Missouri prosecutor seeks to free longtime inmate Kevin Strickland, who many believe is innocent
CBSN
A Missouri prosecutor has filed a motion asking a judge to exonerate a man who has been imprisoned for four decades for a triple murder that she and many others do not believe he committed.
The motion, filed Saturday and made public Monday, stems from a new law that gives local prosecutors the authority to ask judges to exonerate prisoners they believe are innocent. "Most of us have heard the famous quotation that 'injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,'" Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said in a written statement. "Kevin Strickland stands as our own example of what happens when a system set to be just, just gets it terribly wrong."Ashley White received her earliest combat action badge from the United States Army soon after the first lieutenant arrived in Afghanistan. The silver military award, recognizing soldiers who've been personally engaged by an attacker during conflict, was considered an achievement in and of itself as well as an affirming rite of passage for the newly deployed. White had earned it for using her own body to shield a group of civilian women and children from gunfire that broke out in the midst of her third mission in Kandahar province. All of them survived. She never mentioned the badge to anyone in her battalion.