Senior Judge James Welsh delivered his ruling on Tuesday morning to overturn the conviction of 62-year-old Kevin Strickland, who served 43 years at the Western Missouri Correctional Center in Cameron, Missouri, pleading guilty to one count of death and two counts. had gone. In the triple murder case, a case of second degree murder has come to the fore. He received a life sentence of 50 years without the possibility of parole for a crime he said was not involved.
Michael Mansour, with the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office, told CNN that his office expects Strickland to be released on Tuesday.
“To say we are extremely happy and grateful is an understatement,” Baker said. “It brings justice – in the end – to a man who has tragically suffered so much as a result of this wrongful conviction.”
Strickland testified earlier this month During a three-day evidence hearing — which included eyewitness testimony given under oath — Strickland’s legal team presented evidence and arguments to acquit him.
Douglas survived the shooting after suffering a shotgun injury and told police that Vincent Bell and Kill Adkins were the two criminals. But according to KSHB, Strickland, whom she knew, was not identified at the scene until a day later, when it was suggested to her that Strickland’s hair matched Douglas’ description of the shooter. Douglas claimed that his initial failure to identify him was due to his use of cognac and marijuana, according to KSHB.
But over the past 30 years she said she made a mistake and misidentified Strickland. According to KSHB, Douglas made efforts to liberate Strickland through the Midwest Innocence Project.
According to Strickland’s attorney, Robert Hoffman, the two attackers that Douglas identified both pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and each served nearly 10 years in prison for the crimes.
“Most of us have heard the famous quote that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere’,” Peters Baker said in an online statement posted in August. “Kevin Strickland stands as our own example of what happens when a system justified, just gets it horribly wrong.”
In 2020, there were 129 quarantined across the country. According to a report by The National Registry of Exonerations, defendants acquitted last year lost a total of 1,737 years behind bars, an average of 13.4 years per acquittal. And 30% of false convictions can be traced back to the identification of false eyewitnesses in the registry’s database.
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