Sandra Hemme, a 64-year-old Missouri woman with a history of mental illness, was recently declared innocent of a murder she spent over four decades in prison for. The judge ruled her innocence "clear and convincing," but she hasn't been released yet.
Prosecutors are appealing the decision and want Hemme to stay behind bars. They argue she's dangerous, citing a past prison assault. However, Hemme's lawyers say new evidence points to a former police officer as the real culprit and that Hemme poses no threat, NBC News reported.
They believe she's the longest wrongly imprisoned woman in US history and are fighting for her immediate release.
It's not clear if she will be re-tried for Ms Jeschke's murder.
The petition for her exoneration claims that the only evidence used to convict her was her statements to police while she was mentally ill and under the influence of strong medication. Buchanan County prosecutors haven't commented on the possibility of a retrial.
"This Court finds that the evidence as a whole establishes that Ms Hemme's statements inculpating herself are inconsistent, contradicted by physical evidence and accounts of reliable, independent witnesses and that Ms Hemme's impaired psychiatric condition when questioned substantially undermine the reliability of those statements as evidence of guilt," Horsman said in the petition. "... This Court further finds that no evidence whatsoever outside of Ms Hemme's unreliable statements connects her to the crime."
The Innocence Project, based in New York, took on Hemme's case and stated that she spent 43 years wrongfully incarcerated.
"No witnesses linked Ms Hemme to the murder, the victim, or the crime scene. She had no motive to harm Ms. Jeschke, nor was there any evidence that the two had ever met. Neither did any physical or forensic evidence link Ms. Hemme to the killing," the statement said.
Hemme's conviction was based on her "false and unreliable" confessions, which were made while she was being treated at a state psychiatric hospital and "forcibly given medication literally designed to overpower her will," according to the statement.
The Innocence Project accused Holman and the St. Joseph police of concealing evidence that implicated a colleague.
"Fellow police officer Michael Holman, who was found using the victim's credit card the day after the murder; whose truck was seen parked near the victim's home at the time she was killed; in whose closet the victim's earrings were discovered; and who in the months before and after Ms. Jeschke's murder, committed many other crimes against women," The Innocence Project said in a statement.
