43 Americans - Stand for Justice, Act Now

  Ahead of Juneteenth this year, Kentucky's governor did something rare. He looked back at history and found 43 people who had been locked away for helping enslaved men, women, and children escape to freedom. Elijah Anderson. Julett Miles. Thomas Brown. Forty of others. Men and women who broke an unjust law because a just one didn't exist yet. Some died in prison for it. All of them waited more than a century to be called what they always were. Heroes, not criminals. The governor pardoned all 43. It took more than a hundred years. Justice came, but it came too late for them to feel it. That's the part that stays with us. We are 43 too. We didn't plan that. None of us chose the number. We found each other on X, one story at a time, each of us carrying a case that never should have ended the way it did. By the time we counted, there were 43 of us. We noticed the coincidence. We're not going to pretend it means something mystical. But we can't stop thinking about w...

  They Stole 43 Years of Her Life. The Evidence Was in Their Files the Whole Time. Her name is Sandra Hemme. Remember that name. Because what they did to her, they can do to you. A Sick Young Woman and a Murder She Didn't Commit In 1980, Sandra was 20 years old. She was a patient in a psychiatric hospital in St. Joseph, Missouri. She was sick. She was on heavy medication. Her own lawyer later said the drugs were like a "chemical straightjacket." She could barely think straight. That same week, a woman named Patricia Jeschke was murdered in town. Sandra didn't know her. Sandra wasn't even in St. Joseph when it happened. There was not one piece of physical evidence connecting her to the crime. Not a fingerprint. Not a hair. Nothing. So how did she end up in prison for 43 years? The police made it happen. They pulled a heavily drugged, mentally ill young woman out of a hospital bed and interrogated her. Not once. Eight times. Over two weeks. They kept pushing and pu...