As he languished in a Missouri prison for nearly three decades, Lamar Johnson never stopped fighting to prove his innocence, even when it meant doing much of the legal work himself.
Lamar Johnson, center, and his attorneys react on Tuesday, Feb. 14, 2023, after St. Louis Circuit Judge David Mason vacated his murder conviction during a hearing in St. Louis, Mo. Johnson served nearly 28 years of a life sentence for a killing that he has always said he didn't commit. never stopped fighting to prove his innocence, even when it meant doing much of the legal work himself.
Thanks to a team of lawyers, a Missouri law that changed largely because of his case, and his own dogged determination, he can start to put his life back together. “It’s persistence,” the 49-year-old said Friday in an interview with The Associated Press. Decades of studies show that eyewitness testimony is right only about half the time — and since Johnson's conviction, across the country there has been a reexamination of eyewitness identification procedures, which have been shown to often reproduce racial biases.
"He said, ‘You might not believe me, but I’m innocent,'" Kidd recalled."I said, ‘Oh yeah? You might not believe me but I’m innocent, too!’” Johnson tried to stay busy. That included working in the prison hospice unit. It gave him a new perspective. Lindsay Runnels, a Kansas City attorney who partners with the Innocence Project, said Johnson’s work was vital. For example, she said his Freedom of Information Act requests uncovered the extensive criminal background of the jailhouse informant, which called into question the man’s integrity.
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