Missouri AG stops release of longest-serving wrongfully convicted woman who had been held in prison for 43 years

The Missouri Attorney General has blocked the release of a 64-year-old woman who had her conviction in a 1980 murder overturned last month.

Sandra Hemme, considered the longest-known wrongly incarcerated woman in the US, has spent 43 years behind bars for a 1980 murder that her lawyers say was actually committed by a now-discredited police officer.

A judge ruled on June 14 that Hemme’s conviction was wrongful, ordering her to be retried or released from prison within 30 days.

She was set to be released from Chillicothe Correctional Center near Kansas City on Wednesday. But a lawyer from the state’s AG office objected, and called the prison to ask whether two unrelated sentences — amounting to 12 years in prison — should keep her behind bars, a July 10 court filing states.

Hemme had a two-year sentence imposed July 16, 1984, and a 10-year sentence imposed October 24, 1996, that were both supposed to run consecutive to the murder sentence, which the court overturned in June. Both sentences were related to violence while in prison.

The attorney general’s office typically objects to wrongful conviction claims, according to the Associated Press, and argued that it did not have enough time to fight her release, and asked the appellate court to reconsider.

Her legal team said that keeping her in prison would be a “draconian outcome,” according to the outlet.

The Independent has reached out to representative from the AG’s office and Hemme’s lawyers.

Hemme was a psychiatric patient when she confessed to killing 31-year-old library worker Patricia Jeschke on November 13, 1980.

Jeschke didn’t show up for work, prompting her concerned mother to climb into her apartment through a window to find a gruesome scene - her daughter’s nude body in a pool of blood on the floor. There was a knife under her head, a pair of pantyhose was wrapped around her throat and her limbs were bound with a telephone cord.

Investigators raced to find the killer. Hemme appeared to fit the bill, since her reemergence onto the scene seemed suspicious to authorities. She had most of her life from age 12 onward in inpatient psychiatric care, according to her attorneys at the Innocence Project.

Hemme had been discharged from the psychiatric hospital just one day before Jeschke’s body was found.

During her interview with police, investigators noted that Hemme seemed “mentally confused” while her lawyers said that she provided “wildly contradictory” statements. After accusing a man who could not have possibly been the killer, since he was in an alcohol treatment center at the time of the brutal murder, she pleaded guilty in exchange for removing the possibility of the death penalty.

Her lawyers argued that Michael Holman, a former cop, was actually behind Jeschke’s slaying, as he had tried to use her credit card.

In 2015, after Holman’s death, authorities searched his house to find gold horseshoe-shaped earrings in a closet, which Jeschke’s father said he had given his daughter.

Last month, the appeals court wrote that “no evidence whatsoever outside of Ms Hemme’s unreliable statements connects her to the crime.”

A judge noted: “She is the victim of a manifest injustice.”

Instead, the judge noted that evidence suggests then-police officer Holman was linked to the grisly killing: “This Court finds that the evidence directly ties Holman to this crime and murder scene.”

After the judge’s ruling in June, a statement from Hemme’s lawyers read: “The only evidence that ever connected Ms Hemme to the crime was her own unreliable and false confessions: statements taken from her while she was being treated at the state psychiatric hospital and forcibly given medication literally designed to overpower her will.” They added: “We will continue to fight until all charges are dismissed and Ms. Hemme is reunited with her family.”