Kevin Strickland ‘losing belief’ as he awaits innocence hearing after 2 months of delays
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Kevin Strickland innocence claim
Kevin Strickland, 62, has spent the last 40-plus years in prison for a 1978 triple murder he says he did not commit. His lawyers, local prosecutors and Kansas City officials have urged he be released, but the Missouri Attorney General’s Office maintains he’s guilty.
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As Kevin Strickland awaits his day in court after two months of delays, his faith in the system is waning, he told a national news network.
“I hold fast to my faith that God ain’t gone let me die in this jail,” Strickland, 62, told CBS Mornings in a segment that aired Monday morning. “But I’m losing belief that the system is gonna work.”
More than five months ago, Strickland received rare public support from Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, who announced that her office determined Strickland, who was 18 when he was arrested, is “factually innocent” in a 1978 shooting at 6934 S. Benton Avenue in Kansas City. The gunfire took the lives of John Walker, 20, Sherrie Black, 22, and Larry Ingram, 21.
In late August, Baker became the first Missouri prosecutor to use a new state law that allows prosecutors to seek to free prisoners they believe are innocent. In her motion, her office argued that Strickland should “not remain in custody a day longer.”
But the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, which contends Strickland is guilty and received a fair trial in 1979, has filed motions and appeals that have twice delayed a hearing that could lead to Strickland’s freedom.
One of those appeals led to the Missouri Supreme Court disqualifying all judges in Jackson County from hearing the case. The court instead appointed Senior Judge James Welsh, who has set an evidentiary hearing for Nov. 8.
BEHIND THE STORY
MOREOur coverage of Kevin Strickland's story
The Kansas City Star has been covering Kevin Strickland and his innocence claim since September 2020, when we published a deeply reported story from Luke Nozicka that explored the details surrounding the 1978 triple murder Strickland is accused of helping to carry out, as well as the men who have admitted guilt, and the the only witness to the murders saying Strickland is innocent. That report from The Star served in part as the basis for local prosecutors’ review of Strickland’s case in November 2020. Now, Jackson County prosecutors, Kansas City’s mayor and others agreed he deserved to be exonerated, but the state, and specifically the Attorney General’s Office maintains he’s guilty. Read more by clicking the arrow in the upper right.
Why is he still in prison?
Kevin Strickland has 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.” But previously, without the support of Missouri Gov. Mike Parson handing down a pardon or the state Attorneys General, prosecutors in Missouri have had no legal tools to seek to free prisoners they have deemed innocent. That changed in August 2021, however, in a new law that passed as part of a package of criminal justice reforms the Missouri legislature approved and sent to Gov. Mike Parson’s desk in May.
That law gives local prosecutors a mechanism previously missing in state law to pursue freedom for the wrongfully convicted, a step prosecutors’ offices around the nation are taking in the age of criminal justice reform. Prior to the law change, petitions to have convictions tossed have generally only come from the inmates themselves.
In his interview with CBS journalist Erin Moriarty, Strickland said the “roadblocks” to getting in court have seemed “endless.”
“It hurts; I can’t get that 43 back,” Strickland said of the years he has been imprisoned. “There’s nothing that they could do to make that right. My whole life is a memory of prison. I don’t know anything else.”
CBS also interviewed Eric Wesson, who is expected to testify during Strickland’s evidentiary hearing. Publisher of The Call, Kansas City’s Black newspaper, Wesson said the lone eyewitness to the murders twice tried to publicly recant her identification of him.
“She wanted to right or correct that wrong,” Wesson told The Star last month.
In an investigation published in September 2020, The Star reported that, for decades, two men who pleaded guilty in the killings swore Strickland was not with them and two other accomplices during the murders. The testimony of the only eyewitness was paramount in the case against Strickland, but she later tried to recant, The Star reported.
