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Utopia Talk / Politics / Another "criminal" set free in the US

murder
Member Tue Nov 23 13:58:41
Kevin Strickland to be freed after judge vacates conviction in 1978 triple murders

BY LUKE NOZICKA

A judge on Tuesday granted Jackson County prosecutors’ motion to exonerate Kevin Strickland in a 1978 triple murder and ordered his immediate release, confirming that Strickland suffered one of the longest wrongful convictions in U.S. history.

Judge James Welsh, a retired appeals court judge, granted the motion filed by Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker — the first of its kind under a new Missouri law — that sought to exonerate Strickland, now 62.

Since he was sentenced to prison in June 1979, Strickland has spent more than 42 years and 4 months behind bars — or 15,487 days.

It means Strickland, who was 18 when he was arrested, endured the seventh longest wrongful imprisonment acknowledged in American history, and the longest in Missouri by more than a decade, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, which has logged 2,891 exonerations since 1989. Strickland will soon be listed among 12 exonerees who survived 40 years or more of prison.

“There’s no giving those 43 years back to me,” Strickland previously told The Star. “I lost my life.”

Strickland’s innocence was the focus of a September 2020 investigation by The Star, which interviewed more than two dozen people, including two men who admitted guilt and swore Strickland was not with them and two other accomplices during the killings. The Star also reported that the lone eyewitness to the murders, whose testimony was paramount in the case against Strickland, told relatives she wanted to recant her identification of him and believed she helped send the wrong teenager to prison.

Jackson County prosecutors began reviewing Strickland’s conviction in November 2020 after speaking with his lawyers and reviewing The Star’s investigation.

Following a months-long review of the case, Baker’s office in May announced that Strickland is “factually innocent” in the April 25, 1978, triple murder at 6934 S. Benton Avenue in Kansas City and should be freed immediately. Baker filed her motion seeking to free him when the new law, which allows local prosecutors to do so, went into effect in late August.

“Most of us have heard the famous quotation that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’” Baker said that day, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. “Kevin Strickland stands as our own example of what happens when a system set to be just, just gets it terribly wrong.”

On that fateful night in 1978, four suspects tied up four victims and ransacked the South Benton bungalow. They killed three of them in an execution-style shooting: 20-year-old John Walker, 22-year-old Sherri Black and 21-year-old Larry Ingram. Cynthia Douglas, who was Walker’s girlfriend and Black’s best friend, was shot and played dead. The gunfire forever scarred one of her knees.

After she stumbled out of the house in search of help, Douglas, then 20, told detectives she could identify two of the four suspects: Vincent Bell, 21, and Kilm Adkins, 19. She could not, however, identify two other killers who also fled into the night. One had a brown paper sack over his head, she said. The other carried a shotgun and repeatedly told her, “Don’t look at me.”

But the next day, Douglas described the shotgun-wielding suspect to her sister’s boyfriend, who was not at the bungalow but suggested that the perpetrator might be Strickland. She called police.

Hours later, Douglas watched on the second floor of police headquarters as Strickland, two detainees and a corrections employee stood on a raised stage in green jail uniforms for a lineup. Strickland thought the ordeal would clear his name. Instead, Douglas identified Strickland — which Douglas’ relatives now say she was pressured to do by detectives.

Strickland’s first trial in 1979 ended in a hung jury of 11 to one, with the only Black juror holding out for acquittal. A prosecutor called including a Black juror a mistake he “wouldn’t make again.” Prosecutors intentionally excluded Black people from serving at Strickland’s second trial, his lawyers said. He was then convicted by an all-white jury of one count of capital murder and two counts of second-degree murder.

Prosecutors waived the death penalty, and Strickland became the first Jackson County defendant sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 50 years.

Douglas later recanted her testimony, Baker’s office has said. In 2009, Douglas wrote an email to the Midwest Innocence Project with the subject line “wrongfully charged.”

“I am seeking info on how to help someone that was wrongfully accused,” Douglas wrote. “I was the only eyewitness and things were not clear back then, but now I know more and would like to help this person if I can.”

Showing that Douglas’ recantation was real was the crux of Baker’s case for exoneration during a three-day evidentiary hearing earlier this month. Her team called to the stand Douglas’ mother, sister and daughter, all of whom testified that Douglas told them she picked the “wrong guy,” and that her identification of Strickland burdened her until her death in 2015.

At the long-awaited hearing, Baker’s team faced off with the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, which contended Strickland was guilty and received a fair trial. Its attorneys argued that Douglas did not want to recant, noting that she never did formally, and called the testimony of Douglas’ loved ones “hearsay, upon hearsay, upon hearsay.”

The hearing was the first of its kind under the new law. It was delayed twice because of intervention by the office of Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is running for U.S. Senate. His office was the only agency that actively fought Strickland’s release.

Like it did in Strickland’s case, the AG’s office in the last 20 years has resisted nearly every wrongful conviction case to come before it, according to one analysis. Post-convictions attorneys across the state told The Star last month that the AG’s office was “making a mockery” of the new law by filing motion after motion in Strickland’s case.

‘STRICKLAND WASN’T THERE’

Baker was not alone in calling for Strickland’s freedom in May. Federal prosecutors in western Missouri, Jackson County’s presiding judge, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and other officials also agreed then that he should be exonerated.

In June, more than a dozen state lawmakers as well as Kansas City’s City Council urged Missouri Gov. Mike Parson to pardon Strickland, which he did not. He called Strickland’s clemency application not a “priority.” Not long after, Parson pardoned Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who brandished guns at Black Lives Matter protesters in June 2020.

And earlier this month, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell said he agreed with Baker that the evidence suggesting Strickland was wrongly convicted was “overwhelming.”

The case against Strickland, however, began to crumble almost immediately. Four months after Strickland was convicted, Bell pleaded guilty and insisted that Strickland was innocent. In front of a prosecutor and a judge, Bell testified that Douglas mistook Strickland for 16-year-old Paul Holiway, who prosecutors now say looked similar to Strickland. Douglas “made a hell of a mistake,” Bell said.

“I’m telling you the truth today that Kevin Strickland wasn’t there at the house that day,” Bell testified decades ago. “I’m telling the state and the society out there right now Kevin Strickland wasn’t there at that house.”

When she heard Bell’s version of events, Douglas realized she was wrong, according to a 2016 affidavit signed by her ex-husband, Ronald Richardson. At that moment, she approached a prosecutor and told him she should not have picked Strickland. But the prosecutor told her to go away and threatened to charge her with perjury, Richardson recalled.

Douglas later reached out to a host of other officials in her effort to get Strickland’s case back in court, her sister, Cecile “Cookie” Simmons, testified at the recent evidentiary hearing. They included a judge, a well-known civil rights leader, a member of the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners and a now-former Missouri governor, Simmons said. No one would listen to her.

In addition to Bell and Adkins, both of whom told The Star that Strickland was not involved, Terry Abbott — a third suspect who was never charged — in 2019 told a Midwest Innocence Project investigator he knew there “couldn’t be a more innocent person” than Strickland. Serving time for robbery in a Colorado prison, Abbott said he keeps Strickland, who went by the nickname Nordy, in his prayers because he was “just a kid when this happened to him,” the investigator recalled in an affidavit.

“Terry returned to saying this many times throughout our long conversation, repeating that Nordy is innocent and that there is no way that Nordy would do something like this,” the investigator, Blair Johnson, wrote.

Adkins and Bell spent about 10 years in prison for the murders before they were released in 1989 and 1990, respectively. Abbott remains behind bars in Colorado. Police never investigated Holiway, who Baker’s office says was a stronger suspect than Strickland.

Additional evidence pointed to Strickland’s innocence, Baker’s office found. None of the dozens of fingerprints collected from the crime scene, nor the one on the shotgun that Strickland was alleged to have wielded, were his, for example.

Now, Strickland will not receive a dime from Missouri. The state’s compensation law is narrow and only allows payments to innocent people exonerated through a specific DNA testing statute, which was not be the case for Strickland, or most exonerees across the U.S. Strickland’s attorneys set up an online fundraiser, which has raised about $37,000, to help him pay for basic necessities.

As The Star reported in its initial investigation, Douglas’ ex-husband said it would please Douglas ⁠— who he remembered as a fun-loving grandmother, now looking down from heaven — to know that Strickland gets to go home.

“To know that that day has come, now she can finally rest,” Richardson said in July 2020. “Now, she can finally find peace with it, and say, you know, now it’s over. I mean, 40 years later, he’s free, and now I’m free.”

http://www.kansascity.com/news/article256019917.html

Nimatzo
iChihuaha Tue Nov 23 14:33:31
"Now, Strickland will not receive a dime from Missouri. The state’s compensation law is narrow and only allows payments to innocent people exonerated through a specific DNA testing statute, which was not be the case for Strickland, or most exonerees across the U.S"

I honestly can not fathom the inhumanity in how this process works in the USA. You fucked up, big time, time to pay up accordingly. 300k USD per year of wrongful imprisonment is just fair.

murder
Member Tue Nov 23 14:56:53

But they don't see it as fucking up, because it kept a negro off the streets for 42 years.

All over the US there are black men serving time without being convicted or wrongfully convicted ... and they often stay behind bars even when it becomes apparent that they are innocent of the crime they are accused of or were convicted of.

They've kept guys in jail even after its proven that the prosecution or the cops manufactured evidence.

Habebe
Member Tue Nov 23 16:02:47
Nimatzo, Yeah. This isnt the first case I've heard of that ran into these stupid technicalities.

I think 50k per year would be sufficient for the guy.However I like the idea of disincentivizing holding people wrongfully in lockup.

This is the kind of shit that makes me favor a system that should heavily favor the defendant and bans for profit jails/prisons.

How insane is it that people we have a system that pays jails more money to have repeat offenders and longer sentences.

AND THEN!!!! To throw salt in that would these companies are given the privelege to lobby for harsher sentencing laws.

Let that sink in.

This was sold under the idea of a "free market".A free market than encourages legal slavery.

And this isn't a handful of people, this is huge and wide spread.

Bob Barker makes a fortune selling jail approved items from beds to snacks.

So its Not just the for profit jails playing into this.

show deleted posts

murder Member	Tue Nov 23 13:58:41 Kevin Strickland to be freed after judge vacates conviction in 1978 triple murders BY LUKE NOZICKA A judge on Tuesday granted Jackson County prosecutors’ motion to exonerate Kevin Strickland in a 1978 triple murder and ordered his immediate release, confirming that Strickland suffered one of the longest wrongful convictions in U.S. history. Judge James Welsh, a retired appeals court judge, granted the motion filed by Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker — the first of its kind under a new Missouri law — that sought to exonerate Strickland, now 62. Since he was sentenced to prison in June 1979, Strickland has spent more than 42 years and 4 months behind bars — or 15,487 days. It means Strickland, who was 18 when he was arrested, endured the seventh longest wrongful imprisonment acknowledged in American history, and the longest in Missouri by more than a decade, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, which has logged 2,891 exonerations since 1989. Strickland will soon be listed among 12 exonerees who survived 40 years or more of prison. “There’s no giving those 43 years back to me,” Strickland previously told The Star. “I lost my life.” Strickland’s innocence was the focus of a September 2020 investigation by The Star, which interviewed more than two dozen people, including two men who admitted guilt and swore Strickland was not with them and two other accomplices during the killings. The Star also reported that the lone eyewitness to the murders, whose testimony was paramount in the case against Strickland, told relatives she wanted to recant her identification of him and believed she helped send the wrong teenager to prison. Jackson County prosecutors began reviewing Strickland’s conviction in November 2020 after speaking with his lawyers and reviewing The Star’s investigation. Following a months-long review of the case, Baker’s office in May announced that Strickland is “factually innocent” in the April 25, 1978, triple murder at 6934 S. Benton Avenue in Kansas City and should be freed immediately. Baker filed her motion seeking to free him when the new law, which allows local prosecutors to do so, went into effect in late August. “Most of us have heard the famous quotation that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’” Baker said that day, quoting Martin Luther King Jr. “Kevin Strickland stands as our own example of what happens when a system set to be just, just gets it terribly wrong.” On that fateful night in 1978, four suspects tied up four victims and ransacked the South Benton bungalow. They killed three of them in an execution-style shooting: 20-year-old John Walker, 22-year-old Sherri Black and 21-year-old Larry Ingram. Cynthia Douglas, who was Walker’s girlfriend and Black’s best friend, was shot and played dead. The gunfire forever scarred one of her knees. After she stumbled out of the house in search of help, Douglas, then 20, told detectives she could identify two of the four suspects: Vincent Bell, 21, and Kilm Adkins, 19. She could not, however, identify two other killers who also fled into the night. One had a brown paper sack over his head, she said. The other carried a shotgun and repeatedly told her, “Don’t look at me.” But the next day, Douglas described the shotgun-wielding suspect to her sister’s boyfriend, who was not at the bungalow but suggested that the perpetrator might be Strickland. She called police. Hours later, Douglas watched on the second floor of police headquarters as Strickland, two detainees and a corrections employee stood on a raised stage in green jail uniforms for a lineup. Strickland thought the ordeal would clear his name. Instead, Douglas identified Strickland — which Douglas’ relatives now say she was pressured to do by detectives. Strickland’s first trial in 1979 ended in a hung jury of 11 to one, with the only Black juror holding out for acquittal. A prosecutor called including a Black juror a mistake he “wouldn’t make again.” Prosecutors intentionally excluded Black people from serving at Strickland’s second trial, his lawyers said. He was then convicted by an all-white jury of one count of capital murder and two counts of second-degree murder. Prosecutors waived the death penalty, and Strickland became the first Jackson County defendant sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 50 years. Douglas later recanted her testimony, Baker’s office has said. In 2009, Douglas wrote an email to the Midwest Innocence Project with the subject line “wrongfully charged.” “I am seeking info on how to help someone that was wrongfully accused,” Douglas wrote. “I was the only eyewitness and things were not clear back then, but now I know more and would like to help this person if I can.” Showing that Douglas’ recantation was real was the crux of Baker’s case for exoneration during a three-day evidentiary hearing earlier this month. Her team called to the stand Douglas’ mother, sister and daughter, all of whom testified that Douglas told them she picked the “wrong guy,” and that her identification of Strickland burdened her until her death in 2015. At the long-awaited hearing, Baker’s team faced off with the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, which contended Strickland was guilty and received a fair trial. Its attorneys argued that Douglas did not want to recant, noting that she never did formally, and called the testimony of Douglas’ loved ones “hearsay, upon hearsay, upon hearsay.” The hearing was the first of its kind under the new law. It was delayed twice because of intervention by the office of Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is running for U.S. Senate. His office was the only agency that actively fought Strickland’s release. Like it did in Strickland’s case, the AG’s office in the last 20 years has resisted nearly every wrongful conviction case to come before it, according to one analysis. Post-convictions attorneys across the state told The Star last month that the AG’s office was “making a mockery” of the new law by filing motion after motion in Strickland’s case. ‘STRICKLAND WASN’T THERE’ Baker was not alone in calling for Strickland’s freedom in May. Federal prosecutors in western Missouri, Jackson County’s presiding judge, Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas and other officials also agreed then that he should be exonerated. In June, more than a dozen state lawmakers as well as Kansas City’s City Council urged Missouri Gov. Mike Parson to pardon Strickland, which he did not. He called Strickland’s clemency application not a “priority.” Not long after, Parson pardoned Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who brandished guns at Black Lives Matter protesters in June 2020. And earlier this month, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell said he agreed with Baker that the evidence suggesting Strickland was wrongly convicted was “overwhelming.” The case against Strickland, however, began to crumble almost immediately. Four months after Strickland was convicted, Bell pleaded guilty and insisted that Strickland was innocent. In front of a prosecutor and a judge, Bell testified that Douglas mistook Strickland for 16-year-old Paul Holiway, who prosecutors now say looked similar to Strickland. Douglas “made a hell of a mistake,” Bell said. “I’m telling you the truth today that Kevin Strickland wasn’t there at the house that day,” Bell testified decades ago. “I’m telling the state and the society out there right now Kevin Strickland wasn’t there at that house.” When she heard Bell’s version of events, Douglas realized she was wrong, according to a 2016 affidavit signed by her ex-husband, Ronald Richardson. At that moment, she approached a prosecutor and told him she should not have picked Strickland. But the prosecutor told her to go away and threatened to charge her with perjury, Richardson recalled. Douglas later reached out to a host of other officials in her effort to get Strickland’s case back in court, her sister, Cecile “Cookie” Simmons, testified at the recent evidentiary hearing. They included a judge, a well-known civil rights leader, a member of the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners and a now-former Missouri governor, Simmons said. No one would listen to her. In addition to Bell and Adkins, both of whom told The Star that Strickland was not involved, Terry Abbott — a third suspect who was never charged — in 2019 told a Midwest Innocence Project investigator he knew there “couldn’t be a more innocent person” than Strickland. Serving time for robbery in a Colorado prison, Abbott said he keeps Strickland, who went by the nickname Nordy, in his prayers because he was “just a kid when this happened to him,” the investigator recalled in an affidavit. “Terry returned to saying this many times throughout our long conversation, repeating that Nordy is innocent and that there is no way that Nordy would do something like this,” the investigator, Blair Johnson, wrote. Adkins and Bell spent about 10 years in prison for the murders before they were released in 1989 and 1990, respectively. Abbott remains behind bars in Colorado. Police never investigated Holiway, who Baker’s office says was a stronger suspect than Strickland. Additional evidence pointed to Strickland’s innocence, Baker’s office found. None of the dozens of fingerprints collected from the crime scene, nor the one on the shotgun that Strickland was alleged to have wielded, were his, for example. Now, Strickland will not receive a dime from Missouri. The state’s compensation law is narrow and only allows payments to innocent people exonerated through a specific DNA testing statute, which was not be the case for Strickland, or most exonerees across the U.S. Strickland’s attorneys set up an online fundraiser, which has raised about $37,000, to help him pay for basic necessities. As The Star reported in its initial investigation, Douglas’ ex-husband said it would please Douglas ⁠— who he remembered as a fun-loving grandmother, now looking down from heaven — to know that Strickland gets to go home. “To know that that day has come, now she can finally rest,” Richardson said in July 2020. “Now, she can finally find peace with it, and say, you know, now it’s over. I mean, 40 years later, he’s free, and now I’m free.” http://www.kansascity.com/news/article256019917.html
Nimatzo iChihuaha	Tue Nov 23 14:33:31 "Now, Strickland will not receive a dime from Missouri. The state’s compensation law is narrow and only allows payments to innocent people exonerated through a specific DNA testing statute, which was not be the case for Strickland, or most exonerees across the U.S" I honestly can not fathom the inhumanity in how this process works in the USA. You fucked up, big time, time to pay up accordingly. 300k USD per year of wrongful imprisonment is just fair.
murder Member	Tue Nov 23 14:56:53 But they don't see it as fucking up, because it kept a negro off the streets for 42 years. All over the US there are black men serving time without being convicted or wrongfully convicted ... and they often stay behind bars even when it becomes apparent that they are innocent of the crime they are accused of or were convicted of. They've kept guys in jail even after its proven that the prosecution or the cops manufactured evidence.
Habebe Member	Tue Nov 23 16:02:47 Nimatzo, Yeah. This isnt the first case I've heard of that ran into these stupid technicalities. I think 50k per year would be sufficient for the guy.However I like the idea of disincentivizing holding people wrongfully in lockup. This is the kind of shit that makes me favor a system that should heavily favor the defendant and bans for profit jails/prisons. How insane is it that people we have a system that pays jails more money to have repeat offenders and longer sentences. AND THEN!!!! To throw salt in that would these companies are given the privelege to lobby for harsher sentencing laws. Let that sink in. This was sold under the idea of a "free market".A free market than encourages legal slavery. And this isn't a handful of people, this is huge and wide spread. Bob Barker makes a fortune selling jail approved items from beds to snacks. So its Not just the for profit jails playing into this.
	show deleted posts

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