How the St. Louis prosecutor concluded Lamar Johnson had ‘nothing to do’ with 1994 murder
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Jail informant helped send Lamar Johnson to MO prison
Lamar Johnson, a Missouri man who St. Louis’ top prosecutor says was wrongfully convicted, was sentenced to life in prison partly on the word of jailhouse snitch William Mock, who also traded information in Kansas City.
Since 1983, dubious testimony from jailhouse informants like Mock has contributed to sending 10 people to Missouri prisons for crimes they did not commit, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. They collectively spent more than 120 years behind bars and account for about a fifth of the state’s 52 confirmed wrongful convictions.
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Did jailhouse snitch send innocent man to prison? It’s happened to 10 others in Missouri
How the St. Louis prosecutor concluded Lamar Johnson had ‘nothing to do’ with 1994 murder
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When St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner in 2018 started reviewing Lamar Johnson’s murder conviction at the request of his attorneys, her office found “serious prosecutorial misconduct throughout the case.”
It caused Gardner to seek to correct what she described as Johnson’s wrongful conviction in the October 1994 fatal shooting of a man named Marcus Boyd in the Dutchtown neighborhood of St. Louis.
Johnson has been imprisoned for 27 years. Despite Gardner’s review, he remains at the Jefferson City Correctional Center.
Gardner’s conviction integrity unit said it has corroborated Johnson’s innocence. Her unit’s investigation found, among other things, that prosecutors concealed payments to the lone eyewitness as well as the criminal history of a jailhouse informant, William Mock.
“Johnson did not shoot Boyd and had nothing to do with Boyd’s murder, and he should not be in prison for the crime,” her office determined.
Read Gardner’s report on Johnson’s case here:
