A woman whose murder conviction was overturned after she served 43 years of a life sentence was released Friday, despite attempts in the last month by Missouri’s attorney general to keep her behind bars.
Sandra Hemme, 64, left a prison in Chillicothe, 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.
Hemme had been the longest-held wrongly incarcerated woman known in the U.S., 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.”
Under current law, only someone shown to be innocent by means of a DNA test is eligible for compensation after being released. The law allows $36,500 a year for the same number of years the person was wrongly incarcerated.
The vetoed bill would have increased the payment to $65,000 a year and expanded it to include people freed by the conviction review process created in a 2021 law.
The conviction review process:
In order for elected prosecutors to have a pathway to correct wrongful convictions, it was up to the state legislature to pass a law
If this innocent person was eligible for payments in Missouri, which she is not, and if the bill was passed to increase payments, then she may have received a maximum of $2.8m. However, it’d be paid as an annuity of $65k per year. If she dies her family would get nothing more. And, the payments are in lieu of a civil suit.
She’ll have to sue if she wants justice. I hope she does. I’ve been to prison. I think she deserves to be comfortable for the rest of her life.
