After he lived a nightmare:
"Mo. man freed after murder conviction overturned" by David A. Lieb | Associated Press, November 14, 2013
COLUMBIA, Mo. — After nearly a decade in prison, freedom did not come easy for Ryan Ferguson — not even in the final few hours after the Missouri attorney general decided to not retry him in the 2001 slaying of a newspaper sports editor.
Ferguson was released Tuesday evening. But he first thought he was being sent to solitary confinement when he was told to gather his stuff in his prison cell. Even after his lawyer held up a sign through a glass window declaring the ordeal was over, it really wasn’t.
Ferguson, 29, changed into civilian clothes, then was ordered back into an orange prison jumpsuit to be transported from a state prison to a county jail. He feared he was about to be arrested again for the slaying of Columbia Daily Tribune sports editor Kent Heitholt.
Instead, Ferguson rode to freedom from the jail in the back seat of his father’s car — a black sedan emblazoned with a large photo of Ferguson and the words ‘‘Wrongfully Convicted. Time for Justice. FREE RYAN.’’
A week earlier a state appeals court panel overturned Ferguson’s conviction, saying the prosecutor’s office withheld evidence from his lawyers and that he did not get a fair trial. The attorney general’s office said Tuesday that it decided not to re-try Ferguson after reviewing the remaining evidence.
That happens more than you would like to believe here in AmeriKa, world. I know what the public relations brochure put out by the government says, but....
On Wednesday, the Columbia Police Department issued a statement saying it ‘‘will continue to follow-up on any new leads or information that is brought to the department’’ regarding Heitholt’s death.
Ferguson’s case gained national attention because his high school classmate, Chuck Erickson, claimed to have recalled through dreams years after the fact that he and Ferguson killed Heitholt in a late-night robbery after partying for Halloween. Erickson has since recanted his testimony and remains in prison.
Ferguson was greeted with cheers from dozens of supporters at a news conference Tuesday night inside a hotel ballroom — in a scene that resembled an election night watch party. Wearing blue jeans and a gray sweater over a white-collared shirt, Ferguson walked into the room with a big smile and raised his arms in victory in front of a bank of cameras.
He thanked his family, lawyers, his few remaining high school friends, and his many new supporters for backing his quest for freedom.
‘‘To get arrested and to get charged for a crime you didn’t commit is incredibly easy, and you lose your life very fast,’’ Ferguson said. ‘‘But to get out of prison, it takes an army.’’
Ferguson was a 17-year-old high school junior at the time of Heitholt’s slaying. He was convicted in 2005 and had been serving a 40-year sentence for murder and robbery.
Erickson received a 25-year sentence as part of a plea agreement for testifying against Ferguson. At that trial, Erickson said Ferguson had suggested they rob someone to get money for alcohol and that Erickson had hit Heitholt with a metal tire tool before Ferguson strangled him with the man’s own belt.
But during a 2012 court hearing, Erickson said he had been a heavy drug and alcohol user with hazy memories and had originally been persuaded by police and media accounts into believing he was guilty. Erickson said he no longer was sure of his own involvement and was adamant that Ferguson did not do it.
A panel of the Western District of the Missouri Court of Appeals later overturned Ferguson’s conviction.
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Life is given, life is taken away:
Mo. executes supremacist serial killer
It was the first execution in nearly three years in Missouri, once one of the most active death penalty states in the nation. The state turned to a compounding pharmacy to make the drug it needed.
I sure hope they got the right guy and didn't give him tainted medication.
