‘I might get teary eyed’: Friend of wrongly convicted Strickland awaits his release
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Kevin Strickland exonerated
Kevin Strickland spent 42 years in a Missouri prison for a crime that he, and prosecutors, says he didn’t commit. Prosecutors argued in a 25-page motion that Strickland’s innocence is “clear and convincing.” Missouri Gov. Mike Parson and the state Attorneys General’s Office have contended that Strickland received a fair trial and should not be freed.
A judge on Nov. 23, 2021, granted Jackson County prosecutors’ motion to exonerate Kevin Strickland in a 1978 triple murder and ordered his immediate release, confirming that Strickland suffered one of the longest wrongful convictions in U.S. history.
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Outside the gates of the Cameron, Missouri, prison where Kevin Strickland was to walk free after being behind bars for nearly 43 years, his friend Robert Nelson eagerly waited for him.
“I’m so happy,” Nelson said Tuesday afternoon, speaking to a group of reporters gathered near the prison grounds. “I might get teary eyed. Because I know how I felt when I got released.”
Nelson was freed in June 2013 from that same prison after he was exonerated by DNA evidence, according to the Innocence Project, a nonprofit that seeks to undo wrongful convictions. He was convicted in 1984 and sentenced to 70 years for a rape he did not commit.
The release of Strickland, a swift action that came hours after a Jackson County judge’s order to free him, was a cause for mixed emotions as well, Nelson said. Over the past four decades, Strickland’s parents have both died — his mother only recently— and many others have fallen out of his life since he was a teenager. Strickland now uses a wheelchair, he said.
“I know what he’s going to have to go through. It’s going to be tough for him,” Nelson said.
“(In) 40 years, you lose a lot of people,” Nelson said.
Strickland’s release was ordered Tuesday by a Jackson County judge who vacated his conviction in a 1978 triple murder in Kansas City. It is one of the longest known wrongful convictions in U.S. history.
Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker has for the past several months sought his release after her newly established conviction integrity unit found that Strickland was factually innocent in the killings. Baker used a new Missouri law that allows prosecutors to bring forward motions for releasing prisoners believed to have been wrongly convicted.
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.
The Star’s Luke Nozicka contributed to this report.
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