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21-07-2024
MISSOURI: A woman whose murder conviction was overturned after she served 43 years of a life sentence has been released, despite attempts in the last month by a US state’s attorney-general to keep her behind bars.
Sandra Hemme, 64, left a prison in Chillicothe, Missouri, on Friday (Saturday AEST) hours after a judge threatened to hold the attorney-general’s office in contempt if they continued to fight against her release.
She reunited with her family at a nearby park, where she hugged her sister, daughter and granddaughter. “You were just a baby when your mum sent me a picture of you,” she said.
“You looked just like your mamma when you were little and you still look like her.”
Her granddaughter laughed. “I get that a lot,” she said.
Hemme had been the longest-held wrongly incarcerated woman known in the US, according to her legal team at the Innocence Project.
The judge originally ruled on June 14 that Hemme’s attorneys had established “clear and convincing evidence” of “actual innocence” and he overturned her conviction but Republican Attorney-General Andrew Bailey fought her release in the courts.
“It was too easy to convict an innocent person and way harder than it should have been to get her out, even to the point of court orders being ignored,” her attorney Sean O’Brien said. “It shouldn’t be this hard to free an innocent person.”
During a court hearing on Friday, Judge Ryan Horsman said that if Hemme wasn’t released within hours, Bailey himself would have to appear in court on Tuesday morning. 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 he ordered her to be freed in her own recognizance.
“I would suggest you never do that,” Horsman said.
“To call someone and tell them to disregard a court order is wrong.”
Hemme declined to address reporters after she was released. O’Brien said she was going straight to the side of her father, who was hospitalized with kidney failure and recently moved to palliative care.
“This has been a long time coming,” he said of her release.
O’Brien said previously that delays had caused their family “irreparable harm and emotional distress”. There are still struggles ahead.
“She’s going to need help,” he said, noting she wouldn’t be eligible for social security because she has been incarcerated for so long.
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 held behind bars, 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 came from the attorney-general, who filed court motions seeking to force her to serve additional years for decades-old prison assault cases. The warden at the Chillicothe Correctional Centre initially 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 next day, July 9, Horsman ruled Hemme should be released to go home with her sister. 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. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
