Sandra “Sandy” Hemme, a 63-year-old woman from Missouri who was sentenced to life in prison for the 1980 murder of Patricia Jeschke, a library employee, in St. Joseph, Missouri, has regained her freedom.
The conviction was overturned after Hemme spent 43 years in prison for a murder she did not commit.
The foreign news outlet The Guardian reported on Sunday that Hemme was found guilty in 1985 based on her self-incriminating statements made to the police while she was a psychiatric patient.
Nevertheless, a judge has now determined that there is “clear and convincing” evidence that Hemme was innocent of the crime.
On Friday, Livingston County Circuit Judge Ryan Horsman declared that there is “evidence directly” linking the murder of Jeschke to a local police officer who was subsequently incarcerated for a different offence and has since passed away.
Hemme has been incarcerated for the past 43 years; the judge ordered her release within 30 days, barring a retrial by the prosecution.
The judge’s ruling came after Hemme’s legal team presented evidence at a hearing in January that connected the murder to Michael Holman, a deceased former local police officer.
In US history, her conviction was the longest-running case of a woman being wrongfully convicted.
Along with the Innocence Project, her legal team said that the authorities disregarded Hemme’s inconsistent remarks and withheld information that could have supported her case.
“We are grateful to the Court for acknowledging the grave injustice Ms. Hemme has endured for more than four decades,” her attorneys said in a statement.
She first entered a guilty plea to capital murder in order to escape being executed, but an appeal eventually reversed her conviction.
When she was retried in 1985, her conflicting and factually implausible “confession” from her time in a mental hospital served as the sole evidence against her.
Her lawyers asked for her exoneration and claimed that the authorities had disregarded these discrepancies in a 147-page petition.
Hemme, then twenty years old, was receiving therapy for drug abuse, de-realisation, and auditory hallucinations.
She had previously received inpatient mental health therapy, according to her counsel, having spent the majority of her life in treatment since the age of twelve.
