When Missouri police were searching for a suspect in a gruesome killing in 1980, they interviewed Sandra Hemme, a 20-year-old psychiatric patient, Hemme’s attorneys said. But Hemme was so heavily medicated during some of the conversations that she couldn’t hold her head up and needed to be strapped to a chair, according to her attorneys.
Hemme’s statements, her attorneys said, conflicted with information police found in the killing of Patricia Jeschke, whose hands were tied behind her back with a telephone cord when her body was found in her St. Joseph, Mo., home. Hemme ultimately told police that she killed Jeschke.
But the Innocence Project, a nonprofit that aims to exonerate people who it says were wrongfully convicted, said it filed a petition in the Livingston County Circuit Court last year, arguing that police exploited Hemme’s mental health and pressured her into making false statements, leading her to be wrongly imprisoned in 1981 on a life sentence that she’s still serving.
Late Friday, a judge overturned Hemme’s conviction, saying that she presented evidence of her innocence and must be freed within 30 days unless prosecutors retry her, according to the Associated Press. Whether Hemme will be retried or promptly released from prison is unclear; the Missouri attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Innocence Project said Hemme’s more than 43 years behind bars has been the longest known wrongful conviction of a woman in U.S. history. Prison records showed Hemme, 64, was being held at the Chillicothe Correctional Center in Chillicothe, Mo., as of Saturday night.
The Innocence Project didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment but said in a statement to the AP: “We are grateful to the Court for acknowledging the grave injustice Ms. Hemme has endured.”
Hemme was discharged from St. Joseph State Hospital a day before Jeschke was found dead in November 1980, the AP reported. Police said Jeschke was strangled, the St. Joseph News-Press reported at the time.
Police began investigating Hemme, who lived in Concordia, Mo., about two weeks later when she carried a knife to the home of one of her former nurses, according to the AP. Police took Hemme back to the hospital, where she received treatment for auditory hallucinations, derealization and drug misuse, the Innocence Project said. Hemme had received psychiatric treatment since she was 12, according to the Innocence Project.
While receiving care, Hemme interviewed with police officers as a suspect and said she killed Jeschke, the AP reported. She had a trial that lasted one day in spring 1981, the Innocence Project said. Hemme pleaded guilty to capital murder, but her testimony was so vague that the judge initially refused her plea, the St. Joseph News-Press reported at the time.
There was no evidence linking Hemme to the crime scene, the Innocence Project said. Nonetheless, the judge ultimately accepted her guilty plea.
But in March 2023, the Innocence Project said it had collected evidence showing that Hemme was innocent and the crime was actually committed by Michael Holman, who was a St. Joseph police officer at the time of Jeschke’s death. The Innocence Project said police hid evidence that linked Holman, who died in 2015, to the crime. The St. Joseph Police Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday.
On Friday, Judge Ryan Horsman ruled that “no evidence whatsoever outside of Ms. Hemme’s unreliable statements connects her to the crime” and “the evidence directly ties Holman to this crime and murder scene,” the AP reported.
Hemme’s conviction is the latest to be overturned in recent years as DNA testing and forensic resources have become more readily available and old testimonies are reexamined. Glynn Simmons, who served 48 years in Oklahoma in the longest wrongful-conviction case in U.S. history, was released in July. Vincent Simmons, who was imprisoned in Louisiana for more than 44 years on charges of attempted aggravated rape, was released in 2022. Both men, who do not appear to be related, were released after authorities in both cases said they didn’t receive fair trials.
A 2020 study found that more than half of wrongful convictions stemmed from government misconduct. Hemme’s attorneys argued that applied to her case.
Source link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/06/16/sandra-hemme-murder-conviction-overturned-patricia-jeschke/