November 24, (THEWILL) – A Missouri man wrongfully convicted of a triple murder in 1978 and imprisoned for more than 42 years has been exonerated and released.
Judge James Welsh, a retired appeals court judge, granted the motion filed by Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker (the first of its kind under a new Missouri law) that sought to exonerate Strickland, who is now 62.
Strickland has maintained his innocence since his arrest at age 18. He had told the police that he was at home watching television. No physical evidence ever linked him to the crimes.
Since he was sentenced to prison in June 1979, Strickland has spent 42 years and 4 months behind bars.
It means Strickland, who was 18 when he was arrested, endured the seventh longest wrongful imprisonment acknowledged in American history, and the longest in Missouri by more than a decade, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, which has logged 2,891 exonerations since 1989.
He would be listed among 12 exonerees who survived 40 years or more of prison.
“There’s no giving those 43 years back to me. I lost my life,” Strickland said.
Strickland’s innocence was the focus of a September 2020 investigation by The Star, which interviewed more than two dozen people, including two men who admitted guilt and swore Strickland was not with them and two other accomplices during the killings.
The Star also reported that the lone eyewitness to the murders, whose testimony was paramount in the case against Strickland, told relatives she wanted to recant her identification of him and believed she helped send the wrong teenager to prison.
Jackson County prosecutors began reviewing Strickland’s conviction in November 2020 after speaking with his lawyers and reviewing The Star’s investigation.
Following a months-long review of the case, Baker’s office in May announced that Strickland is “factually innocent” in the April 25, 1978, triple murder at 6934 S.Benton Avenue in Kansas City and should be freed immediately.
Baker filed her motion seeking to free him when the new law, which allows local prosecutors to do so, went into effect in late August.
“To say we’re extremely pleased and grateful is an understatement. This brings justice — finally — to a man who has tragically suffered so, so greatly as a result of this wrongful conviction”, Baker said Tuesday.
Lawyers for the Midwest Innocence Project, who have worked for months to help free Strickland, told the BBC they were “ecstatic” about the news.
“We were confident any judge who saw the evidence would find Mr Strickland is innocent and that is exactly what happened. Nothing will give him the 43 years he has lost and he returns home to a state that will not pay him a cent for the time it stole from him. That is not justice,” said Midwest Innocence Project legal director Tricia Rojo Bushnell in a statement.
The state of Missouri only compensates prisoners exonerated through DNA evidence, not because of eyewitness testimony, according to the Midwest Innocence Project.
On that fateful night in 1978, four suspects tied up four victims and ransacked the South Benton bungalow. They killed three of them in an execution-style shooting: 20-year-old John Walker, 22-year-old Sherri Black and 21-year-old Larry Ingram.
Cynthia Douglas, who was Walker’s girlfriend and Black’s best friend, was shot and played dead. The gunfire forever scarred one of her knees.
After she stumbled out of the house in search of help, Douglas, then 20, told detectives she could identify two of the four suspects: Vincent Bell, 21, and Kilm Adkins, 19. She could not, however, identify two other killers who also fled into the night. One had a brown paper sack over his head, she said. The other carried a shotgun and repeatedly told her, “Don’t look at me.”
But the next day, Douglas described the shotgun-wielding suspect to her sister’s boyfriend, who was not at the bungalow but suggested that the perpetrator might be Strickland. She then called the police.
Hours later, Douglas watched on the second floor of police headquarters as Strickland, two detainees and a corrections employee stood on a raised stage in green jail uniforms for a lineup.
Strickland thought the ordeal would clear his name. Instead, Douglas identified Strickland — which Douglas’ relatives now say she was pressured to do by detectives.
Strickland’s first trial in 1979 ended in a hung jury of 11 to one, with the only Black juror holding out for acquittal. A prosecutor called including a Black juror a mistake he “wouldn’t make again.”
Prosecutors intentionally excluded Black people from serving at Strickland’s second trial, his lawyers said. He was then convicted by an all-white jury of one count of capital murder and two counts of second-degree murder.
Prosecutors waived the death penalty, and Strickland became the first Jackson County defendant sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 50 years.
Years later, Ms Douglas would recant her lone eyewitness testimony, writing to the Midwest Innocence Project that “things were not clear back then, but now I know more and would like to help this person if I can”.
Ms Douglas died before she could formally recant her testimony against Strickland, but her mother, sister and daughter have all testified in court that she picked “the wrong guy”.
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