Thousands of people raised money online for a Missouri man who served 43 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit.

Kevin Strickland, 62, was exonerated Tuesday morning after serving decades at Western Missouri Correctional Center in Cameron, Missouri. Strickland was convicted in 1979 of one count of capital murder and two counts of second-degree murder in a triple homicide. He received a 50-year life sentence without the possibility for parole for a crime that, over the years, he maintained he had not been involved in. https://edition.cnn.com/2021/11/25/us/kevin-strickland-funds-raised-wrongful-imprisonment-trnd/index.html It was the longest wrongful incarceration in state history, but under Missouri law he is not entitled to receive any financial compensation. So his lawyers launched a GoFundMe page to help with his living expenses.

The fundraiser set up to help Strickland reached $1.5m (£1.1m). Lawyers for the Midwest Innocence Project, who worked for months to help free Mr Strickland, praised the more than 27,000 strangers who had donated. The state of Missouri only compensates prisoners exonerated through DNA evidence, not because of eyewitness testimony, his lawyers said. "Until the system has changed where the system is failing, the community is stepping in to fix it, to fill the void," said Tricia Rojo Bushnell, an appellate attorney, specializing in wrongful conviction and death penalty cases. She is one of his lawyers and the project’s executive director.  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59452651

Strickland does not yet have a bank account, a phone or a form of government identification. For now, he is staying at a brother’s house. He will receive the full amount of the donations as soon as he has a bank account to transfer it into, Bushnell said. The Midwest Innocence Project will also set him up with a financial adviser to help him structure the money and determine how he wishes to spend it.
“I’ll build a small house, a small bedroom, two- to three-bedroom house, have me some chickens and four to five dogs, a fishing pond somewhere close by, a big fence where nobody can get in,” he said. “Just some alone time, some getaway space.”

READ MORE: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/27/us/kevin-strickland-exonerated-fundraiser.html