The Missouri Supreme Court cleared the way Thursday for a Missouri woman whose murder conviction was overturned to be freed after 43 years in prison.
A circuit court judge ruled last month that Sandra Hemme’s attorneys presented evidence of her “actual innocence,” and an appeals court determined she should be freed while her case is reviewed.
However, Hemme’s immediate release has been complicated by the lengthy sentences she received for crimes committed while incarcerated — totaling 12 years, added to the life sentence for her murder conviction.
Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey took his fight to keep her imprisoned to the state’s highest court. Her attorneys argued that keeping her incarcerated any longer would be a “draconian outcome.”
Her release now appears imminent as the Missouri Supreme Court has refused to overturn the lower court rulings, allowing her to be released on her own recognizance and placed in the custody of her sister and brother-in-law in Higginsville, Missouri.
No details have been released on when Hemme will be freed.
Hemme, now 64, had been serving a life sentence at the Chillicothe Correctional Center after being twice convicted of murdering library worker Patricia Jeschke. According to her legal team at the Innocence Project, she is the longest-held wrongly incarcerated woman known in the U.S.
“This Court finds that the totality of the evidence supports a finding of actual innocence,” Circuit Court Judge Ryan Horsman concluded after an extensive review. Horsman noted that Hemme was heavily sedated and in a “malleable mental state” when investigators repeatedly questioned her in a psychiatric hospital. Her attorneys described her confession as “often monosyllabic responses to leading questions.” Other than this confession, no evidence linked her to the crime, her trial prosecutor said.
The St. Joseph Police Department ignored evidence pointing to Michael Holman, a fellow officer who died in 2015, and the prosecution was not informed of FBI results that could have cleared her, so it was never disclosed before her trials, the judge found.
“This Court finds that the evidence shows that Ms. Hemme’s statements to police are so unreliable and that the evidence pointing to 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 manifest injustice.”
Sandra Hemme (Photo by Missouri Department of Corrections)
