Daviess County Associate Circuit Judge Daren Adkins issued a ruling on Aug. 14 which released a Kansas City man, Ricky L. Kidd, who had been jailed for the past 23 years for a robbery and double murder that occurred in 1996.
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Judge Adkins presided over a four-day habeas corpus hearing in Daviess County Circuit Court from April 23-26 and had taken the case under advisement. He made the ruling last Wednesday in DeKalb County.
Ricky Kidd was released on Aug. 15, a day after the ruling was made. The state was given 30 days to decide whether or not it will retry the case.
The case originated in Jackson County in 2015 when plaintiff Rick L. Kidd filed a writ of habeas corpus in DeKalb County where he was incarcerated at Crossroads Correctional Center.
Kidd was represented by the Midwest Innocence Project, along with co-counsel Sean O’Brien and Cindy Dodge, in the case which was heard in Daviess County.
Ricky Kidd and Marcus Merrill were charged with murder in 1996 after three men fled the scene of a robbery and double homicide on Monroe Avenue and 70th Street, near Swope Park.
Later, in a deposition, Merrill swore that he and two other men, Gary Goodspeed Jr. and Gary Goodspeed Sr., committed the crime. According to the Midwest Innocence Project, which worked for years to exonerate Kidd, prosecutors withheld information included in depositions that could have been used in Kidd’s defense.
One eye witness recanted his testimony. Another witness who was four years old at the time was found to have identified Kidd under “suggestive” circumstances.
Kidd also provided an alibi which was corroborated by documents from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office where he was obtaining a gun permit at the time of the crime, and no physical evidence linked Kidd to the murders.
Kidd was serving life without the possibility of parole and had maintained his claim of innocence throughout his incarceration.
Judge Adkins said that evidence of Kidd’s innocence was “clear and convincing.”
A writ of habeas corpus gives a court the power to release a prisoner after the prisoner has been processed through the criminal justice system with all its procedural safeguards and appeals.
Some of the information in this article is taken from the Aug. 15, 2019, edition of the Kansas City Star.