Updated 20.14 | Published 09.48
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full screenSandra Hemme is released after 43 years in captivity. Photo: AP
Sandra Hemme, 64, is free.
She was released from a Missouri prison after being wrongly convicted for over 40 years.
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Sandra Hemme was serving a life sentence for the stabbing death of library worker Patricia Jeschke in 1980. But on Friday she was released and was able to reunite in a park with her sister, daughter and granddaughter, writes CNN.
– You were just a baby when your mother sent me a picture of you. You looked just like your mother when you were little and you still look like her, she said.
– I hear it often, said the grandson and laughed.
After 43 years in prison, Henne is the longest serving woman in the United States who has been wrongly convicted, according to her team at the Innocence Project.
The reunion came just hours after her release, which in the past month has been marked by efforts by Missouri’s top attorney, Andrew Bailey, to stop it.
“Never seen it”
As early as June 14, there was “clear and convincing evidence” of “actual innocence”.
Three courts, including the Missouri Supreme Court, have all agreed since a month ago that Hemmes should be released. Yet she has not been released until now, puzzling her lawyers as well as experts.
– I have never seen it. Once the courts have spoken, the courts should be obeyed, said Michael Wolff, a former Missouri Supreme Court justice and professor and dean emeritus at Saint Louis University Law School.
Hemme’s lawyer Sean O’Brien thinks it was too easy to convict an innocent person and much harder than it should have been to get her out.
– Even to the point of ignoring court orders. It shouldn’t be that hard to free an innocent person.
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full screenSandra Hemme is reunited with her family after spending 43 years in prison as an innocent convicted of murder. Photo: Hg Biggs/AP
Asked wardens to ignore court orders
During Friday’s court hearing, the judge ordered that Hemmes be released within a couple of hours. Otherwise, Attorney General Bailey himself would have to appear in court on Tuesday morning for contempt of court.
The judge also scolded Bailey’s office for calling the warden and telling prison officials not to let Hemme out.
“Calling someone and telling them to ignore a court order is wrong,” he told CNN.
Peter Joy, a law professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, said the effort to keep Hemme in jail was “a shock to the conscience of any decent person” because evidence strongly suggests she committed no crime.
Other suspect
The judge in the case concluded in June that Hemme was heavily sedated and in a “malleable mental state” when investigators repeatedly questioned her at a psychiatric hospital after the murder.
Her lawyers described her final confession as “often monosyllabic responses to leading questions.”
Other than the confession, there was no evidence linking her to the crime, according to her prosecutors.
In the time since the murder of the library worker, police ignored evidence pointing to Michael Holman, who worked as a police officer at the station that investigated the murder and who died in 2015. Prosecutors were also not informed of findings from the FBI before the trials that had cleared Hemmes of the murder suspicions.
Evidence presented to the judge showed that Holman’s pickup truck was seen outside the library worker’s apartment, that he tried to use her credit card and that her earrings were found at his home.
In his report, the judge called Hemme “a victim of manifest injustice”.