Missouri high court clears the way for a woman’s release after 43 years in prison
CHILLICOTHE, Missouri — The Missouri Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the release of a Missouri woman whose murder conviction was overturned after serving 43 years in prison.
A district court judge ruled last month that Sandra Hemme’s lawyers had provided evidence of her “actual innocence,” and an appeals court ruled that she should be released while her case was reviewed.
But Hemme’s immediate release was complicated by the lengthy sentences she received for the crimes she committed while incarcerated: a total of 12 years, on top of the life sentence she received for her murder conviction.
Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey took his fight to keep her locked up at the state’s highest court, but her lawyers argued that keeping her locked up any longer would be a “draconian outcome.”
However, her release appears imminent as the Missouri Supreme Court refuses to overturn the lower court’s rulings, which allowed her to be released on her own recognizance and placed in the care of her sister and brother-in-law in the Missouri town of Higginsville.
No details have been released about when Hemme will be released.
Hemme, now 64, was serving a life sentence in a prison northeast of Kansas City after being convicted twice of murdering library worker Patricia Jeschke.
According to her legal team at the Innocence Project, she is the longest-serving woman wrongfully imprisoned in the US.
“This Court finds that the totality of the evidence supports a finding of actual innocence,” Circuit Court Judge Ryan Horsman concluded after an extensive assessment.
Horsman noted that Hemme was heavily sedated and in a “malleable mental state” when detectives repeatedly questioned her at a psychiatric hospital. Her attorneys described her eventual confession as “often monosyllabic answers to leading questions.” Other than the confession, there was no evidence linking her to the crime, her prosecutor said.
Meanwhile, St. Joseph police ignored evidence that pointed to Michael Holman, a colleague who died in 2015. Moreover, the prosecution was not told of FBI findings that could have exonerated her, and therefore were never released before her trial, the judge ruled.
“This court finds that the evidence demonstrates that Ms. Hemme’s statements to police are so unreliable and the evidence implicating Michael Holman as the perpetrator of the crime is so objective and probative that no reasonable juror would find Ms. Hemme guilty,” Horsman concluded in his 118-page ruling. “She is the victim of a clear injustice.”