Well done, Mike Parson. You too, Eric Schmitt. Your war on common decency claimed quite a dazzling victory last week when Kevin Strickland’s mother, 85-year-old Rosetta Savanah Thorton, died without her son — her “factually innocent” son — by her side.
Strickland, the 62-year-Missouri man who has so far served 43 years for a triple murder that prosecutors, actual guilty parties and the evidence all say he did not commit, told The Star in May that getting to see his mother again before she passed was his top priority.
She suffered from dementia, and he was not sure she’d recognize him. But in the history of mothers, sons and saying goodbye, when was that ever the point? “We’re going to speed down the highway” toward her once free, Strickland said three months ago. “I got to get there.”
“He knew she was very ill,” Strickland’s attorney Robert Hoffman said last Tuesday. “He was hoping he would get out soon enough to see her while she was alive. It’s just a tragic situation.”
And more tragic still because the only reason Rosetta Thorton died without Strickland holding her hand is that Missouri Gov. Mike Parson and Attorney General Eric Schmitt made sure of it.
On May 10, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker got up in front of God and a bunch of TV cameras and apologized for “a profound error we must correct right now.” The case against Strickland was “thin from its inception,” and had long since melted to nothing at all. But we’ve been over all that, and Parson isn’t interested in the details.
Or rather, isn’t going to risk doing anything that might read like compassion. Or ever let even a wrongful conviction slip away without a fight.
First, he said pardoning Strickland just wasn’t a priority, with thousands of others in line ahead of him.
Then, the governor said he wasn’t sure of Strickland’s innocence. “I am not convinced that I’m willing to put other people at risk if you’re not right,” he said. Nor was he willing to meet with those who knew every nuance of the case to answer any specific concerns or questions he might have, because where would that get him?
Now, more than three months after Parson should have pardoned Strickland, he hasn’t and won’t.
Schmitt, who is running for Roy Blunt’s U.S. Senate seat, has gone even further. His office is arguing that Strickland is without any question guilty, and has “worked to evade responsibility” for the killings ever since he was sent away as a teenager.
Neither of these gentlemen ever seems to worry about the risk that he’s not right in assuming that everyone else is wrong about Kevin Strickland.
Does either ever think maybe he’s the one trying to evade responsibility — for stealing a man’s life, and then working hard to make sure it stays that way?
Does either wonder whether keeping a parent and her child, who himself uses a wheelchair now, apart at the end is an act with consequences a lot more profound than who does or doesn’t remain the tough guy hero of the Republican base? We’re guessing no.
But when Kevin Strickland does go free — and yes, he will — they can tell their voters without any fear of contradiction that it wasn’t because they ever showed him the slightest shred of humanity. And the rest of us will remember it, too.
