Kevin Strickland, 62, has spent the last 40-plus years in prison for a 1978 triple murder he says he did not commit. His lawyers, local prosecutors and Kansas City officials have urged he be released, but the Missouri Attorney General’s Office maintains he’s guilty.
Two days after a new state law took effect to help bring justice to the wrongfully convicted, the Jackson County prosecutor announced the first inmate who could benefit: Kevin Strickland.
The law allows prosecutors to ask a judge to reverse a conviction in an innocence case.
In a 25-page motion, prosecutors argued that Strickland’s innocence in the April 25, 1978, shooting in Kansas City is “clear and convincing.” They asked the court to quickly set a hearing, examine the evidence and throw out Strickland’s conviction, which would free him. The evidence, they added, shows that Strickland, now 62, “should not remain in custody a day longer.”
“Most of us have heard the famous quotation that ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,’” Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said in a statement Monday. “Kevin Strickland stands as our own example of what happens when a system set to be just, just gets it terribly wrong.”
Specifics for what comes next are not clear, but there’s expected to be a hearing where a judge could decide whether to toss out the conviction. If Strickland is exonerated, his imprisonment will go down as the longest known wrongful conviction in Missouri history: He has spent more than 15,403 days in prison.
The Missouri Attorney General’s Office, which has contended Strickland is guilty and has accused local prosecutors of misunderstanding the case, will be allowed to question witnesses and make arguments at the hearing.
The new law was passed earlier this month as part of a package of criminal justice reforms the Missouri legislature approved and sent to Gov. Mike Parson’s desk in May.
It gives local prosecutors a mechanism previously missing in state law to pursue freedom for the wrongfully convicted, a step prosecutors’ offices around the nation are taking in the age of criminal justice reform. Prior to the law change, petitions to have convictions tossed have generally only come from the inmates themselves.
Conviction Integrity Units set up by reform-minded prosecutors have increasingly determined that people their offices charged decades ago were wrongfully convicted and imprisoned. Strickland is the first person deemed innocent by Baker’s unit.
Efforts to free the innocent have been limited in Missouri.
Across the state, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner has said she intends to use the new law, which went into effect Saturday, to seek the freedom of Lamar Johnson, whom she says was wrongly convicted in a 1994 murder. The state supreme court rejected Gardner’s request for Johnson to get a new trial this spring, before lawmakers worked to grant that power to local prosecutors.
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