Woman who won new murder trial despite earlier manslaughter plea bargain won't be retried
A Kentucky woman who took a manslaughter plea because she was afraid she would be convicted of a murder she didn’t commit won a new trial in July.
Now the government has decided that Susan Jean King won’t be retried, the Courier-Journal reports.
“In our minds, this is a complete exoneration,” her lawyer, Linda Smith of the Kentucky Innocence Project, told the newspaper.
Evidence that helped establish King’s innocence include the fact that she has only one leg and thus would not have been physically capable of throwing the victim’s body off a bridge into the Kentucky River; and a credible 2012 confession by a man who said he committed the 1998 slaying.
By that point, King had served her sentence for the 2008 manslaughter conviction.
Initially, a Spencer Circuit Court judge, although convinced by the evidence, said he couldn’t as a matter of law grant King a new trial because of her guilty plea. But a state Court of Appeals panel reversed that decision in July, an earlier Courier-Journal article reported.
“In a society whose foundations were built upon the guarantee of justice to every citizen, the conviction of an innocent person represents a serious and egregious violation of such guarantee,” Judge Jeff S. Taylor wrote in the court’s opinion.
A Louisville police detective who brought the 2012 confession to the attention of the Innocence Project was demoted afterward, then won a $450,000 jury verdict in a whistleblower case.
Now King is deciding whether to retain private counsel and sue the state, Smith tells the newspaper.
