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 recognisance.
“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 hospitalised 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 recognisance and placed with her sister and brother-in-law.
Bailey, a Republican facing opposition in the August 6 primary election, responded with another request late on Thursday, asking the Circuit Court to reconsider.
Hemme was serving a life sentence at the Chillicothe Correctional Centre for the 1980 stabbing death of library worker Patricia Jeschke in Saint Joseph, Missouri.
Hemme’s immediate freedom was 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”.
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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 agreed.
Peter Joy, a law professor at the Washington University School of Law in Saint Louis, said the effort to keep Hemme in prison was “a shock to the conscience of any decent human being”, since evidence strongly suggests she didn’t commit the crime.
Bailey’s office did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment on Friday.
Bailey, who was appointed attorney-general after Eric Schmitt was elected to the US 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 Saint Joseph Police Department, meanwhile, ignored evidence pointing to Michael Holman â a fellow officer, who died in 2015 â 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 ute 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”.
