Plain Old Justice

STATE UNLIKELY TO COMPENSATE STRICKLAND

By K. W. Locke

It took a lot of lawyers to free an innocent man.  In 1979, Kevin Strickland went on trial in Kansas City for a triple murder perpetrated by four attackers.  The prosecution charged that Strickland was one of the four.

The jury could not reach agreement on a verdict and the judge declared a mistrial.   At the second trial a jury convicted Strickland, based on a mistaken identification by a witness who survived the attack.

The witness did not realize she had pointed to the wrong man until after Strickland's conviction, when two of the actual murderers confessed.  One of them bore a resemblance to Strickland.

The real killers stated that Strickland had not been involved.  Nonetheless, Strickland remained in prison, his appeals denied.

In 2020, lawyers from the Midwest Innocence Project teamed up with three attorneys from a prestigious international law firm, who donated their services.   They assembled the evidence indicating that Strickland was innocent and took it to the prosecuting attorney for Jackson County, Missouri, which includes Kansas City.

The prosecuting attorney, Jean Peters Baker, became convinced of Strickland's innocence and joined the effort to exonerate him.   Ethically, a prosecutor's duty is not merely to try to convict the guilty but to do justice.  However, it is rare to see a proscutor work hard to free someone already convicted and in prison.

A previous post explained how Peters actually did more than Missouri's canon of legal ethics requires.  Some states have adopted ethical codes requiring a prosecutor to seek to undo a conviction if there is clear and convincing evidence that the defendant was innocent.  Missouri does not.   Peters did it anyway.

She supported the Innocence Project's attempt to get the Missouri Supreme Court to overturn Strickland's conviction.  The Court did not.   That result was not too surprising, considering that Missouri did not have a law specifically allowing the Court to  act.

However, the Missouri legislature had enacted a new statute allowing prosecutors to return to the court which convicted a defendant and ask the court to undo it.   When the law took effect in August 2021, Peters filed a 25-page motion.

The Missouri attorney general opposed Peters, disputing that there was clear and convincing evidence of Strickland's innocence.  After a 3-day hearing, the judge ruled that Strickland did not commit the crime and ordered his release from prison.

On November 23, Strickland became a free man for the first time in 43 years.   However, it is unlikely that the state will compensate Strickland for those years.   Missouri law allows such compensation in very few cases, and Strickland's exoneration was not based on DNA evidence.

In contrast, an innocent man recently pardoned in North Carolina may receive up to $750,000 for his wrongful imprisonment.

In 1994, because a witness lied on the stand, a North Carolina jury convicted 19-year-old Montoyae Dontae Sharpe of murder.   Weeks later, the witness admitted she had lied but Sharpe remained behind bars for a quarter century.

In 2019, a court overturned Sharpe's conviction and the prosecution dropped the charges.  However, that did not qualify Sharpe to receive compensation from the state.

On November 12, 2021, North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper granted Sharpe a "pardon of innocence."  Cooper now is eligible to receive $50,000 for each year he spent in prison, up to a total $750,000.