CHILLICOTHE, Mo. — A woman whose murder conviction was overturned after spending 43 years in prison was freed Friday after Missouri’s attorney general fought for more than a month to keep her behind bars.
Sandra Hemme, 63, left the Chillicothe jail Friday, hours after a judge threatened to hold the attorney general’s office in contempt of court if it continued to fight her release. She reunited with her family at a nearby park, where she hugged her sister, daughter and granddaughter.
“You were just a baby when your mother sent me a picture of you,” she said. “You looked like your mother when you were little and you still do.”
His granddaughter laughs. “I get this kind of thing a lot.”
The judge initially ruled on June 14 that Hemme’s attorneys had established “clear and convincing evidence” of “actual innocence” and overturned the conviction. But Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey challenged his release in court.
“It was too easy to convict an innocent person and much harder to get them out, to the point where court orders were ignored,” said his lawyer Sean O’Brien. “It shouldn’t be this hard to get an innocent person out.”
At a court hearing Friday, Judge Ryan Horsman said that if Hemme was not released by a set time, he wanted Bailey himself to appear in court Tuesday morning, and he threatened to hold the attorney general’s office in contempt.
He also criticized Bailey’s office for calling the prison warden and asking him not to release Hemme after an appeals court ruled she could be released. “I suggest you never do that,” Horsman said, adding: “Calling someone and telling them to disregard a court order is wrong.”
The Missouri Department of Corrections later confirmed that Hemme, who has been in prison for 43 years, would be released by 6 p.m. CDT Friday.
“She’s going straight to her dad,” O’Brien said. Her father was hospitalized with kidney failure and was recently transferred to hospice care. “We’ve been waiting a long time for this.”
He had previously said the delays had caused his family “irreparable harm and emotional distress.”
There are still difficulties to overcome.
“She’s going to need help,” he said, noting that she won’t be eligible for Social Security because she’s been incarcerated for so long.
Over the past month, a circuit judge, an appeals court and the Missouri Supreme Court have all agreed that Hemme should be released, but she remains behind bars, leaving her attorneys and legal experts baffled.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Michael Wolff, a former Missouri Supreme Court justice and professor and dean emeritus of the St. Louis University School of Law. “Once the courts have made their decision, they have to be obeyed.”
The only obstacle to Hemme’s release came from the attorney general, who filed lawsuits to force her to serve additional years for decades-old prison assault cases. The warden of Chillicothe Correctional Facility refused to release Hemme, because of Bailey’s actions.
On June 14, Horsman ruled that “the totality of the evidence supports the conclusion that the young woman is innocent.” On July 8, a state appeals court ruled that Hemme should be released while it continues to review the case. On Thursday, the Missouri Supreme Court declined to overturn lower court decisions that had allowed her to be released on her own recognizance and placed with her sister and brother-in-law.
Bailey, a Republican facing opposition in the Aug. 6 primary election, responded with another request Thursday night, asking the circuit court to reconsider its decision.
Hemme was serving a life sentence at Chillicothe Correctional Facility for the 1980 stabbing death of library employee Patricia Jeschke in St. Joseph, Missouri.
According to her legal team at the Innocence Project, she is the longest-serving wrongly incarcerated woman in the United States.
Hemme’s immediate release was complicated by the sentences she received for crimes committed in prison. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1996 for assaulting a prison employee with a razor blade, and to two years in prison in 1984 for “proposing to commit violence.” Bailey had argued that Hemme posed a risk to her safety and the safety of others and that she should begin serving those sentences immediately.
Her lawyers countered that keeping her incarcerated longer would be a “draconian consequence.”
Some legal experts agree.
Peter Joy, a law professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, said the attempt to keep Hemme in prison was “a shock to the conscience of any decent human being” because the evidence strongly suggests she did not commit the crime.
Bailey’s office did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment Friday.
Bailey, who was appointed attorney general after Eric Schmitt was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, has a history of opposing overturning convictions, even when local prosecutors cite evidence of actual innocence.
After an extensive examination, Horsman concluded in June that Hemme was sedated and in a “malleable mental state” when investigators repeatedly interviewed her at a psychiatric hospital after the killing. Her lawyers described her final confession as “often monosyllabic responses to leading questions.” Other than the confession, no evidence linked her to the crime, the prosecutor at her trial said.
Meanwhile, the St. Joseph Police Department ignored evidence pointing to Michael Holman — a fellow officer who died in 2015 — and the prosecution was not informed of FBI findings that could have exonerated Hemme, so they were never disclosed until after his trials, the judge found.
Evidence presented to Horsman showed that Holman’s van was seen outside Jeschke’s apartment, that he tried to use her credit card and that her earrings were found in his home.
In his report, Horsman called Hemme “a victim of manifest injustice.”
Salter reported from O’Fallon, Missouri.
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