CHILLICOTHE, Mo. — This woman was freed on Friday after Missouri’s attorney general fought for more than a month to keep her in jail. Her murder sentence was overturned after 43 years in prison.
Sandy Hemme, 63, got out of Chillicothe prison on Friday, hours after a judge said the attorney general’s office would be held in contempt if they didn’t stop fighting for her freedom. A nearby park was where she met up with her family again. There, she hugged her daughter and granddaughter. Joyce Ann Kays, her sister, was beaming.
On June 14, the judge first said that Hemme’s lawyers had shown “clear and convincing evidence” of “actual innocence,” which meant that the conviction should be thrown out. But Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey fought in court to keep her from being freed.
Judge Ryan Horsman said at a meeting on Friday that if Hemme wasn’t freed by a certain time, he wanted Bailey to show up in court on Tuesday morning, and he threatened to hold the attorney general’s office in contempt.
He also told Bailey’s office off for calling the warden and telling jail officials not to let Hemme go even though an appeals court panel said she could. “You should never do that,” Horsman told her. “It is wrong to call someone and tell them to ignore a court order.”
The Missouri Corrections Department then said Hemme, who had been locked up for 43 years, would be freed before Friday at 6 p.m. CDT.
Hemme’s family were in court on Friday, but they didn’t want to talk after the hearing. The rest of her family was with her father, who had kidney failure and was in the hospital before being moved to hospice care. “He only wants to see his daughter free in this life,” Hemme’s lawyer, Sean O’Brien, wrote in a court document on Thursday. “Just as Ms. Hemme wants nothing more than to be at her father’s bedside at this time.”
He also said that keeping the matter open was causing “irreparable harm and emotional distress” to their family.
After the court meeting on Friday, O’Brien said, “she is going right to her father” when she got out of jail. “It’s been a long time coming.”
In the past month, a circuit judge, an appellate court, and the Missouri Supreme Court all agreed that Hemme should be freed. However, she was still being held in jail, which confused her lawyers and other lawyers.
Professor and dean emeritus of Saint Louis University Law School Michael Wolff said, “I’ve never seen it.” Wolff used to be a judge on the Missouri Supreme Court. “When the courts say something, people should listen to them.”
The attorney general was the only thing stopping her from being free. He has taken her to court to try to force her to spend more time for assaults she committed decades ago. Because of what Bailey did, the director at the Chillicothe Correctional Center won’t let Hemme go.
After looking at all the proof, Horsman decided on June 14 that the person was actually innocent. On July 8, a state appeals court said that Hemme should be freed while the case was still being looked into. Thursday, the Missouri Supreme Court did not overturn the lower courts’ decisions that let her go free on her own recognizance and stay with her sister and brother-in-law.
Bailey, a Republican who is running against someone in the Aug. 6 primary race, sent the Circuit Court another request late Thursday night, asking them to think about it again.
Hemme was in the Chillicothe Correctional Center on a life term for stabbing and killing St. Joseph, Missouri library worker Patricia Jeschke in 1980.
Based on what her lawyers at the Innocence Project say, she is the longest-held wrongfully jailed woman in U.S. history.
Hemme’s instant freedom was complicated by the sentences she got for crimes she did while she was in jail. She got 10 years in prison in 1996 for threatening a jail guard with a razor blade. In 1984, she got 2 years in prison for “threatening to commit violence.” Bailey had said that Hemme is dangerous to herself and others and that she should begin serving her time right away.
Her lawyers said that keeping her in jail any longer would be a “draconian outcome.”
Some lawyers agreed with them.
A law professor at St. Louis’s Washington University School of Law, Peter Joy, said that the effort to keep Hemme in jail was “a shock to the conscience of any decent human being” because there is strong proof that she didn’t do the crime.
Bailey’s office did not answer right away to texts Friday asking for comment.
Bailey, who became attorney general when Eric Schmitt was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022, has a history of being against overturning convictions, even when local officials show proof that the person was innocent.
A lot of research led Horsman to say in June that Hemme was heavily sedated and in a “malleable mental state” when police frequently questioned her in a psychiatric hospital after the murder. Her lawyers said that her final confession was made up of “often monosyllabic responses to leading questions.” Aside from her confession, the prosecutor in her case said there was no other proof that linked her to the crime.
The judge found that the St. Joseph Police Department ignored evidence that pointed to Michael Holman, a fellow officer who died in 2015. The prosecution also wasn’t told about FBI results that could have cleared Hemme, so it was never made public before her cases.
Holman’s pickup truck was seen outside of Jeschke’s apartment, he tried to use her credit card, and her earrings were found in his home. This was shown to Horsman as proof.
In his report, Horsman said that Hemme was “proven to have been wronged.”
