No charges for judge blamed in accident

MARSHALL, Mo. -- A circuit court judge will not face charges for his involvement in a March accident in which a pedestrian was hit, the Missouri attorney general's office said.

The attorney general's office issued a statement Friday saying charges would not be filed against Dennis A. Rolf, the presiding judge of the 15th Judicial Circuit.

A police report released earlier by Sweet Springs police said Rolf, whose district includes Sweet Springs, struck a pedestrian with his car's mirror and then left the scene of the accident.

"The information and evidence provided to our office do not, in our view, warrant the filing of charges," the attorney general's office statement said.

The incident report shows that Rolf told officers he had a mixed drink with his dinner. A screening later showed Rolf had blood-alcohol level of .000. Saline County Sheriff Wally George said an on-duty Missouri State Highway Patrol trooper performed the breathalyzer test.

George said he had the trooper perform the test because the Sweet Springs officer on duty had never performed a breathalyzer test and he did not want to make a mistake in what he expected to be a high-profile, sensitive case.

George said the alcohol in a single drink would be hard for the machine to detect if it were consumed with a meal.

The two pages of the incident report containing the investigating officers' narrative had been withheld from the media until last week, when the attorney general's office released them. Kansas City television station KCTV filed an open records lawsuit late last month claiming the pages should be released to the media.