The Sad Case of Kevin Strickland

Kevin Strickland spent 43 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, making him one of the longest wrongfully imprisoned people in U.S. history. Strickland’s story is one of the most heartbreaking examples of wrongful imprisonment in American history. In 1979, at the age of 18, he was convicted of a triple murder in Kansas City, Missouri, despite maintaining his innocence.

His conviction rested almost entirely on the testimony of one witness, who later recanted and admitted she had been pressured by police into identifying him. There was no physical evidence tying Strickland to the crime, yet he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 50 years.

For decades, Strickland fought to prove his innocence. Advocacy groups, journalists, and even prosecutors later acknowledged that his conviction was a mistake. Still, appeals and petitions for his release were denied again and again, a stark reminder of how difficult it can be to overturn a wrongful conviction once it enters the system. Finally, in 2021, a judge formally exonerated Strickland, declaring that he had been wrongly imprisoned for 43 years.

Missouri law at the time did not offer him compensation, meaning he was released with little financial support despite spending more than four decades behind bars for a crime he did not commit. His case has since become a rallying cry for reform in wrongful conviction laws and compensation statutes across the United States.

Here are a few of my reactions to this travesty of justice:

1. The legal system needs to acknowledge that eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable. No conviction should ever be allowed when it is based solely on eyewitness testimony. Any case relying solely or mainly on eyewitness testimony should contain a jury instruction in which the judge advises the jury that eyewitness testimony is inherently unreliable and should be evaluated with strict scrutiny. Especially problematic is an eyewitness identification of a stranger. This type of "evidence" has virtually no credibility, and the jury instruction should so indicate.

2. The case illustrates how important it is to not discriminate against black people serving on juries. in Strickland's first trial, the sole black juror voted against conviction, after which the prosecutor vowed that this wouldn't happen again. True to his word, the prosecutor eliminated every black prospective juror with peremptory challenges in the second trial, and Strickland waas convicted. It was a few years later that the Supreme Court, in the case of Batson v. Kentucky (1986), ruled that a prosecutor's use of a peremptory challenge in a criminal case-—the dismissal of jurors without stating a valid cause for doing so-—may NOT be used to exclude jurors based solely on their race. Unforunately for defendant Strickland, this ruling was not applied retroactively.

3. The case illustrates what a blatantly racist society exists in the state of Missouri. We northerners like to disparage the so-called "deep South" for its racism, but I've found that border states like Missouri are often the worst offenders. For example, Indiana in the 1920s had the highest Ku Klux Klan membership of any U.S. state. At its peak, the Indiana Klan boasted around 240,000 members, which represented nearly 30% of the native-born white male population in the state.

4. The denial of compensation by racist Missouri is an outrage. States need to ensure that some compensation is provided for those defendants who are imprisoned as a result of a wrongful conviction.