Juan Rivera during last week's press conference
Last Friday authorities in the northern Chicago suburb of Waukegan
agreed to pay Juan Rivera $20 million dollars for his wrongful conviction and the twenty years he spent behind bars for a crime he
did not commit. The week before, Ricky Jackson
was awarded $1 million dollars by a Cleveland judge for wrongfully spending 39 years behind bars (he will receive another million or so later). In February, Jerry Hobbs—exonerated after spending five years in jail—
settled his claim for $7.5 million.
Glenn Ford has not fared so well in Louisiana. Despite the pleas of the prosecutor who wrongly convicted him, Louisiana refuses to pay the mandated $25,000 per year, claiming that Ford has failed satisfactorily to “prove his innocence.” Pittsburgh’s Drew Whitley will receive nothing from the State of Pennsylvania after serving 18 years for a crime he did not commit. And 81-year-old Dale Johnston is likely to die before the State of Ohio compensates him for wrongfully placing him on death row. Still worse, 72-year-old James Edwards, who in 2012 was cleared of one of two murders he was coerced to confess to, remains in jail because only one of the convictions has been cleared.
There are two main reasons for the disparate compensation of these citizens. Join me below the orange jumpsuit, and I'll explain why.
I believe there are two reasons why we compensate folks differently for wrongful incarceration.
First, as hard as it is to believe, a citizen is not automatically entitled to compensation just because they were wrongfully convicted and had years of their lives taken away. They often must prove they were “factually innocent” of the crime (as opposed to merely having their constitutional rights stripped away by the criminal justice process). These cases can be extremely difficult to prove, as by the time the person is exonerated, most physical evidence is gone and memories have faded. Even worse, many states deny compensation to any exonerated person who “contributed” to the wrongful conviction by, say, succumbing to a forced confession.
Second, each jurisdiction has different statutes (or none at all) governing compensation. The federal government, the District of Columbia, and 30 states have compensation statutes of some form. The following 20 states do not: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming. Under federal law, a wrongfully imprisoned individual can receive up to $100,000 per year on death row or half that for any non-capital offense.
What’s the solution? I believe it is time the federal government took charge of the compensation of wrongfully convicted citizens by expanding the Civil Rights Act. With the number of people exonerated each year continuing to rise (it has tripled over the last two decades), the problem is not going to go away. It is time to standardize the compensation scheme and put some teeth into the law, so that folks like Rafael Madrigal—owed but not paid $281,700 according to California’s scheme—will be paid what they’re owed. “States should not have the choice to ‘opt out’ of compensating the people they wrongfully imprison,” says Los Angeles criminal defense attorney Robert Helfend. “It’s time for Congress to recognize that this is a civil rights issue and pass comprehensive legislation.”
I could not agree more.