A circuit judge, an appellate court and the Missouri Supreme Court agree that a woman whose murder conviction was overturned should be free after 43 years in prison.
Yet Sandra Hemme is still behind bars, leaving her lawyers and legal experts puzzled.
“I’ve never seen it,” said Michael Wolff, a former Missouri Supreme Court judge and professor and dean emeritus of Saint Louis University Law School. “Once the courts have spoken, the courts should be obeyed.”
The lone holdup to freedom for the 64-year-old woman is opposition from Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who has filed court actions seeking to force her to serve additional years for decades-old prison assault cases. The warden at the Chillicothe Correctional Center has declined to let Hemme go, based on Bailey’s actions.
Punishing a person for protecting themselves in a violent hell-hole that she would not have been in if she hadn’t been put there wrongly by the state is seriously fucked up. She almost has a case for entrapment. If the state had not put her in prison, she would not have had the means, the motive, nor the opportunity to commit the crime. And since she was wrongly put there, the state should be liable for any crimes committed.
That’s entirely too logical. Repubs hate their constituents. They hate women. He’s (AG) doing the only thing he knows how: punishing someone weaker than him.
I think that attorney general should have to walk in her shoes for a bit and then have someone hold up his release
Rarely does one ascend to positions of profound influence with the capacity for empathy.