Last week in Cameron, Missouri, after four decades behind bars, Kevin Strickland, 62, was released and cleared of the murder conviction that robbed him of his life. He was 18 when he was arrested in 1978: on April 25, he was at his parents’ house, in the living room, watching TV, when at the same time, in Kansas City, an armed gang broke into in a house and shot the young people inside. Three die instantly, a fourth is injured and manages to escape. And it is she, the only witness, who will describe the scene to the police.
Two men are arrested, then Kevin Strickland. Simply because he ran into the two suspects on the morning of the murder. Nothing links him to the crime scene, no fingerprints, no testimony, no clue, but the jury sentences him to life imprisonment.
Kevin Strickland is a free man tonight after spending 43 years behind bars in one of the longest wrongful-conviction cases in U.S. history. @LinseyDavis reports. pic.twitter.com/YqDqkxfPRF
— ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) November 24, 2021
Last year, in 2020, a local newspaper, the Kansas City Star, reopens the file, investigates, finds the letters sent by the survivor to an association to help detainees, letters in which she explains that the police forced her hand, and that the teenager who has turned sixty is innocent. This journalistic investigation prompted the re-examination of his case and his release. A victory of course, but also a great leap into the void.
After 15,487 days of incarceration, Kevin Strickland has no home, car, job, bank account, or savings. And the state of Missouri does not provide any financial compensation for judicial errors like this. So the association which defends him launched a fundraising on the Internet, and a wave of solidarity was formed: 22,000 donors in a few days, all of whom left him words of encouragement, support, compassion, and a jackpot which reached 1.6 million dollars this Tuesday.
“I would not say that I am angry. I feel a lot of things, joy, sadness, fear, that I am going to try to make live together (…) but above all I have the wish that what I suffered never happens to anyone again. “
Kevin Strickland, victim of a miscarriage of justice in the United States
in front of journalists on his release from prison
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Enough to help him rebuild, find accommodation, and above all take care of himself, he who can no longer walk. Knowing that there are things that we cannot catch up on. On leaving prison, Kevin Strickland went to meditate at the grave of his mother, who died last August, who therefore did not see him free. In the United States, according to the national miscarriages registry, since 1989, 2,737 wrongfully convicted have been cleared.
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