people who have made bad decisions. For those individuals, she believes in specialty courts like DUI courts, drug courts, mental health courts and veterans courts. These specialized legal environments lean heavily on rehabilitation and education to help people improve their lives and hopefully prevent them from committing further wrongs.
But she knows funding is often a roadblock when it comes to alternative courts. When asked if she had a plan to gain funding for the programs, she said she did not.
"But I am a firm believer in bringing people to the table," Hensley said. "The attorney general has the ability and the responsibility to form task forces who meet consistently to find the answers."
Hensley went on to tell how she was in a store one day, and a man approached her saying that she had prosecuted his daughter. The young woman had been in one of the alternative courts. Hensley said she was a bit apprehensive until the man went on to say that he wanted to thank her for making his daughter go through the program. It had changed the girl's life.
"It matters that we have these alternative courts," said Hensley. "It made a difference in Cass County. I want to do that statewide."
Another one of the top priorities for the candidate is the landfill fire at Bridgeton outside of St. Louis. She said current Attorney General Chris Koster had stayed on top of the issue, and she would do the same.
According to her biographical statement, Hensley was appointed to the position of Cass County prosecutor in January 2005, then was elected to the position in November 2006 and again in 2010 for a four-year term that began January 2011.
Hensley received the 2010 Missouri Attorney General's Justice Award for Domestic Violence Prevention and the Missouri Lawyer's Media Women's Justice Practitioner Service Award in 2015. She participated as prosecutor in the Child Abuse Response Team, the Fire Investigation Team, and the DWI Task Force.
In 2014, she was selected by the Missouri Association of Prosecuting Attorneys (MAPA) to serve as chair of the Missouri DWI and Traffic Safety Best Practices Committee.
She grew up in Raymore, where her parents and family still reside. She opened a law office with her husband, Kenny Hensley, in 1991 in Raymore and was there until she became prosecutor in 2005. Kenny and Teresa were married in 1979 and have one son, Frank, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Heather.