Gov. Parson unsure if Kevin Strickland is innocent. Here’s why prosecutors say he is

Missouri Gov. Mike Parson this week said he was not convinced Kevin Strickland is innocent, even though prosecutors say the Kansas City man was wrongly convicted as a teenager four decades ago.

A former sheriff, Parson told 41 Action News he did not know if Strickland, 62, is “innocent or not” in a 1978 triple murder in Kansas City that the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office now says he did not commit.

Kelli Jones, Parson’s spokeswoman, said the governor and his team have and will continue to review Strickland’s case. However, she said, Parson believes “we must give great deference to the judicial process and a jury’s finding of guilt.”

The governor’s office did not immediately respond to an email asking what exactly made Parson question Strickland’s proclaimed innocence. Strickland’s attorneys said they would be happy to sit down with Parson and “go over the evidence.”

Here are some of the reasons why prosecutors, who conducted a months-long review into Strickland’s conviction, say he has wrongly spent more than two-thirds of his life in prison.

• The guilty men said he is innocent: In an investigation, The Star reported that two men who pleaded guilty in the murders for decades swore Strickland was not with them and two other accomplices during the shooting. One of them, Vincent Bell, told The Star he knew Strickland was innocent because “I’m one of the ones who did it, God forgive me.” Bell pleaded Strickland’s innocence and named his uncharged accomplices as early as 1979, when he was being sentenced. Prosecutors determined the core claims he made at the time — “on the verge of a prison term at the risk of being branded a snitch” — were credible.
  
  

• A third suspect said he is innocent: Terry Abbott, a suspect who was never charged, in 2019 told a Midwest Innocence Project investigator that he knew there “couldn’t be a more innocent person” than Strickland. Serving time for robbery in a Colorado prison, Abbott said he keeps Strickland in his prayers because he was “just a kid when this happened to him.”

• The lone eyewitness said he is innocent: The testimony of eyewitness Cynthia Douglas, who was wounded in the shooting and watched her friends die, was paramount in the case against Strickland. On the night of the shooting, Douglas told detectives she could only identify two of the four suspects: Bell and Kilm Adkins. She identified Strickland the next day after she described a shotgun-wielding suspect to her sister’s boyfriend, who suggested that perpetrator might be Strickland. She later recanted, writing in a 2009 email that Strickland had been “wrongfully charged.” Prosecutors now say her “delayed, tainted” identification was the “cornerstone upon which this entire case rested.”

• Others support the eyewitness’ recantation: Douglas died in 2015, so prosecutors reviewing Strickland’s conviction could not interview her. But in addition to Douglas’ email, her mother, her ex-husband and a close family friend signed affidavits saying she wanted nothing more than to see Strickland freed because she believed she made a mistake in identifying him. Last year, her ex-husband told The Star he once apologized to Strickland on his ex-wife’s behalf, saying, “Trust me, man, she wanted you out.”

• Strickland’s fingerprint was not on the shotgun: Prosecutors at trial claimed Strickland carried a shotgun during the murders and elicited testimony that no fingerprints on the weapon could be compared. But new forensic testing done this year showed the only fingerprint found on the gun was not Strickland’s.

As part of their review, prosecutors concluded that inflammatory statements Strickland, then 18, made to police did not prove he was involved in the shooting. They also asked themselves if Strickland knew too much about the crime, examined what they called his “porous alibi” and dug into the homicide detectives’ notes on the case.

The review included presenting the case to 20 senior and homicide prosecutors. In the end, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, federal prosecutors and other officials on May 10 called for Strickland’s exoneration and release.

“This is a profound error we must correct now,” Baker said at the time.

Now using a wheelchair, Strickland remains imprisoned at the Western Missouri Correctional Center in Cameron.

Without a pardon, Strickland could be freed through at least two other avenues.

His attorneys earlier this month refiled a petition urging his release in DeKalb County after the Missouri Supreme Court declined to hear his case. It is expected that his attorneys at a later date will argue he should be freed during an evidentiary hearing.

If he is not released by Aug. 28, Baker hopes to file a motion then asking a Jackson County judge to exonerate Strickland. That’s when a bill, if signed into law by Parson, would allow local prosecutors to seek to free prisoners they have deemed innocent.