On Tuesday, a Minneapolis inmate who is seeking justice for his murder conviction said Sen. Amy Klobuchar falsely got him a life sentence behind bars. 

Myon Burrell, 33, was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of 11-year-old Tyesha Edwards despite there being "little evidence," as Blavity previously reported. Imprisoned since he was a teen, Burrell, who is from Minneapolis, says that he was wrongfully convicted for murder and the presidential candidate is at fault. 

Burrell was 16 years old when Sen. Klobuchar, then prosecutor against Burrell, sought to give him life for a stray bullet that killed Edwards while she was doing her homework inside her house.

Burrell was convicted with no gun, fingerprints or hard evidence implicating him, and one of Burrell’s co-defendants, who admitted to the crime, said Burrell was not there. 

“I’m the one that did this,” co-defendant Ike Tyson, told the Associated Press. “I did it.” 

Tyson is currently serving a 45-year sentence while Burrell is serving life inside the Stillwater Correctional Facility in Stillwater, Minnesota.


“I could put in an appeal and say, hey, listen, give me less time and let me out right now. But then I would be taking responsibility for a crime I didn't commit. And I can never do that," Burrell told ABC News.

He was convicted by a jury for first-degree murder in May 2003 and convicted for a second time in 2008, though Klobuchar was not in office as a prosecutor at that time, according to ABC News. Regardless, she used her prosecutorial past to get elected as senator in 2006.

Klobuchar, however, was unconcerned with whether or not she might have been involved in putting an innocent Black teen behind bars for life. She used the Edwards incident to further her campaign, saying she is tough on crime against gun violence at the September Democratic debate in Houston last year.

“When I came into that office, we worked with the community groups, we put up billboards, we found the shooter and we put him in jail,” she said, referring to another Black victim, ABC News reported. “We did the same for the killer of a little girl named Tyesha Edwards who was doing her homework at her kitchen table and was shot through the window.”

While it seems that Klobuchar was pleased with the results, a closer examination of her prosecutorial work by the AP suggests that there were major flaws in her case against Burrell.

Sunny Hostin, a fellow former prosecutor and host of The View, interviewed Klobuchar and echoed the same sentiments, saying to the senator "How do you defend that record?" in an intense interview.

Blavity previously reported that a collective group of Black organizations based in Minneapolis, including the NAACP and Black Lives Matter Twin Cities, asked Klobuchar to suspend her campaign for president.