Inmates at Limon Correctional Facility spent much of last week under lockdown.
So, it wasn’t until three days after a court ruling that one of them, Tim Kennedy, learned he is free of two life sentences.
Kennedy’s lawyers and sister had tried letting him know his convictions were overturned. They waited for his regular calls. But the prisonwide lockdown kept him from getting messages and phoning.
Word of his appeal victory Tuesday finally got through Friday when a fellow worker in the prison’s maintenance shop heard about the order in the news.
“I almost fell over. It was total elation,” Kennedy said later that morning. “This is, hands down, the best day of my life.”
Kennedy, 52, has served 13 years behind bars for a double murder he says he didn’t commit. The El Paso County district attorney’s office used key suspects — who had never met Kennedy — as witnesses against him.
He doesn’t dispute that the gun believed to have been used to kill Jennifer Carpenter and Steve Staskiewicz in 1991 likely was one he lent his two friends for self-protection. The couple was hiding out in their trailer, fearing threats on their lives as Carpenter prepared to testify against a man and woman who had raped her months earlier.
We’ve written that DNA testing excludes Kennedy from key pieces of evidence at the scene.
We’ve detailed the sorry performance of his trial lawyer, a man to whom Kennedy’s late father paid his life savings.
We’ve reported on how the sheriff’s investigator now works in the prison system and dispatched a colleague to apparently intimidate Charles Stroud — one of Carpenter’s rapists and a suspect in the murders — from testifying at Kennedy’s appeal.
And we’ve covered how DAs withheld a letter from Stroud to Rebecca Corkins, codefendant in Jenny’s rape. Both were in jail at the time of the murders and have said they wanted to silence testimony against them.
“Like (I) told you all along, ‘everything’ is covered,” reads Stroud’s letter. “Don’t worry! We took care of it. . . . Money buys anything, anywhere.”
Judge Thomas Kane ruled the letter could have helped the defense and “should have been produced prior to the trial.”
What Kennedy wants people to know is how grateful he is to Kane, who also presided over his jury trial in 1997.
What he wants to talk about is how much he has changed in prison.
The former carpenter had a rap sheet for stealing a truck and feeding his Vicodin habit by forging his name on a prescription. He found Christianity behind bars. He grew closer with family. And he became less shy, less passive as he stood up to “fight my situation.”
While some prisoners gas on about their innocence, Kennedy has kept his story to himself.
DAs risk an embarrassing airing of their screw-ups if they decide to retry the case, built on the theory that Kennedy killed his friends over a $30 gun.
His lawyers will ask for a bond hearing this week in hopes of releasing him soon.
Kennedy dreams of walking free, deciding what to wear and eat, and riding a bike early each morning.
“They’ve done everything they could to make sure I had no air to breathe, no space to move in,” he says.
“It would be nice to be treated like a man instead of a dog.”
If need be, he welcomes a new trial as a way to expose what he calls officials’ “lies and manipulation.” He says he relishes a shot at vindication.
“It’s been 13, almost 14 years now, that I’ve been trying to get the truth out,” he says.
“I’d love the chance to restore my dignity, my reputation, my name.”
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
