A Missouri woman who spent more than 40 years in prison for murder has had her conviction overturned after a judge found “clear and convincing” evidence that she was innocent of the murder in question.
Sandra “Sandy” Hemme, 63, was convicted of – and sentenced to life imprisonment for – the 1980 murder of Patricia Jeschke, a library worker in St Joseph, Missouri, after Hemme made statements to police incriminating herself while was a psychiatric patient.
On Friday, Livingston County Judge Ryan Horsman ruled that “evidence directly links” Jeschke’s murder to a local police officer who later went to prison for another crime and has since died.
Hemme, who has spent the past 43 years behind bars, must be released within 30 days unless prosecutors decide to retry her, the judge said. The ruling came after an evidentiary hearing in January, where Hemme’s legal team presented arguments in support of her evidence.
Hemme’s prison sentence marks the longest known wrongful conviction of a woman in U.S. history, say her attorneys at the Innocence Project — a nonprofit criminal justice organization.
“We are grateful to the Court for recognizing the grave injustice that Ms. Hemme has suffered for more than four decades,” her lawyers said in a statement.
Hemme initially pleaded guilty to capital murder in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. But according to the Associated Press, her conviction was thrown out on appeal. She was convicted again in 1985 after a one-day trial in which the only evidence against her was her ‘confession’.
In a 147-page petition seeking her acquittal, lawyers argued that authorities ignored Hemme’s “extremely contradictory” and “factually impossible” statements while she was a patient at a psychiatric hospital.
Hemme, then 20, was being treated for auditory hallucinations, de-realization and drug use when she was targeted by police, her lawyers said. She had spent most of her life, from the age of 12, in inpatient psychiatric treatment.
During a series of hours-long interviews, Hemme gave conflicting accounts about the killing while she was being treated with antipsychotic drugs, her lawyers said. “At times she was so over-medicated that she could not even hold her head up and was tied down and tied to a chair,” they wrote.
Detectives noted that Hemme appeared “mentally confused” and could not fully understand their questions. Steven Fueston, a retired St. Joseph police detective, testified that he stopped one of the interviews because “she didn’t seem entirely coherent.”
Police “exploited her mental illness and forced her to make false statements while she was sedated and treated with antipsychotic medication,” Hemme’s lawyers said.
They alleged that authorities at the time withheld evidence showing that Michael Holman, a 22-year-old police officer at the time, had attempted to use the victim’s credit card. Holman’s truck was seen near the crime scene and a pair of earrings identified by Jeschke’s father were found in Holman’s possession.
Holman had been a suspect and was being questioned at the time. Many of the details that came to light during the Holman investigation were never given to Hemme’s attorneys. Holman was investigated for insurance fraud and burglary and spent time in prison. He died in 2015.
In his ruling Friday, Horsman wrote that “no evidence beyond Ms. Hemme’s unreliable statements links her to the crime,” adding that those statements were “taken while she was in psychiatric crisis and physical pain.”
In contrast, “this court finds that the evidence directly links Holman to this crime and murder scene,” Horsman wrote. He said prosecutors had failed to disclose evidence that would have helped Hemme’s defense and that her trial attorney had fallen “below professional standards.”
The Missouri attorney general’s office, which fought to uphold her conviction, did not immediately comment on the judge’s ruling, the Kansas City Star reported.
