July 20 (UPI) — Sandra Hemme walked away from a Missouri prison and into the welcoming embrace of her family members Friday evening after serving 43 years for a 1980 murder she didn’t commit.
Hemme, 64, was released at about 5:50 p.m. CDT from the Chillicothe Correctional Center, which is about 90 miles east of Kansas City, Mo.
Attorney Sean O’Brien escorted Hemme from the prison and to members of her family gathered outside the prison.
Hemme’s time is prison was the longest that a wrongfully convicted woman has served in the United States, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
“We are grateful that Ms. Hemme is now, finally, reunited with her family after 43 years,” Hemme’s legal team, which included the Innocence Project, said. “She has spent more than four decades wrongfully incarcerated for a crime she had nothing to do with. Tonight, she is surrounded by her loved ones, where she should have been all along. We will continue to fight until her name is cleared.
Hemme, a young mentally ill woman, was under the effects of strong prescription drugs when law enforcement investigators questioned her several times about the murder of Patricia Jeschke in St. Joseph, Mo.
Many have since concluded a former police officer who died many years ago likely murdered Jeschke.
“Police exploited her mental illness and coerced her into making false statements while she was sedated and being treated with antipsychotic medication,” the Innocence Project told media.
Her conviction was based on the false statements coerced by St. Joseph Police Department investigators who ignored evidence pointing to St. Joseph Police officer Michael Holman, who died in 2015, the Innocence Project said.
No witnesses connected Hemme to the victim, murder or the crime scene, and Hemme had no motive to murder Jeschke, according to the Innocence Project.
The organization said only evidence against her were the false statements that police extracted from Hemme while she “was being treated at the state psychiatric hospital and forcibly given medication literally designed to overpower her will.”
Officials at the Innocence Project said the St. Joseph Police Department “hid evidence implicating one of their own.”
Evidence showed officer Holman used Jeschke’s credit card a day after her murder, his truck was parked her home during the time she was murdered and investigators found her earrings at Holman’s home.
Livingston County Presiding Judge Ryan Horsman overturned the conviction against Hemme, which the Missouri Supreme Court later upheld.
“It would be difficult to imagine that the state could prove Ms. Hemme’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt based on the weight of the evidence now available that ties Holman to this victim and crime and excludes Ms. Hemme,” Horsman said in his ruling overturning Hemme’s conviction.
