For 23 years, Raymond Tempest Jr. has been professing his innocence in the gruesome murder of Doreen Picard, whose bludgeoned body was found in a basement in the Rhode Island city of Woonsocket in 1982.
Tempest, a high-school dropout and the son of a local sheriff, was convicted in 1992 of strangling the 22-year-old homecoming queen with her own sweater and pummeling her to death with a 28-inch pipe. But on Monday a state judge in Rhode Island finally agreed that the conviction must be overturned, setting the stage for Tempest’s possible release—and handing a hard-earned pro bono victory to Michael Kendall of McDermott Will & Emery.
