Temujin Kensu

Fredrick Thomas Freeman was born in Flint, Michigan, on May 23, 1963, one of two children of Leonard Freeman and his wife Monice (). He graduated in 1981 from Flint's Northern High School and joined the US Army. He was given an honorable discharge in 1982, after completing the cannon training program at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. ==Crime==

On November 5, 1986, at about 9 a.m., 20-year-old Scott Macklem was killed by a single shotgun round while he was in the parking lot of St. Clair County Community College in Port Huron, where he was a student. No one saw the shooting but several people heard it and some would later testify that they had witnessed a man in a car leaving the scene. The police found a shotgun shell and ammunition box at the site but the murder weapon has never been traced. The victim was the son of the mayor of Croswell, Michigan, and his family was well-known in the area. ==Arrest and trial==

The police were alerted to Freeman as a suspect by Crystal Merrill, who was then Macklem's fiancée but had had a prior relationship with Freeman in May and June that year. Merrill was the first prosecution witness, and testified that Freeman had threatened to kill her and Macklem if she did not stop seeing Macklem. She alleged that Freeman had raped her on their first date. Another witness, Phillip Joplin, said that Freeman had confessed to the murder while they shared a courtroom holding cell. Joplin further stated that Freeman wasn't worried about the trial because he had "constructed an airtight alibi". However, while some witnesses had seen Freeman before 3 a.m. on the morning of the shooting and others had seen him that afternoon, there appeared to be a gap in sightings. The prosecutor, Robert Cleland, was therefore able to argue that Freeman could have chartered a private aircraft to take him to Port Huron by 9 a.m. and then return to Escanaba after the shooting. No evidence was provided that he had actually done this, although one of the eyewitnesses who were said to have seen the killer identified Freeman from photographs later shown to have been altered for the trial. That witness had been hypnotized to provide more detail in his recollection, particularly the license plate of a car seen leaving the scene. The prosecution described Freeman as a jealous man with a violent past that included a pending assault charge and a conviction for issuing bad checks. His motive for the killing was alleged to be to control Merrill. During the trial, photographs of Freeman's martial arts weapons were shown, together with other similar items that did not belong to him: he was described as a "ninja warrior", despite the fact that the murder weapon was a 12-gauge shotgun and the fingerprint on the ammunition box found near the location did not match his. When the jury retired to consider their decision, they initially split 6–6 but after four more votes they reached a unanimous guilty verdict on May 18, 1987. One juror commented to the press that "his alibi was too perfect". Freeman was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. ==Appeal case==

In November 1986, Freeman was living with his pregnant girlfriend Michelle Woodworth at a rented farmhouse in Rock, about 20 miles from Escanaba. Ralph Simpson was appointed by Michigan's State Appellate Defender's Office to act as appeal attorney for Freeman and an appeal was first filed in the summer of 1987. The case he built took several years to proceed through the courts but was assisted when information supplied by a private investigator, Allen Woodside, became available. In particular, Woodside was instrumental in getting the jailhouse informant Joplin to sign an affidavit that he had received inducements to give his testimony, namely that he would not be returned to prison but would serve the remainder of his term in community placement and that he would be given money there. Woodside obtained another affidavit, from Woodworth, that she had been threatened by police that if she persisted to give her alibi evidence in court she would be committing perjury and might lose custody of her child. In 1993, the Michigan Court of Appeals upheld the conviction, despite ruling that Freeman's defense attorney should have protested more vigorously about the inclusion of all his "prior bad acts". The Michigan Supreme Court later refused to hear the case. ==Aftermath==

In prison, Freeman converted to Buddhism and changed his name to Temujin Kensu. A separate commutation process led to a hearing in September 2010, when the Michigan Parole and Commutation Board considered Kensu's sentence. Governor Jennifer Granholm subsequently followed the 11–0 vote of the parole board to deny commuting the life sentence. In 2016, Kensu successfully sued the Michigan Department of Corrections over the way his medical needs had been ignored and was awarded a total of $325,000 in compensatory and punitive damages after a jury found in his favour. The St. Clair County Prosecutor at that time, Mike Wendling, believed that Kensu was manipulating the judicial system by his continuous appeals, since none of his arguments were new, and that the victim's family was being forgotten. By 2019, Kensu's case had attracted widespread attention and was being called a miscarriage of justice. Thomas E. Brennan, former chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, stated "Reading the trial transcript as an outsider, you just had this smell of the whole thing. I don't see how they could convict the guy. Had I been the trial judge, I hope I would have had the guts to throw the case out." Carl Levin, a US state senator for Michigan from 1979 to 2015, said “I have personally reviewed the documents from the various court cases. As a lawyer, I believe the evidence of innocence is compelling.” Another state senator, Stephanie Chang, said “It is atrocious that this kind of miscarriage of justice could take place in our state, leaving an innocent individual in prison for multiple decades.” set up by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel considered Kensu's case and decided that there was “no new evidence that supports the factual innocence claim”. This decision was strongly condemned by senator Chang and two members of congress, Andy Levin and Rashida Tlaib, who wrote "our point of view ... is based on the fact that Kensu could not have committed and did not in fact commit the crime for which the state is taking away the entire rest of his life, now 35 years on." In June 2022, the Innocence Clinic, part of the University of Michigan Law School, submitted an application for executive clemency to Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. This was turned down, as had been two previous pleas. , Kensu was still in prison at the Macomb Correctional Facility in Lenox Township, Michigan. == Personal life ==

While in prison, Kensu began a correspondence with Denise Deringer, whom he had first met in 1979. They married in January 2001 and she took the name A'miko Kensu: she died from ovarian cancer in November 2012. On November 4, 2022, Kensu married Paula née Randolph. == Notes ==