Missouri woman who served 43 years in prison is free after her 1980 murder conviction was overturned
CHILLICOTHE, Mo. (AP) — A woman whose murder conviction was overturned after she served 43 years in prison was released Friday, after Missouri’s attorney general fought for more than a month to keep her behind bars.
On Friday, Sandra Hemme left prison in Chillicothe, hours after a judge threatened to hold the attorney general’s office in contempt if they continued to fight against her release.
The judge originally ruled on June 14 that Hemme’s attorneys had established “clear and convincing evidence” of “actual innocence” and overturned the conviction. But Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey fought her release in the courts. Attorneys for Hemme, 64, say they are thrilled.
During a court hearing Friday, Judge Ryan Horsman said that if Hemme wasn’t released by a designated time, he wanted Bailey himself to appear in court Tuesday morning, and he threatened to hold the attorney general’s office in contempt.
He also scolded Bailey’s office for calling the warden and telling prison officials not to release Hemme after an appeals court panel said she could be released. “I would suggest you never do that,” Horsman said, adding: “To call someone and tell them to disregard a court order is wrong.”
The Missouri Corrections Department then confirmed Hemme, whose been in prison for 43 years, would be released before 6 p.m. CDT Friday.
Two of Hemme’s relatives were in court Friday but declined to talk after the hearing. The rest of her family members were with Hemme’s father, who was hospitalized with kidney failure and moved to palliative care. “He wants only to see his daughter free in his lifetime, just as Ms. Hemme wants nothing more than to be at her father’s bedside at this time,” Hemme’s attorney, Sean O’Brien, said in a court filing Thursday.
He added that further delay is causing their family “irreparable harm and emotional distress.”
After she is released, “she is going right to her father,” O’Brien said after Friday’s court hearing. “This has been a long time coming.”
Over the last month, a circuit judge, an appellate court and the Missouri Supreme Court all agreed Hemme should be released, but she was still behind bars late Friday, leaving her lawyers and legal experts puzzled.
“I’ve never seen it,” said Michael Wolff, a former Missouri Supreme Court judge and professor and dean emeritus of Saint Louis University Law School. “Once the courts have spoken, the courts should be obeyed.”
The lone holdup to freedom for the 64-year-old woman was opposition from the attorney general, who has filed court actions seeking to force her to serve additional years for decades-old prison assault cases. The warden at the Chillicothe Correctional Center has declined to let Hemme go, based on Bailey’s actions.
Horsman ruled on June 14 that “the totality of the evidence supports a finding of actual innocence.” A state appeals court ruled on July 8 that Hemme should be set free while it continued to review the case. The Missouri Supreme Court on Thursday declined to undo the lower court rulings that allowed her to be released on her own recognizance and placed with her sister and brother-in-law.
Bailey, a Republican facing opposition in the Aug. 6 primary election, responded with another request late Thursday, asking the Circuit Court to reconsider.
Hemme has been serving a life sentence at the Chillicothe Correctional Center for the 1980 stabbing death of library worker Patricia Jeschke in St. Joseph, Missouri.
She’s been the longest-held wrongly incarcerated woman known in the U.S., according to her legal team at the Innocence Project. Her lawyers, in an emailed statement to The Associated Press on Thursday, said her family “is eager and ready to reunite with her, and the Department of Corrections should respect and promptly” release her.
Hemme’s immediate freedom has been complicated by sentences she received for crimes committed while behind bars. She received a 10-year sentence in 1996 for attacking a prison worker with a razor blade, and a two-year sentence in 1984 for “offering to commit violence.” Bailey had argued that Hemme represents a safety risk to herself and others and that she should start serving those sentences now.
Her attorneys countered that keeping her incarcerated any longer would be a “draconian outcome.”
Some legal experts agree.
Peter Joy, a law professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, said the effort to keep Hemme in prison is “a shock to the conscience of any decent human being,” noting that she’s already been in prison for decades for a crime that evidence strongly suggests she didn’t commit.
“To now say she has to serve an additional 12 years is like running over a person and backing your car up to run over them a second time,” Joy said.
Bailey’s office did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment Friday.
Bailey, who was appointed attorney general after Eric Schmitt was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, has a history of opposing overturning convictions, even when local prosecutors cite evidence of actual innocence.
Horsman, after an extensive review, concluded in June that 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 Holman — a fellow officer, who died in 2015 — and the prosecution wasn’t told about FBI results that could have cleared Hemme, so it was never disclosed before her trials, the judge found.
Evidence presented to Horsman showed that Holman’s pickup truck was seen outside Jeschke’s apartment, that he tried to use her credit card, and that her earrings were found in his home.
Horsman, in his report, called Hemme “the victim of a manifest injustice.”
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Salter reported from O’Fallon, Missouri.