Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker called it “disappointing” that Kevin Strickland’s innocence claim was not heard Thursday, but said he will get his day in court.
“It’s just when,” Baker told reporters following a scheduling hearing Thursday morning, saying her office is pushing for an evidentiary hearing as soon as possible. “While it is not yet too late, it’s late. This is late.”
Utilizing a new law that went into effect Saturday, Jackson County prosecutors filed a 25-page motion Monday that argues Strickland’s innocence is “clear and convincing” in the April 25, 1978, triple homicide in Kansas City.
Judge Kevin Harrell had set a hearing for 8:30 a.m. Thursday, during which prosecutors would have argued that Strickland, 62, has been wrongly imprisoned for more than 40 years.
But the hearing was delayed after the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, under Eric Schmitt, filed an emergency petition asking for the hearing to be stopped. An appeals court granted that motion to give the attorney general’s office, which contends Strickland is guilty, more time to prepare for the hearing.
In a statement Wednesday, Schmitt’s spokesman Chris Nuelle said Strickland was convicted in the killings by a jury. He noted the Missouri Supreme Court previously declined to hear Strickland’s case.
“Those victims deserve justice,” Nuelle said.
Baker said Thursday that four decades should be enough time to investigate Strickland’s innocence claim. She said all her office wants is for a judge to hear the evidence.
“We’re still bogged in process and further litigation,” she said.
In granting the attorney general’s motion, the Western District Court of Appeals ordered Harrell to consider motions filed by the attorney general’s office.
One requested that the 16th Circuit Court of Jackson County and its judges recuse themselves from Strickland’s proceedings. The attorney general cited a letter Baker put out on May 10, which said Dale Youngs, the circuit’s presiding judge, “concurs on behalf” of the court that Strickland’s conviction should be set aside.
At Thursday’s hearing, Harrell proposed that a motion hearing be set for Sept. 24, but Baker and Strickland’s attorneys asked that it be sooner.
A new date was then set for Sept. 13, during which attorneys on all sides will argue over the motions. But the hearing during which prosecutors will argue Strickland is innocent has not been set, and likely will not be for at least the next 11 days.
“We don’t want to stay in this limbo forever,” Baker told Harrell.
One of Strickland’s attorneys, Bob Hoffman of the law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, said every day the case drags on is another day Strickland sits in prison. His attorneys said he will miss his mother’s funeral Saturday because of the delays so far.
Strickland’s attorneys said they think the new law that went into affect Saturday is clear: the attorney general’s office does not have a right to request discovery or file motions in the case.
Senate Minority Leader John Rizzo, who wrote the provision in the law that allows prosecutors to ask judges to exonerate prisoners deemed innocent, agreed in a statement Wednesday that the legislation was not intended to allow the attorney general’s office to file motions in relation to the hearing.
An appeals court ruling that allowed that power Wednesday, he added, was setting “dangerous legal precedent” that the attorney general is using to “needlessly delay justice for the wrongfully imprisoned.”
“This ruling creates new powers out of thin air while ignoring both the letter of the law and the legislative intent behind it,” said Rizzo, a Democrat from Independence.
Because of the appeals court ruling, the attorney general’s office will be allowed to file a motion requesting discovery by Friday evening.
At Thursday’s hearing, five men exonerated in other states sat in the back of the courtroom to show support for Strickland. They are members of a group that has recently started calling itself the National Organization of Exonerees.
“It’s extremely frustrating for us; it’s hurtful,” the group’s chairman, Kenneth Nixon, who was exonerated in Michigan, said of the hearing’s delay. “People tend to forget that ... there’s a human being on the other side of what’s happening today.”
Strickland, he added, is “sitting in a cell, wrongly.”
Tricia Rojo Bushnell, executive director of the Midwest Innocence Project, said Strickland was understandably “unhappy” by the delay, but that after decades behind bars, he remained resilient.
Strickland will not only miss his mother’s funeral, but he also won’t get to see his daughter, who is now in her 40s and flew in for the ceremony, Rojo Bushnell said. Strickland’s daughter was 7 weeks old when he was arrested.
In an opinion piece published Thursday in the Missouri Times, Josh Kezer, who spent 16 years in prison for a southeast Missouri murder he did not commit, said Schmitt “continues to prove himself devoid of empathy and constitutional obligation in defense of victims of crime and injustice.”
“A conservative voter in Missouri, I vote Republican because I believe in and support pro-life, pro-victim, pro-justice, pro-conservative, and pro-Christian values,” Kezer wrote in part. “Schmitt doesn’t represent these ‘pros.’ Not when he does nothing.”
In an investigation published nearly a year ago, The Star reported that, for decades, two men who pleaded guilty swore Strickland was not with them and two other accomplices during the killings. A third, uncharged suspect has also since called Strickland innocent.
The lone eyewitness to the murders told relatives and friends that she tried to recant for years, local prosecutors say. They called her identification the only direct evidence against Strickland at trial.
