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A 60-year-old African-American was exonerated and released Tuesday by a Missouri court after spending 43 years in prison over a miscarriage of justice. Kevin Strickland, 62, was sentenced in 1979 to life imprisonment by an all-white jury for a triple murder he has always denied having committed.
“There was no material evidence linking him to the crime and he was convicted solely on the basis of the testimony” of a survivor who then retracted, noted Judge James Welsh in his decision. In addition, two of the four perpetrators of the murderous raid had formally exonerated him, said the magistrate. “The court’s confidence in Kevin Strickland’s conviction is so undermined it cannot stand”, he concluded by ordering the “immediate release” of the prisoner.
The Jackson County prosecutor, who had asked for the conviction to be overturned, praised the move. “Justice is – finally – done for this man who suffered so much from this tragic miscarriage of justice”, Jean Peters Baker said in a statement. The name of Kevin Strickland has now added to a long list of Americans victims of miscarriages of justice, and is among those who have spent the most time behind bars.
According to the “National Registry of Exonerations”, a project carried out by several American universities, the approximately 2,500 people cleared by justice over the last thirty years have spent an average of 13.9 years in prison, with a maximum of 47 years and 2 months. .
Obtaining compensation for these lost years was not always easy, the Midwest Innocence Project organization, which carried Kevin Strickland’s case, set up a crowdfunding campaign on the internet to help him settle in his new life.
He had recently indicated to the Washington Post wanting, once free, to go to the grave of his mother, who died this summer, and to see, for the first time, the ocean.
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