This American woman spent more than 4 decades in prison for the murder she didn’t commit

Sandra Hemme, a 64-year-old Missouri woman with a history of mental illness, was recently found not guilty of a murder for which she spent more than four decades in prison. The judge found her innocence “clear and convincing,” but she has not yet been released.

Prosecutors are appealing the decision and want Hemme to stay behind bars. They argue that she is dangerous, citing a previous prison attack. However, Hemme’s lawyers say new evidence points to a former police officer as the real culprit and that Hemme poses no threat, NBC News reported.

They believe she is the longest-serving wrongfully imprisoned woman in U.S. history and are fighting for her immediate release.

It is unclear whether she will be retried for Ms. Jeschke’s murder.

The petition for her dismissal states that the only evidence used to convict her was her statements to police while mentally ill and under the influence of strong medication. Buchanan County prosecutors have not commented on the possibility of a new trial.

“This Court finds that the evidence as a whole establishes that Ms. Hemme’s statements incriminating herself are inconsistent, contradicted by physical evidence and independent and reliable witness reports and that Ms. Hemme’s impaired psychiatric condition when questioned impairs substantially the reliability of these statements as evidence of guilt,” Horsman said in the petition. “…This Court further concludes that no evidence outside of Ms. Hemme’s unreliable statements connects her to the crime.”

O Innocence Projectbased in New York, took on Hemme’s case and claimed that she spent 43 years unjustly incarcerated.

“No witnesses linked Ms. Hemme to the murder, the victim, or the crime scene. She had no motive to harm Ms. Jeschke, nor was there any evidence that the two had ever met. Nor did any physical or forensic evidence link Mrs. Hemme to the murder,” the statement read.

Hemme’s conviction was based on her “false and unreliable” confessions, which were made while she was being treated at a state psychiatric hospital and “forcibly given medication literally designed to overpower her will,” according to the release.

The Innocence Project accused Holman and St. Joseph police of concealing evidence that implicated a colleague.

“Colleague officer Michael Holman, who was found using the victim’s credit card the day after the murder; whose truck was seen parked near the victim’s home at the time she was killed; in whose closet the victim’s earrings were discovered; and who in the months before and after Ms. Jeschke’s murder, committed many other crimes against women,” the Innocence Project said in a statement.