A woman was finally released from a US prison 43 years after she was wrongfully convicted of murdering a librarian worker.
Sandra Hemme, 64, walked out of Chillicothe Correctional Center in Missouri yesterday to be reunited with her sister, daughter and granddaughter in a local park.
Her murder conviction was overturned on June 14 this year, after a court ruled there was ‘clear and convincing evidence’ of ‘actual innocence’.
However, Missouri’s Republican attorney general Andrew Bailey fought against her release on the basis of two decades old prison assault offences.
However, hours before Ms Hemme was freed, judge Ryan Horsman threatened to hold the attorney general’s office in contempt if they continued to fight against her release.
Ms Hemme had been the longest-held wrongly incarcerated woman known in the US, according to her legal team at the Innocence Project.
She was serving a life sentence for the brutal 1980 stabbing death of library worker Patricia Jeschke in St. Joseph, Missouri.
In June, after an extensive review, Judge Horsman concluded that Ms Hemme was heavily sedated and in a ‘malleable mental state’ when investigators repeatedly questioned her in a psychiatric hospital after the killing.
Her attorneys described her ultimate confession as ‘often monosyllabic responses to leading questions’.
Other than the confession, no evidence linked her to the crime, her trial prosecutor said.
The St. Joseph Police Department, meanwhile, ignored evidence pointing to Michael Holmamm, a police officer, who died in 2015.
The court heard Holman’s pickup truck was seen outside Ms Jeschke’s apartment, that he tried to use her credit card, and that her earrings were found in his home.
Judge Horsman called Ms Hemme ‘the victim of a manifest injustice’.
Ms Jeschke’s mother found her daughter’s naked body in a pool of blood in her apartment.
Her limbs had been bound with a telephone cord, a knife was placed under her head and a pair of pantyhose was wrapped around her throat.
A day before her body was found Ms Hemme was discharged from a psychiatric hospital, where she spent a large proportion of her life from the age of 12.
Police found the timing suspicious and brought her in for questioning, noting that she seemed ‘mentally confused’.
At one point she accused a man of being the killer, but it turned out he was in an alcohol treatment centre at the time of the murder.
She eventually pleaded guilty in exchange for removing the possibility of the death penalty and was jailed for life.
In 1984 Ms Hemme received a further two-year sentence for ‘offering to commit violence’ in prison and in 1996 was handed a 10-year sentence for attacking a prison worker .
Mr Bailey had argued that Ms Hemme represents a safety risk to herself and others and that she should start serving those sentences now.
But during a court hearing on Friday, Judge Horsman said that if Ms Hemme wasn’t released within hours, Mr Bailey himself would have to appear in court Tuesday morning on contempt charges.
He also scolded Mr Bailey’s office for calling the warden and telling prison officials not to release Ms Hemme after he ordered her to be freed.
‘I would suggest you never do that,’ Judge Horsman said, adding: ‘To call someone and tell them to disregard a court order is wrong.’
Ms Hemme’s lawyer Sean O’Brien said ‘it shouldn’t be this hard to free an innocent person’.
‘It was too easy to convict an innocent person and way harder than it should have been to get her out, even to the point of court orders being ignored.’
Several legal experts criticised the attorney office’s attempts to keep Ms Hemme in jail.
Peter Joy, a law professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, described it as ‘a shock to the conscience of any decent human being’, while Michael Wolff, a former Missouri Supreme Court judge, said, ‘I’ve never seen it. Once the courts have spoken, the courts should be obeyed.’
Mr O’Brien has previously that delays had caused their family ‘irreparable harm and emotional distress’.
And there are still struggles ahead.
‘She’s going to need help,’ he said, noting she won’t be eligible for social security because she has been incarcerated for so long.
Ms Hemme didn’t address the media after her release but during the park reunion, where she hugged her family, the grandmother told her granddaughter:
‘You were just a baby when your mom sent me a picture of you,’ she said. ‘You looked just like your mamma when you were little and you still look like her.’
Her granddaughter laughed and replied: ‘I get that a lot’.
Mr O’Brien said she would then be going straight to the side of her father, who was hospitalised with kidney failure and recently moved to palliative care.
Speaking of his client’s freedom, he added: ‘This has been a long time coming.’
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