After serving more than two decades behind bars in a Kansas correctional facility for a double murder, Lamonte McIntyre was freed Saturday. He doesn’t have any job prospects or even a résumé. He has no computer skills and has never owned a smartphone.
He also hasn’t received a penny for being falsely imprisoned.
According to KSHB, in 1994, Doniel Quinn and Donald Ewing were killed while sitting in a car in a Kansas City, Kan., “drug-infested neighborhood.” Kansas City police detectives investigating the deaths soon arrested Lamonte McIntyre, telling his mother that they would question him and clear things up in “a few minutes.”
The police didn’t have fingerprints. There was no DNA tying McIntyre to the crime. Investigators never found a murder weapon. Prosecutors didn’t even have a motive as to why McIntyre would have killed two men in broad daylight. There wasn’t a shred of proof that showed McIntyre even knew the victims.
Despite the lack of evidence, despite the revelation that the assistant prosecutor and the lead detective on the case may have been in a romantic relationship, and despite the fact that police never even searched for a murder weapon, authorities charged McIntyre with murder in both deaths. That was 23 years ago.
Lamonte McIntyre was 17 years old.
Throughout the years, McIntyre continued to tell anyone who would listen that he was innocent. But what is a teenager supposed to do when he is fighting a multimillion-dollar prosecution team, the prison-industrial complex and a state with unlimited resources?
Lamonte McIntyre kept fighting.
McIntyre’s conviction was vacated by an appellate court, and he was set free. In most states, that also would have meant that he would have been compensated for his time in prison. In Missouri, he would have received $50 for every day of his incarceration. Colorado would have paid him $70,000 per year. In Michigan, he would have been compensated $50,000 for every year he was imprisoned.
In Kansas, he gets nothing. Zero. Nada. Zilch.
Last year the Kansas Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill to award $80,000 per year to wrongfully incarcerated inmates. The committee then sent it to the Kansas Judicial Council to “examine the issue.” The Kansas Judicial Council sent it to the Legislative Research Department. The Legislative Research Department now says it is “looking at a road map ... ,” blah-blah-blah and some other bullshit that will result in a man who spent most of his life behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit being fucked again by the system.
So what is Lamonte McIntyre supposed to do now that he is free after being locked away from society for 23 years, never getting to go to a prom, never attending college, missing out on dates, job interviews, family, love and everything that the rest of the world takes for granted?
Keep fighting.
Read more at KSHB.