ST. LOUIS — Lamar Johnson is a murderer no more.
He is neither a convict nor a felon. He is a free man. He is innocent.
There Johnson stood on Tuesday in the third-floor courtroom of Circuit Court Judge David Mason, with a smile beaming from ear to ear, tears streaming from his eyes, hugging his attorney Lindsay Runnels, the weight of nearly three decades in prison shed from his body like heavy armor he no longer needs. He was in the same judicial district where in 1995, after presented a case based on bad evidence by a prosecutor who took shortcuts and a police detective who rushed toward the conclusion he wanted, a jury sent him away for the rest of his life.
Johnson was just a boy from McRee Town at the time, trying to survive the "dark side," the name given to the neighborhood by the boys who lived there.
Now he's a quiet, thoughtful man who convinced Mason that he didn't kill Marcus Boyd. So said the judge in a historic ruling that took the criminal justice system in St. Louis to task.
"This combined testimony amounts to clear and convincing evidence that Lamar Johnson is innocent and did not commit the murder of Marcus Boyd either individually or acting with another," Mason wrote. "Consequently, this Court finds that there is clear and convincing evidence of Lamar Johnson's actual innocence and that there was constitutional error at the original trial that undermines confidence in the judgment."
The ruling was handed out to a packed courtroom, including a television camera from the CBS show "48 Hours," as Johnson's fight for innocence became a national news story, in part because the state of Missouri made it so hard for a man with so much evidence that he was wrongfully convicted to get that evidence before a judge.
The effort started in earnest in 2019 when embattled St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner filed a motion to vacate Johnson's sentence, after her conviction integrity unit produced a compelling investigation uncovering prosecutorial misconduct and shoddy police work, as well as the contemporary confessions of the two men who say they killed Boyd. A judge, aided by the efforts of then Attorney General Eric Schmitt, shut down that effort because Missouri didn't have a statute that allowed a prosecuting attorney to seek justice that way.
But thanks to Johnson and Gardner — and attorneys Runnels, Charlie Weiss, Jonathan Potts, Tricia Rojo Bushnell and others — the Missouri Legislature passed the law that allowed Gardner to seek the hearing that now has freed Johnson. He becomes the second Missouri man freed from prison after a prosecutor sought a hearing to undo an injustice from decades ago.
Johnson won't be the last. His redemption is a bit of timely vindication for Gardner, whose many management failures have the Legislature and others gunning for her job. She got this one right, and the result could go a long way to rebuilding the broken trust between the Black community in St. Louis and the justice system that too often has not treated defendants of color, particularly those living in poverty, the same as others.
"This is an amazing day," Gardner said, after walking Johnson out to a waiting throng of reporters a couple of hours after Mason's ruling. "We showed that the city of St. Louis is about justice."
In some ways, as he breaks down the case's failures in 46 careful pages, Mason's words reflect those written by another African American judge in St. Louis, just a few years before Johnson was arrested. In 1990, U.S. District Judge Clyde S. Cahill, was overseeing a lawsuit to close the city's notorious Workhouse jail over bad conditions. In an order in the case, he lamented the conditions in St. Louis that led to the dispute:
"While it is both natural and predictable to expect the greatest concentration of law enforcement to be centered in those areas where crime appears to be more prevalent, it is also axiomatic that abuses there are likely to be condoned or ignored," Cahill wrote. "These areas are usually in the poor and minority neighborhoods where jobs are scarce, education is substandard, and the promise of the 'American dream' has died. Certain neighborhoods in St. Louis have become the target of intensive police activity, including high surveillance and 'battering ram' search warrants. Obviously, such intrusive tactics increase that resentment and anger toward law enforcement which always seethes below the surface. These intrusive tactics, coupled with detention because of poverty, lead to a destruction of confidence in the criminal justice system."
Thirty-three years later, that confidence in the justice system continues to wane, particularly amid a similar spike in gun violence, though Mason, in setting Johnson free, has done his part to heal a historic rift.
Johnson, standing before cameras after his freedom was secured, was a man of few words. Twenty-eight unjust years in prison will do that. He thanked Mason and Gardner, his attorneys and the media, and he left the courthouse with Gardner giving him a two-word encouragement:
"You're free."
