A woman whose murder conviction was reversed after 43 years in jail was released on Friday, despite Missouri’s attorney general’s efforts for more than a month to keep her in prison.
Sandra Hemme, 63, was released from jail in Chillicothe on Friday, hours after a court threatened to place the attorney general’s office in contempt if they continued to fight her release. She reconnected with her family in a neighboring park, hugging her daughter and grandchild. Her sister, Joyce Ann Kays, was all smiles.
On June 14, the judge found that Hemme’s counsel had presented “clear and convincing evidence” of “actual innocence” and reversed the conviction. But Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey battled her release in court. During a court hearing Friday, Judge Ryan Horsman stated that if Hemme was not released by a certain time, Bailey himself should appear in court Tuesday morning, and he threatened to hold the attorney general’s office in contempt.
He also chastised Bailey’s office for contacting the warden and instructing prison officials not to release Hemme after an appeals court panel said she may be released. “I would suggest you never do that,” Horsman said. He continued: “To call someone and tell them to disregard a court order is wrong.”
The Missouri Corrections Department then announced that Hemme, who has been in prison for 43 years, will be released before 6 p.m. CDT Friday.
Two of Hemme’s relatives were in court on Friday but declined to speak after the session. The rest of her family was with Hemme’s father, who was hospitalized with kidney failure and transferred to palliative care. “He only wants to see his daughter free in his lifetime, just as Ms. Hemme wants nothing more than to be by her father’s bedside at this time,” Hemme’s attorney, Sean O’Brien, said in a court filing Thursday.
He went on to say that any further delay was hurting their family “irreparable harm and emotional distress.”
After her release, “she is going right to her father,” O’Brien said following Friday’s court appearance. “This has been a long time coming.”
Over the previous month, a circuit judge, an appeal court, and the Missouri Supreme Court all agreed that Hemme should be released, yet she remains in jail, perplexing her attorneys and legal experts.
“I’ve never seen it,” said Michael Wolff, a former Missouri Supreme Court judge, professor, and dean emeritus at Saint Louis University Law School. “Once the courts have spoken, the courts should be obeyed.”
The attorney general was the only impediment to her release, having initiated court actions to require her to serve additional years on decades-old prison assault offenses. Based on Bailey’s behavior, the warden at Chillicothe Correctional Center has declined to release Hemme.
On June 14, Horsman determined that “the totality of the evidence supports a finding of actual innocence.” On July 8, a state appeals court ordered that Hemme should be released while the matter was still being reviewed. The Missouri Supreme Court declined Thursday to overturn lower court findings that permitted her to be released on her recognizance and placed with her sister and brother-in-law.
Bailey, a Republican facing opposition in the August 6 primary election, filed another request late Thursday, asking the Circuit Court to reconsider.
Hemme was serving a life term at the Chillicothe Correctional Center for the 1980 stabbing death of librarian Patricia Jeschke in St. Joseph, Missouri.
She is the longest-held wrongfully incarcerated woman in the United States, according to her legal team at the Innocence Project.
Hemme’s rapid release was complicated by the penalties she received for crimes committed while in prison. She received a 10-year sentence in 1996 for using a razor blade to attack a prison worker, as well as a two-year sentence in 1984 for “offering to commit violence.” Bailey had claimed that Hemme posed a safety danger to herself and others and that she should begin serving those sentences immediately.
Her advocates argued that keeping her detained any longer would be a “draconian outcome.”
Several legal experts concurred.
Peter Joy, a law professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, said the campaign to keep Hemme in prison was “a shock to the conscience of any decent human being,” given that evidence strongly indicated she did not commit the crime.
Bailey’s office did not immediately reply to requests for comment Friday.
Bailey, who was appointed attorney general after Eric Schmitt was elected to the United States Senate in 2022, has a track record of opposing reversing convictions, even when local prosecutors have proof of real innocence.
After a thorough investigation, Horsman decided in June that Hemme was severely drugged and in a “malleable mental state” when detectives repeatedly questioned her in a psychiatric institution following the murder. Her attorneys described her last admission as “often monosyllabic responses to leading questions.” Aside from her confession, there was no evidence linking her to the crime, according to the prosecutor.
The St. Joseph Police Department, meanwhile, ignored evidence pointing to Michael Holman, a fellow officer who died in 2015, and the prosecution was not informed of FBI data that may have exonerated Hemme, so it was never given before her trials, the court determined.
The evidence provided to Horsman revealed that Holman’s pickup truck was observed outside Jeschke’s apartment, that he attempted to use her credit card, and that her earrings were discovered at his residence.
Horsman’s assessment described Hemme as “the victim of a manifest injustice.”