Judge is bursting at the seams Woman released in the USA 43 years after wrongful conviction
Although the court's decision is clear, the prosecution finds all kinds of objections to keeping the woman in prison. But then the judge has had enough.
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- A woman in the USA was wrongly imprisoned for 43 years.
- Now she has been released after the energetic intervention of a judge.
- According to the Innocence Project, an organization specializing in miscarriages of justice, she was the longest falsely imprisoned woman in the USA.
In the USA, a woman wrongly convicted of murder has been released from prison after 43 years. After an energetic intervention by Judge Ryan Horsman, 64-year-old Sandra Hemme left the prison in Chillicothe, Missouri, on Friday (local time). There she embraced her sister, her daughter and her granddaughter in a nearby park. According to the Innocence Project, an organization specializing in miscarriages of justice, she was the longest falsely imprisoned woman in the USA.
Hemme had been sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a library employee. In mid-June, Judge Horsman ruled that her lawyers had presented clear and convincing evidence of her innocence and overturned the sentence. Hemme had been heavily sedated when investigators questioned her in a psychiatric clinic. Her confession was the only evidence and consisted of a series of monosyllabic answers to suggestive questions. The woman was "the victim of an obvious injustice."
Judge sticks it to the prosecutor
Prosecutor Andrew Bailey appealed. Although several courts ruled Hemme should be released pending a decision on Bailey's appeal, the prosecutor balked, arguing the woman was a danger to the public. Finally, he demanded that Hemme serve two more sentences that she had received while in custody.
On Friday, the judge was out of luck. If the acquitted woman was not released within hours, he would cite Baily for contempt of court, Horsman said, and also slammed his office for ordering the prison to keep Hemme in custody despite the judge's order. "I recommend never doing that," Horsman said. "It's wrong to call someone and tell them to override a court order."
Bailey's office did not comment for now. Hemme's attorney, Sean O'Brien, commented that it was apparently quite easy for the prosecution to convict innocent people, but quite difficult to release them.
dpa