A woman whose murder conviction was overturned after she served 43 years of a life sentence was released Friday, despite attempts in the last month by Missouri’s attorney general to keep her behind bars.
Sandra Hemme, 64, left a prison in Chillicothe, hours after a judge threatened to hold the attorney general’s office in contempt if they continued to fight against her release. She reunited with her family at a nearby park, where she hugged her sister, daughter and granddaughter.
Hemme had been the longest-held wrongly incarcerated woman known in the U.S., according to her legal team at the Innocence Project. The judge originally ruled on June 14 that Hemme’s attorneys had established “clear and convincing evidence” of “actual innocence” and he overturned her conviction. But Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey fought her release in the courts.
“It was too easy to convict an innocent person and way harder than it should have been to get her out, even to the point of court orders being ignored,” her attorney Sean O’Brien said. “It shouldn’t be this hard to free an innocent person.”
That’s my take on the death penalty.
I have a problem with the state executing its citizens to exert control through violence.
I don’t have a problem with those inside of our government being killed as a show of good faith to the citizens when someone decides to use the power given to them by the government to violate other people’s rights. If we’re going to fight wars to protect our society from foreign enemies, we should be willing to use the same level of force to protect it from domestic enemies.
No ordinary citizen, including most government employees, should ever be subject to capital punishment, no matter how heinous their crimes. Police, military, politicians, and other government officials on the other hand should face that possibility when they abuse their power and violate the rights of citizens. The government should show exactly how little tolerance there is to the government being misused for criminal ends.
Of course, this is all too late. American society will never work this way.