If you’re tough on crime, you better celebrate Missouri setting Lamar Johnson free | Opinion

Ricky Kidd. Carrody Buchhorn. Keith Carnes. Floyd Bledsoe. Kevin Strickland. Lamonte McIntyre. Olin “Pete” Coones Jr. Missouri or Kansas threw all of them behind bars — many of them for a long, long time — for crimes they swore they didn’t commit.

And all have been freed in the past few years alone after a variety of injustices came to light — perjury, official misconduct, bad forensic science — making it clear that the states got it wrong the first time.

Add to that shameful list Lamar Johnson, who will finally walk free after St. Louis-area Circuit Judge David C. Mason examined the evidence against his guilt Tuesday, and found it “clear and convincing.” The unjust conviction will be vacated after Johnson spent more than half his life locked up.

The National Registry of Exonerations counts 52 people exonerated in Missouri since 1991 (not yet including Johnson), and 18 in Kansas since 1992. If you believe in justice, and that the government officials we elect and police we hire are subject to basic human fallibility, then those 70-some wrong convictions we know about likely already infuriate you. And what, then, about the other innocents surely now in jail cells whose circumstances haven’t been reviewed?

In Johnson’s case, the two men who confessed to the 1994 fatal shooting of Markus Boyd ended up convicted themselves (though one for an unrelated crime). But in too many other instances, when an innocent is incarcerated, that means the guilty still walk among us.

How is that justice? If your loved one were a victim, wouldn’t you be outraged that the real perpetrator went free while someone else paid the price?

Don’t confuse calls for mercy with demands for justice. It’s one thing for principled death penalty opponents to ask a governor to stay an execution, or grant clemency to a prisoner sentenced to death. It’s entirely different to insist that the government prove its case when serious doubts are raised about whether someone was put away unjustly.

Missouri has a long history of resolutely defending convictions — and of getting it wrong. A state lawyer notoriously testified to the Missouri Supreme Court in 2001 that yes, “even if we find that (the defendant) is actually innocent,” the attorney general’s office would continue to press for his execution.

Lamar Johnson will never get back the years he lost. And it remains to see whether he’ll get the immense compensation he deserves for the inequity. That relief is far from assured.

But if you consider yourself a law-and-order type, you have zero right to grumble today. Bad convictions don’t cut down on crime. In fact, they invite more of it by keeping the wrong people on the streets. And when a crooked police officer is found out and removed from the force, that’s nothing but a net good for the department.

The fight against crime is obviously one of the most important parts of self-governance. Reexamining the work of the law enforcement and courts we respect to right their mistakes — and then working to prevent more of them — is a huge part of supporting that fight.