A judge overturned the conviction of a Missouri woman who spent 43 years in prison after she framed herself in a 1980 murder while she was a psychiatric patient, with the judge and the woman's attorneys suggesting that a former police officer may have been the perpetrator. killer.
Judge Ryan Horsman ruled Friday night that Sandra Hemme, now 64, presented evidence of actual innocence and must be freed within 30 days unless prosecutors retry her in the Patricia Jeschke death case. 31-year-old library employee. The judge said Hemme's trial attorney was ineffective and prosecutors failed to reveal evidence that would have helped her defense.
Hemme's attorneys, who filed a motion asking for her immediate release, said this is the longest a woman has been imprisoned for a wrongful conviction.
“We are grateful to the Court for recognizing the grave injustice that Ms. Hemme has endured for more than four decades,” her attorneys said in a statement, vowing to continue their efforts to dismiss the charges and allow Hemme to be reunited with her family. .
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Sandra Hemme, now 64, spent 43 years in prison before a judge overturned her murder conviction. (Missouri Department of Corrections via AP)
Hemme was handcuffed with wrist shackles and so deeply sedated that she “could not hold her head up” or “articulate anything but monosyllabic responses” when she was initially questioned about Jeschke's death, according to her lawyers.
Lawyers said in a petition seeking Hemme's exoneration that authorities ignored his “wildly contradictory” statements and suppressed evidence implicating then-police officer Michael Holman, who tried to use Jeschke's credit card. Holman died in 2015.
The judge wrote that “there is no evidence, other than Ms. Hemme's unreliable statements, connecting her to the crime.”
“To the contrary, this Court finds that the evidence directly links Holman to the scene of the crime and murder,” the judge wrote.
On November 13, 1980, Jeschke missed work and her worried mother climbed through a window of her apartment and discovered her naked body on the floor in a pool of blood. Jeschke had his hands tied behind his back with a telephone cord, a pair of stockings around his throat and a knife under his head.
Hemme was not being investigated in connection with the murder until she showed up nearly two weeks later at the home of a nurse who once treated her while carrying a knife and refused to leave.
Police located Hemme in a closet and transported her back to St. Joseph Hospital. She had been hospitalized several times since she started hearing voices at the age of 12.
Hemme had been released from the same hospital the day before Jeschke's body was found and arrived at her parents' house that same night after hitchhiking more than 100 miles across the state. The moment seemed suspicious to authorities and Hemme was subsequently questioned.
Hemme was being treated with antipsychotic medications that had caused her to have involuntary muscle spasms when she was first questioned. She complained that her eyes were rolling, according to her attorney's request.
Detectives said Hemme seemed “mentally confused” and was not able to fully understand their questions.
“Each time the police extracted a statement from Ms. Hemme, it changed dramatically from the previous one, often incorporating explanations of facts that the police had just discovered,” her attorneys wrote in the petition.
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Sandra Hemme established evidence of actual innocence, a judge ruled. (iStock)
Hemme eventually claimed that he witnessed a man named Joseph Wabski kill Jeschke.
Wabski, whom Hemme met when they both stayed in the state hospital's detox unit, was initially charged with capital murder before prosecutors quickly learned he was at an alcohol treatment center in Topeka, Kansas, at the time and withdrew the charges against him.
After learning that Wabski was not the killer, Hemme cried and claimed that she was the killer.
Police were also beginning to consider Holman as a suspect. About a month after the murder, Holman was arrested for falsely reporting that his truck had been stolen and collecting an insurance payment. The same truck was seen near the crime scene and Holman's alibi, in which he claimed to have spent the night with a woman at a nearby motel, could not be confirmed.
Holman, who was eventually fired and has since died, also attempted to use Jeschke's credit card at a photography store in Kansas City, Missouri, the same day her body was discovered. Holman claimed she found the credit card in a purse that had been abandoned in a ditch.
During a search of Holman's home, police found a pair of gold horseshoe-shaped earrings in a closet, which Jeschke's father said he recognized as a pair he bought her. Police also found jewelry stolen from another woman during a robbery earlier that year.
The four-day investigation into Holman ended abruptly, and Hemme's lawyers said they were never provided many of the details uncovered.
Hemme wrote to his parents on Christmas Day 1980, telling them that he might also change his guilty plea.
“Even though I am innocent, they want to put someone in jail so they can say the case is solved,” Hemme wrote.
“Let it finish,” he added. “I'm tired.”
The following spring, Hemme agreed to plead guilty to capital murder in exchange for the death penalty being thrown out.
Sandra Hemme's attorneys filed a motion requesting her immediate release. (MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images)
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But the judge initially rejected his guilty plea because he didn't share enough details about the incident.
Her lawyer told her that her chance of avoiding the death penalty depended on the judge accepting her guilty plea. After a break and some training sessions, she gave the judge more details.
The plea was later thrown out on appeal, but he was convicted again in 1985 after a one-day trial in which jurors were not provided details of what his current attorneys say were “grotesquely coercive” interrogations.
The system “failed him at every opportunity,” Larry Harman said in his attorneys' petition. Harman, now a judge, previously helped Hemme get her initial guilty plea thrown out.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
