Kevin Strickland’s lawyers drop one case to focus on potentially faster path to freedom
Kevin Strickland’s attorneys dropped his pending case in DeKalb County to focus on a new path to freedom that will be available later this month.
The move, made in a court filing Wednesday, will allow his lawyers to shift efforts to a future Jackson County case that could lead to his exoneration much sooner.
Dropping the DeKalb County case eliminates a three-day evidentiary hearing set for Nov. 17 to 19, during which Strickland’s attorneys would have argued he is innocent in front of a DeKalb County judge.
Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, whose office determined Strickland is innocent in a 1978 triple murder, intends to use a new law that goes into effect Aug. 28 to file a motion asking a Jackson County judge to exonerate Strickland. He could be freed through that process before November, which would make the DeKalb County case a waste of time.
Strickland’s attorneys and the Missouri Attorney General’s Office — which contends Strickland is guilty in the Kansas City killings — have been engaged in “skirmishes” over legal discovery for weeks.
Among other things, the attorney general’s office has sought the personal communications, including emails and texts, of Dan Nelson, Jackson County’s chief deputy prosecutor who dug into the evidence in Strickland’s case before determining he is innocent.
In their motion to dismiss, Strickland’s lawyers accused the attorney general’s office of seeking “abusive and burdensome” depositions and discovery. The office’s tactics, they argued, showed it was determined to distract them and Jackson County prosecutors from the future local proceeding and to punish them for trying to exonerate Strickland, who has been imprisoned for more than 40 years.
Strickland’s attorneys said, in court records, that the attorney general filed notices to take depositions, including of Nelson and other witnesses, without coordinating dates with them. They called the office’s practices “particularly troubling” because a DeKalb County hearing was pushed back, in part, to conserve resources while the new process played out in Jackson County.
Chris Nuelle, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office, said the suggestion that seeking depositions and “pertinent information as part of this case is any way punitive is false and insulting.”
“The fact that they dismissed their case simply because we’re asking for relevant information raises questions — principally, what are they hiding?” Nuelle said in an email to The Star.
One of Strickland’s attorneys, Bob Hoffman of the firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, said the attorney general presumably wanted to depose those who investigated Strickland’s innocence claims to “make some ill-founded attack on their character or intentions.”
“This is not new behavior by the AG,” Hoffman said in a statement. “They have never seen a convicted person who they believe is actually innocent, because they simply refuse to even consider the possibility.”
Since 2000, the attorney general’s office has resisted just about every wrongful conviction case to come before it, Chicago-based news outlet Injustice Watch reported last year.
Strickland’s lawyers filed his motion to dismiss without prejudice, meaning he could seek freedom in DeKalb County again if need be.
‘We were flatly rejected’
In a letter Wednesday to Attorney General Eric Schmitt, Baker said the attorney general’s broad requests for discovery, including correspondence with reporters, was “not conceivably relevant” to Strickland’s proclaimed innocence.
“Those requests appear to only harass anyone who disagrees with you,” she wrote.
Baker also said members of her office tried to sit down with the attorney general’s office to provide them with evidence and their findings on April 2 — more than a month before Baker publicly called for Strickland’s immediate release.
For a month, she wrote, her office tried to contact top lawyers at the attorney general’s office to “discuss the underlying evidence, both in Strickland’s favor, and not in his favor.”
“I was, and remain, disappointed that we were flatly rejected,” Baker wrote.
The attorney general’s office was “the only entity that we contacted who refused to consider” their findings, Baker wrote. When she called for Strickland’s exoneration, she was supported by federal prosecutors, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and other officials who agreed with her assessment that Strickland, now 62, was wrongly convicted when he was 19.
In a statement Wednesday night, the attorney general’s office said Jackson County prosecutors offered “an abbreviated presentation, not the whole of the facts or evidence” in the case before Strickland filed his petition in court — which state prosecutors said is how they generally handle such cases.
In an email last week, Hoffman also told an assistant attorney general that he and Strickland’s other lawyers “virtually begged” to meet with decision-makers at the attorney general’s office to answer their questions and give them a “fulsome explanation” as to why they believe Strickland is innocent.
“You declined,” Hoffman wrote.
Andrew Crane, the assistant attorney general, responded that he remembered Hoffman’s request for a meeting but that, based on the evidence, the attorney general’s office did not believe Strickland was entitled to relief.
“If there is additional evidence that supports Mr. Strickland’s claims, we are certainly willing to review it,” Crane wrote. “Do not misunderstand: if anyone in this office believed Mr. Strickland was innocent, we would not be having this conversation.”
If Strickland is exonerated, he will have suffered the longest wrongful imprisonment known in Missouri history.
