Bollywood Fever: A woman whose murder conviction was overturned after she served 43 years in prison was released on Friday. This came after Missouri’s attorney general fought for over a month to keep her behind bars.
Sandra Hemme, 63, left prison in Chillicothe on Friday, hours after a judge threatened to hold the attorney general’s office in contempt if they continued to oppose her release. She reunited with her family at a nearby park, where she embraced her daughter and granddaughter. Her sister, Joyce Ann Kays, was overjoyed.
The judge had initially ruled on June 14 that Hemme’s attorneys had established “clear and convincing evidence” of her “actual innocence,” leading to the conviction being overturned. However, Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey challenged her release in court.
During a court hearing on Friday, Judge Ryan Horsman stated that if Hemme wasn’t released by a designated time, he would require Bailey himself to appear in court on Tuesday and threatened to hold the attorney general’s office in contempt. He also reprimanded Bailey’s office for instructing the warden to ignore a court order allowing Hemme’s release. “I would suggest you never do that,” Horsman warned, adding: “To call someone and tell them to disregard a court order is wrong.”
The Missouri Corrections Department then confirmed that Hemme, who had been in prison for 43 years, would be released before 6 p.m. CDT on Friday.
Two of Hemme’s relatives attended the court hearing but declined to comment afterward. The rest of her family was with Hemme’s father, who was hospitalized with kidney failure and had been 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 on Thursday.
O’Brien added that further delay was causing the family “irreparable harm and emotional distress.”
After her release, “she is going right to her father,” O’Brien said. “This has been a long time coming.”
Over the past month, a circuit judge, an appellate court, and the Missouri Supreme Court all agreed that Hemme should be released, yet she remained imprisoned, leaving her lawyers and legal experts puzzled.
“I’ve never seen it,” said Michael Wolff, a former Missouri Supreme Court judge and professor emeritus of Saint Louis University Law School. “Once the courts have spoken, the courts should be obeyed.”
The sole obstacle to her freedom came from the attorney general, who filed court actions to extend her imprisonment due to decades-old prison assault cases. The warden at the Chillicothe Correctional Center had refused to release Hemme 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 overturn the lower court rulings that allowed her release on her own recognizance to stay with her sister and brother-in-law.
Bailey, who faces opposition in the Aug. 6 primary election, responded with another request late Thursday, asking the Circuit Court to reconsider.
Hemme was serving a life sentence for the 1980 stabbing death of library worker Patricia Jeschke in St. Joseph, Missouri. She is the longest-held wrongly incarcerated woman known in the U.S., according to her legal team at the Innocence Project.
Hemme’s immediate freedom was complicated by sentences for crimes committed while in prison. 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 argued that Hemme poses a safety risk to herself and others and should serve those sentences now.
Her attorneys countered that keeping her incarcerated any longer would result in a “draconian outcome.” Some legal experts agreed.
Peter Joy, a law professor at the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, said the effort to keep Hemme in prison was “a shock to the conscience of any decent human being,” given evidence suggesting her innocence.
Bailey’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday. Bailey, appointed attorney general after Eric Schmitt was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, has a history of opposing the overturning of convictions, even when local prosecutors cite evidence of actual innocence.
Horsman’s review concluded that Hemme was heavily sedated and in a “malleable mental state” when repeatedly questioned by investigators in a psychiatric hospital after the killing. Her attorneys described her confession as “often monosyllabic responses to leading questions.” No other evidence linked her to the crime, according to her trial prosecutor.
The St. Joseph Police Department ignored evidence pointing to Michael Holman, a fellow officer who died in 2015. The prosecution wasn’t informed about FBI results that could have cleared Hemme, and this evidence 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 attempted 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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