1 year ago
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For nearly three decades, Ginny Schrappen exchanged letters with a man imprisoned for a murder which he has always said he didn’t commit and whom she believed.
Her faith in Lamar Johnson was rewarded when a judge in Missouri overturned his conviction earlier this year after evidence surfaced that the killer in fact was someone else – and now the pen pals have met for the first time.
CBS News late last week chronicled the emotional meeting at Schrappen’s house, with Johnson explaining how thankful he was for the confidence his correspondent’s letters imbued in him when he was wrongfully locked up for so long.
“Especially when somebody is innocent, you want someone to believe in you,” Johnson told CBS. “Because when you have people who believe in you and they won’t give up on you, then it makes it harder for you to give up on yourself.”
In an interview which also served as an update for what Johnson has been doing since his release from prison drew national news headlines, Schrappen recounted how it was about 25 years ago that a deacon at her St Louis-area church handed her a letter from a local man who was imprisoned and had written to the local diocese in hopes of getting a reply from a congregant.
Johnson had been convicted of murder for the October 1994 killing of Marcus Boyd, who was shot dead on his front porch by two masked men. Police and prosecutors said Johnson gunned Boyd down during a dispute over drug money, ignoring his pleas of innocence and insistence that he was with his girlfriend miles away when the killing occurred.
Schrappen wrote back to Johnson, and they did not stop exchanging letters for the rest of the unjust punishment which he would ultimately serve. She says it always rang true to her that Johnson was innocent.
“I’ve been accused of being naive before, and that’s OK,” Schrappen told CBS. However, she was never worried about those detractors, adding that she knew Johnson was “not going to come and get me”.
Eventually, Johnson’s case caught the attention of the Midwest Innocence Project. The organization built a case to invalidate Johnson’s conviction based primarily on a key witness in the case who recanted his testimony implicating Johnson while saying it was he – not Johnson – who helped another man kill Boyd.
That witness confirmed Johnson was not even at the scene of Boyd’s killing.
On 14 February, local St Louis judge David Mason struck down Johnson’s murder conviction and ordered him freed from prison.
The moment vindicated Johnson, who – from his prison cell – had filed public records requests that gave the Midwest Innocence Project a crucial head start in pursuing his case. Word of Johnson’s case has also prompted Missouri lawmakers to pass a law which allows prosecutors to request a hearing before a judge in cases of potential wrongful conviction, which has already helped secure the release of another unjustly imprisoned man.
Since his release, Johnson, 49, has been engaging in a number of activities. Toward the top of that list was for Johnson to see one of his dearest friends for the first time.
According to CBS, after Johnson arrived at her home, the 80-year-old Schrappen gave him a hug, a kiss on the cheek, a tour of her place, a box of his favorite cereal – and one final letter.
The network recorded Johnson as he read the missive. Part of it said: “You deserve the best, Lamar.”
English (US)