Cornealious Michael Anderson III

Cornealious Michael "Mike" Anderson III (born 1977) is an American who was convicted of armed robbery in 2000 and sentenced to thirteen years in the Missouri state prison system. Due to a clerical error, his bond was not revoked when a warrant was issued for his arrest, and Anderson was not arrested because the Missouri Department of Corrections thought he was already in prison. The error was only discovered when he was scheduled to be released from prison in 2013 and he was arrested and required to serve his sentence. His arrest stirred national controversy, especially since he was a changed man by that time, and on appeal Anderson was set free in 2014. On August 15, 1999 in St. Charles, Missouri, Anderson and a companion robbed a Burger King manager at gunpoint of approximately $2,000 while he was attempting to deposit the money in a night deposit box at a bank. A witness observed Anderson and his companion leaving in a car and reported the license plate number to the police. When the police ran the number, they found that it was registered to 22-year-old Cornealious Michael Anderson. The next day, St. Charles police found Anderson's car in a parking lot about a mile from the bank, but they did not catch him until two months later, when he was found hiding in his girlfriend's apartment. In March 2000, Anderson's jury trial for armed robbery began. Although police never recovered a weapon, they searched Anderson's apartment and found an advertisement brochure for Beretta semiautomatic pistols. The St. Charles prosecutor in the case used the brochure to argue that although no weapon was found, Anderson owned a gun. The jury returned a verdict of guilty and Anderson was sentenced to a total of 13 years in prison. Ten months after the robbery, Anderson left Fulton Diagnostic Center on a$25,000 bond. His attorney appealed the conviction based on the inclusion of the Beretta brochure as evidence in the trial because it introduced unfair prejudice. The appeals judge, however, reaffirmed his conviction.