Posted on 06/16/2024 7:24:44 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
A judge has overturned the conviction of a Missouri woman who was a psychiatric patient when she incriminated herself in a 1980 killing that her attorneys argue was actually committed by a now-discredited police officer.
Judge Ryan Horsman ruled late Friday that Sandra Hemme, who has spent 43 years behind bars, had established evidence of actual innocence and must be freed within 30 days unless prosecutors retry her. He said her trial counsel was ineffective and prosecutors failed to disclose evidence that would have helped her.
Her attorneys say this is the longest time a women has been been incarcerated for a wrongful conviction. They filed a motion seeking her immediate release.
“We are grateful to the Court for acknowledging the grave injustice Ms. Hemme has endured for more than four decades,” her attorneys said in a statement, promising to keep up their efforts to dismiss the charges and reunite Hemme with her family.
A spokesperson for Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey didn't immediately respond to a text or email message seeking comment Saturday.
Hemme was shackled in leather wrist restraints and so heavily sedated that she “could not hold her head up straight” or “articulate anything beyond monosyllabic responses" when she was first questioned about the death of 31-year-old library worker Patricia Jeschke, according to her lawyers with the New York-based Innocence Project.
They alleged in a petition seeking her exoneration that authorities ignored Hemme's “wildly contradictory” statements and suppressed evidence implicating Michael Holman, a then-police officer who tried to use the slain woman's credit card.
The judge wrote that “no evidence whatsoever outside of Ms. Hemme’s unreliable statements connects her to the crime.”
“In contrast,” he added, “this Court finds that the evidence directly ties Holman to this crime and murder scene.”
(Excerpt) Read more at channel3000.com ...
“Dig the body up...”
I do remember reading about that very act, here on Free Republic, some years ago.
I love how we pull real world examples into cogent use.
“So.... cops framing people for murders the cops did is a-ok?”
Can’t remember saying that, but then again I have 100,000 posts or so here, so anything’s possible.
Maybe you need to vote with your feet.
“Maybe you need to vote with your feet.”
Soon we will ALL being doing so, unless these judges are stopped.
Would you be willing to trust that in the next Portland Antifa/BLM event?
And there is the problem.
Not that one bad cop did something bad. Every group has bad people who do bad things. The problem is that the entire system either looked the other way or helped them do it.
This reminds me of that one case in Hawaii. Guy is waiting for the soup kitchen open and nods off, Hero Cop sees him and decides for some unknown reason that he is a wanted criminal. Arrests guy. Guy is asked his name and answers honestly. Guy is then placed in mental hospital for years and given various medications as they try to force him to say he is someone else. Finally new attorney decides to do something that should have been done years before, check his finger prints. Not the guy Hero Cop said he was. Actual fugitive in prison in Alaska. Guy was totally innocent.
Years and no one checked his finger prints. Apparently no one looked at picture either. No one checked to see if fugitive was still at large.
No one checked. Because Hero Cop is apparently divine and completely incapable of error.
My work is much less likely to result in people's lives being ruined but I double and triple check everything because I COULD BE WRONG.
The entire justice system needs to hold themselves to the same standard.
Keep loving on those Leftist Judges as they put innocent people away.
You know the answer to that. No.
They should. But they won’t.
“I am glad to see you admit it.”
LOL!
That is o.k. thinking until you are the one innocent wrongly executed. Then, you will be squealing like a pig, “I’m innocent. Don’t execute me!”
but nobody but nobody should get railroaded....thankfully to full body cams, we can see how cops can sometimes bull doze people over with their false claims.
“That is o.k. thinking until you are the one innocent wrongly executed. Then, you will be squealing like a pig, “I’m innocent. Don’t execute me!””
Since that almost certainly WILL NOT happen to me (or just about no one else that’s innocent), I won’t be squealing. But the version of ‘justice’ we have now PROHIBITS my wife from safely shopping where she wants, and forces me to come with her.
But I have to admit, the anti-death penalty types are VERY EFFECTIVE, even on this site!
It doesn’t help to clean up the current prosecutor’s office, either. The prosecutors from 43 years ago are long gone.
Such a horrible injustice and no redress.
There is precedent.
There is only minor issue with that in this particular case--The POS Holman was cremated.
God knows truth.
People gotta stop with the emotional pull thoughts and choice making. It’s ruining this country.
Innocent people die daily.
God rewards those who remain in His will no matter what is going on, and some times that means going through bad stuff even like being fed to lions, or those let out in the arena to be killed in some way as entertainment, or thrown in boiling oil, or stoned to death, or wrongly accused and hung on a cross to die.
evil will be in this world until Jesus returns.
In the mean time, it’s war. And innocents die in war.
Portland is far away and artifacts doesn’t demonstrate in tiny rural farm towns because we would react strongly with pitchforks and tractors, ifykwim.
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