"Joy, sadness, fear," these are the feelings Kevin Strickland said he dealt with after his release from a Missouri state prison where he spent 43 years for a crime he didn't commit. "I'm not necessarily angry," he told reporters.
But the Washington Post's comment on what Strickland had to say was strong when I wrote that he must be angry, and very angry, at a justice system that took away more than two-thirds of his life and at state officials who kept him imprisoned long after his innocence had been proven.
The newspaper said in an editorial that Strickland left the correctional center in western Missouri two days before Thanksgiving, after a judge acquitted him of triple murder for which he had been convicted when he was 18 in 1979 in prison with no opportunity for release for 50 years.
The ruling from Judge James Welch followed a three-day evidentiary hearing that the Jackson County District Attorney's Office requested because the evidence used to convict the man has been refuted since his trial.
The newspaper pointed out that the proposal submitted by Attorney General Jane Peters Baker is the first of its kind under the new state law.
Prior to the enactment of the new law, local prosecutors were prohibited from correcting wrongful convictions, even when abundant evidence pointed to gross unfairness, as in the Strickland case.
An all-white jury convicted Strickland black.
Kevin Strickland has endured one of the longest wrongful prison terms known in US history and the longest in Missouri in over a decade, but because the state only compensates acquitted inmates with DNA evidence, Strickland won't get a penny from it.
Despite this evidence, even as the district attorney sought Strickland's release, Attorney General Eric Schmidt (R) fought fiercely to secure the conviction, delay the hearing, and attempt to obstruct his release.
The newspaper criticized Schmidt for acting in his office's shameful tradition of opposing fairness in nearly every wrongful conviction.
She noted that Strickland had endured one of the longest wrongful prison terms known in US history and the longest in Missouri in more than a decade, according to the National Registry of Exoneration.
But because the state only compensates acquitted inmates with DNA evidence, Strickland won't get a penny from it.
In return, the charity Midwest Innocence Project, which helped Strickland win the patent, created a bank account in which 20,000 people donated more than $1 million.
The newspaper commented that no alms should be taken from strangers to compensate people against whom the state had committed a grave mistake, and concluded its editorial that Strickland's release should spur state lawmakers to reform this cruel system, and should also draw attention to Lamar Johnson, another black man who imprisoned him. The state is in a crime he did not commit, and he has been behind bars for 26 years and time is running out.