‘Disbelief’: Kevin Strickland freed from prison after longest Missouri wrongful conviction
Kevin Strickland was watching a soap opera Tuesday morning at the Western Missouri Correctional Center in Cameron when a news alert flashed across the television.
It said Strickland, 62, would soon be freed. A judge had granted Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker’s motion to exonerate him in a 1978 triple murder that he has always said he did not commit.
Other prisoners started hollering and cheering, Strickland told reporters after his lawyers pushed him out of the prison in a wheelchair.
“They knew from Day One that I didn’t commit this crime,” Strickland said of police and prosecutors.
Earlier in the day, Judge James Welsh exonerated Strickland and ordered his immediate release. It confirmed Strickland, who spent more than 40 years behind bars, suffered one of the longest wrongful convictions in U.S. history.
Strickland told reporters he was in “disbelief.” He called for change to the criminal justice system. He thanked his legal team and Baker, saying he thought this day would not have come without them.
He told other wrongly convicted prisoners to never give up. He also noted that the prison guards were kind to him Tuesday.
“I’m not sure that’s the jail I’ve lived in for a couple years,” he said, pointing back at it. “They were super nice today. Told me not to come back; I shouldn’t have been here the first time.”
Asked what he thought about the criminal justice system, Strickland said it “needs to be torn down and redone.”
“It don’t work,” he said. “I mean, it work here in the long run, but it took 43 years to get here.”
Among those gathered outside the prison was Robert Nelson, who himself was exonerated after spending nearly 30 years in Missouri prisons. He knew Strickland behind bars and said he was happy he was being freed, but said that he is now in a wheelchair.
“Now I might get teary eyed,” Nelson said. “Cause I know how I feel when I got released.”
Also standing in the crowd of supporters was Ricky Kidd, a Kansas City man who spent 23 years in prison for a double murder he did not commit. He walked out of the same prison in 2019.
Strickland’s innocence was the focus of a September 2020 investigation by The Star, which interviewed more than 20 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.
Asked what he would do next, Strickland said that’s difficult to say.
“I don’t know what I’m doing right now,” he said, adding, though, that he would like to speak to lawmakers about changing the legal system. “I got some ideas ... to keep this from happening to someone else.”
This story was originally published November 23, 2021 at 3:00 PM.
