JEFFERSON CITY — Rodney Lincoln returned to the scene of the crime.
Here he was Friday morning, sitting in a wheelchair and connected to oxygen, outside the prison that had held him for a murder he didn’t commit. Lincoln was convicted for the 1982 ºüÀêÊÓƵ murder of JoAnn Tate, but the main witness in the case, Tate’s daughter, later recanted. The uncovered a rush to judgment plus evidence, including DNA, that cleared Lincoln.
But the Missouri Court of Appeals ruled in 2016 that innocence is not enough to free a person from prison in the Show-Me State, unless they happen to be on death row; Lincoln was not. Lincoln’s sentence was commuted two years later by former Gov. Eric Greitens.
Lincoln showed up at the prison Friday to greet Michael Politte as he walked out on parole, having been imprisoned since he was 14. A week earlier, Lincoln had been due in the state Capitol to testify for a bill intended to make sure that what happened to him doesn’t happen to others. Lincoln, 77, was hospitalized that day — his health isn’t great — and so he wasn’t there to testify.
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But he couldn’t miss greeting Politte. He stood and shook the man’s hand. Politte grinned from ear to ear and gave Lincoln a bear hug. There’s a tight-knit but fairly small group of men who have been freed from prison in Missouri, either because of prosecutorial misconduct, or innocence, or both.
I asked Lincoln what it meant for him to see Politte walk out of the prison they both once inhabited.
“It shows that justice may be slow, but it’s working,†Lincoln said.
That’s the idea behind the “innocence is enough†bill sponsored by Sen. John Rizzo, D-Independence. As originally conceived, would, in effect, vacate Lincoln’s ruling by allowing any Missouri prisoner to make a claim of “actual innocence†in a petition seeking their freedom, as long as they could present “clear and convincing evidence†that they didn’t commit the crime of which they were convicted.
The new law is meant to help people like Christopher Dunn, who has been in prison for almost 32 years for a murder that he says he didn’t commit. In 2020, a Texas County judge agreed with Dunn, writing in a ruling that the evidence points strongly toward innocence, but because of the Lincoln ruling, he couldn’t set Dunn free, simply because he isn’t on death row.
That doesn’t make sense, Lincoln says. A host of former Missouri judges agree.
“Missouri is an outlier compared to how other states deal with actual innocence claims. To our knowledge, there is no other state that restricts an available freestanding actual innocence claim to those sentenced to death,†a group of 16 retired judges wrote to lawmakers. The judges include former Missouri Supreme Court Justices Michael Wolff and Ray Price, former Appeals Court judges Booker T. Shaw and Lisa Van Amburg, and former Circuit Judges Jack Garvey and Barbara Wallace. They come from across the political spectrum and the state.
“We struggle to see the rationale for this distinction — beyond the urgency of an impending execution. There is no moral reason to distinguish between these injustices. The law should reflect the uncontroversial notion that innocent people, no matter their punishment, do not belong in prison.â€
Rizzo’s bill passed unanimously out of committee, but not in a version that would actually fix the problem at hand. This late in the session the bill is likely dead. If it eventually becomes law the way the bill was originally written, it will join one passed by the Legislature last year that allows prosecutors to file direct actions to try to free innocent people. That would be a steady move toward bringing Missouri in line with the sort of justice measures allowed in other states.
Late last year, that law was used by Jackson County Prosecuting Attorney Jean Peters Baker to free another wrongly convicted man, Kevin Strickland, after 43 years behind bars. Yet another series of bills filed this year would help people like Strickland receive some sort of compensation from the state after they’ve been exonerated, but those bills, filed by both Republicans and Democrats, appear stalled in various parts of the legislative process.
As Lincoln said, progress is “slow,†but there appears to be some movement toward justice for the wrongly convicted.
“We have seen firsthand how the legal system, despite its best intentions, occasionally fails to produce accurate and fair results,†the judges wrote in their letter supporting Rizzo’s bill. “Yet in Missouri we do not have a sufficient mechanism for a court to hear and decide freestanding claims of actual innocence. Equal justice must include the right of the innocent to be heard, no matter their sentence.â€