Lamonte McIntyre to finally get what he deserves — compensation for wrongful conviction
Lamonte McIntyre, who served 23 years behind bars for two Kansas City, Kansas murders he did not commit, is at long — very long — last going to get the more than $1.5 million that the State of Kansas owes him. And they’re expunging his record, as they should have done long ago.
“I feel like I’ve finally, finally, finally been vindicated,” McIntyre said in an interview, just minutes after getting the completely unexpected news. “Freedom — now I finally know what it’s really like because the state has acknowledged the wrong that it did.”
How’s he going to celebrate? Well, it’s taco Tuesday at his house, he said, laughing. And now he can volunteer at the Boys & Girls Club, which he couldn’t do before his record was expunged, because even though then-Gov. Jeff Colyer had personally apologized to him, he couldn’t pass a background check.
“It’s a big deal,” McIntyre said, “and I’m so excited I don’t know what to say. That hurdle in my life is finally behind me.” Now, too, he can finally afford to get treatment for his PTSD.
What kind of guy, after all he’s been through, thinks first about the volunteering he can now do? An innocent one.
Yet when I wrote about McIntyre’s situation just before Christmas, state and local officials were still fighting against even trying to make the intentional wrong done him right. Maybe he really was guilty after all, local officials whispered. Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt was still fighting the payment, and said McIntyre hadn’t really been exonerated.
All this more than two years after Wyandotte County’s district attorney, Mark Dupree Sr., threw out the charges against McIntyre and called the case “a manifest injustice.” More than two years after he was released from prison, and 19 months after Colyer signed the law passed specifically to compensate him in McIntrye’s own church, because he got to pick the place.
Then, on Tuesday — out of the blue for both McIntyre and his attorney, Cheryl Pilate — the Kansas attorney general’s office announced that it had examined 900 additional pages of documents that Pilate had not previously provided. After doing that, the attorney general’s statement said, he had decided to expunge McIntyre’s record.
Since Dupree had stopped a hearing on McIntyre’s innocence early, declaring that it was all too obviously McIntyre who was the victim, Schmidt said that a court hadn’t technically exonerated him.
Since then, “We have worked diligently to obtain and review all available evidence, including evidence not provided in the earlier judicial proceedings,” Schmidt said in a statement on Tuesday. “We are now able to tell the court we have reviewed all evidence we know to be available, completed our due diligence in evaluating that evidence, and agree that Mr. McIntyre is able to show he has met the statutory requirements for compensation under the new law.”
It defies belief that Pilate, who has spent years trying to win McIntyre’s freedom, would not have walked to Topeka barefoot in snow to deliver the documents if Schmidt had been open to looking at them before now.
“Today,” Pilate said in a statement, “the State of Kansas officially acknowledged what has always been known to Lamonte, his attorneys, his family and others connected with his case — that he is innocent.”
State Rep. Cindy Holscher, who has stood by McIntyre when others didn’t dare to get involved, said this news was even better than winning the Super Bowl. Great as that was, “this, this is the victory that makes my heart sing.”
The facts now, as always, are that the only thing linking then-17-year-old McIntyre to the April 1994 broad-daylight murder of two men he did not even know was the detective who worked the case, Roger Golubski. McIntyre’s mother has accused the detective of forcing her to have sex with him, and of framing her son to get back at her for objecting.
Three of the five photos used in the lineup were of her two sons and her nephew. Eyewitnesses who said McIntyre was not the shooter and someone else was were ignored, as were relatives who said McIntyre had been home all day, right up until he was arrested.
One of the two women who initially said they saw McIntyre shoot the men has long since recanted, and said that police and the prosecutor forced her to lie under oath. The other woman, Ruby Mitchell, who has not recanted but has merely said she’s sorry if she got it wrong, and that Golubski had frightened and pressured her sexually en route to the police station, was the one person Kansas City, Kansas officials were still pointing to as of December as preserving the possibility that McIntyre really was guilty all along.
It’s hard not to suspect that it was the truly guilty who were being protected by those who insisted that McIntyre shouldn’t be paid. Kansas City, Kansas police officials wrote a letter to Schmidt, saying that McIntyre didn’t deserve the money. Maybe Schmidt believed what he was hearing from his friends and supporters in the Fraternal Order of Police. What the police knew about the injustice done McIntyre has yet to be fully investigated, so hopefully Schmidt can now turn his attention to that glaring wrong.
But today is a day for gratitude that justice has been done and the truth acknowledged, even this belatedly.
This story was originally published February 4, 2020 at 6:00 PM.
