More than 40 local prosecutors across the country filed a legal brief Thursday supporting the City of St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s effort to overturn the murder conviction of a local man her office has concluded is innocent. Lamar Johnson, the prisoner, was convicted of murder in 1995 and is serving a life sentence.
A St. Louis man imprisoned for a murder that the local prosecutor said he did not commit expressed dismay this week at why he remains behind bars. “I just don’t understand why I can’t go home,” Lamar Johnson said in a telephone interview from the Jefferson City Correctional Center.
A Missouri judge on Thursday questioned if she even has the authority under state law to consider the local prosecutor’s motion contending a St. Louis man was wrongly convicted of a 1994 murder based on prosecutorial and police misconduct that they said led the framing of an innocent man.
The St. Louis city prosecutors’ effort to overturn a conviction based on police and prosecutorial misconduct faces an uphill legal battle, legal experts said this week. Unlike several other states, Missouri has no process for such a request, experts said.
Prosecutors in St. Louis said in an explosive set of charges that an innocent St. Louis man was wrongly convicted of murder in 1995 after police fabricated trial evidence and prosecutors hid information from defense attorneys.