Man Wants Exoneration in Triple Murder After Prosecutor Says He Was Wrongfully Convicted
A Kansas City, Missouri, man who has been in prison since 1979 is seeking exoneration for a triple murder for which many people, even a prosecutor, says he was wrongfully convicted, the Associated Press reported.
Attorneys for Kevin Strickland will argue his case Monday in an evidentiary hearing after legal procedures and canceled hearings resulted in months of delays.
Strickland, 62, has lived most of his life in prison after his conviction for the fatal shootings of Larry Ingram, 21; John Walker, 20; and Sherrie Black, 22, in Kansas City on April 25, 1978. He has always maintained he is innocent, saying that he was watching television at home at the time of the killings, when he was 18 years old, the AP said.
Republican Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who is running for Senate, said he believes Strickland committed the murders. Motions filed by his office prompted most of the delays in Strickland's bid for exoneration, according to the AP.
For more reporting from the Associated Press, see below.
Strickland, a Black man, saw his first trial end in a hung jury when the only Black juror, a woman, held out for acquittal. After his second trial in 1979, he was convicted by an all-white jury of one count of capital murder and two counts of second-degree murder.
In May, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker announced that she and other legal and political leaders believe Strickland was wrongfully convicted. She said evidence used to convict him had been recanted or disproven since his trial.
Two other men convicted in the killings later insisted that Strickland wasn't at the crime scene, The Kansas City Star reported. And before she died, the only eyewitness to the killings recanted her testimony that Strickland was the shooter.
Strickland, who has a history of back problems, was brought in a wheelchair Monday morning into a room near where the hearing was about to begin. Asked how he felt, he said, "Scared."
His brother, L.R. Strickland, said before the hearing that he was also scared.
"We've been sort of set aside for so long. It seems like there's so much bureaucracy involved, and we never got a simple determination of what seemed to be factually pertinent to that my brother is actually innocent, because he is," L.R. Strickland said.
In June, the Missouri Supreme Court declined to hear Strickland's petition. Republican Governor Mike Parson also refused to pardon Strickland, saying he wasn't convinced that Strickland was innocent.
Hearings were scheduled in August in DeKalb County, where Strickland is imprisoned. Those hearings were canceled after Peters Baker used a new state law to seek an evidentiary hearing in Jackson County, where Strickland was convicted. The law allows local prosecutors to challenge convictions if they believe the defendant did not commit the crime.
A hearing scheduled for September 2 was delayed after Schmitt's office sought more time for the court to hear several motions his office filed in the case.
Schmitt sought to have all 16th Circuit judges in Jackson County recused from presiding over the evidentiary hearing because the presiding judge in that circuit had said he agreed that Strickland was wrongfully convicted.
The Missouri Supreme Court ruled September 30 that the Jackson County judges should be recused from the hearing to avoid any suggestions of impropriety or bias, delaying another hearing. Retired Senior Judge James Welsh was then appointed to preside over the case.
