The 'Impossible' Possible: Innocent Woman Released From Prison After Decades
Sandra Hemme spent 43 years behind bars for a murder she didn't commit because of egregious legal misconduct
Sandra Hemme is a holder of a record she never wanted or could imagine.
No woman has been incarcerated longer for a wrongful conviction as Hemme, according to her attorneys they had said as they filed a motion for her release.
“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,” Heather Hollingsworth at the Associated Press reported.
After 43 years imprisoned, Hemme received the corrective decision and action that she has long been due. Judge Ryan Horsman ruled that Hemme, per Hollingsworth’s reporting, “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.”
This may not be the judicial norm (wrongly imprisoning the wrong person) yet it happens way too frequently, literally robbing people of liberty, freedom, the pursuit of happiness and destroying their lives and additionally inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on the sentenced person’s loved ones.
“We are grateful to the Court for acknowledging the grave injustice Ms. Hemme has endured for more than four decades,” her attorneys said, Hollingsworth wrote.
The backstory:
“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,” Hollingsworth wrote.
As unethical and deeply disturbing as those facts are, it gets worse.
The attorneys stated in their petition 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,” per Hollingsworth.
How bad was it deemed to be factually?
“The judge wrote that ‘no evidence whatsoever, outside of Ms. Hemme’s unreliable statements, connects her to the crime. In contrast, this Court finds that the evidence directly ties Holman to this crime and murder scene.”
Larry Harman, who helped Hemme get her initial guilty plea thrown out and later became a judge, said in the petition that he believed she was innocent, Hollingsworth wrote.
“The system,” he said, “failed her at every opportunity.”
The system did it as much as the murderer, the now-deceased Holman. That’s correct, the system and its participants are guilty yet not serving time in a penitentiary.
Rarely, after others do the hard work and after innocent people have suffered misery, does it correct its inarguable wrongdoing. Punishment of the bad actors in the said destructive system don’t suffer similar punishments, whether legally, freedom wise, morally, financially or family wise. Or with their reputation.
Yes, women too, get assaulted and long abused by the system and professionals within it who are supposed to be ethical, thorough, precise, reliable, near perfect and thus, trustworthy when dealing with innocent or not-guilty citizens.
The system is not often deserving the trust, respect and blind allegiance it expects and demands. It is too often arrogantly incorrect. Is it the best justice system in the world?
That question is a distraction from the better question: How can it be made better, today, to lessen the probability that more individuals and their loved ones are victims of malpractice by the the totality of the legal system?
Money will be coming Hemme yet it alone does not repay or restore what was an judicial armed robbery of freedom, years and decades of life and life experiences.
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Michael Toebe is a reputation consultant, advisor and communications specialist at Reputation Intelligence: Reputation Quality, assisting individuals and organizations with further building reputation as an asset or ethically and responsibly protecting, restoring or reconstructing it.
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