Judgment Day

An exonerated prisoner is national news, and the media cannot wait to tell the story of the innocent prisoner who has spent X amount of years behind bars. But what happens after these prisoners are released?

CNN recently interviewed 15 of the 17 men wrongfully convicted in Dallas County Texas. You can read how they’ve fared.

The detailed story of one recently exonerated prisoner, Wiley Fountain, is here.

Wiley was one of the lucky few to receive financial compensation from the state, but the $190,000 or so that made it into his pocket is long gone.

Time-out: $190,000 for 15 years? Just under $12,700 for each year of his life lost to a wrongful conviction? That sucks, plain and simple. I’m not sure you can even put a dollar amount on “time,” but I know a measly $12k doesn’t cut it. How often are exonerated prisoners compensated, and how does it work? Does the state simply shell out the money and say “good luck?” I’d hope there is some kind of reintegration program, but I’m pretty sure it’s average at best. Maybe Grits or Jamie Spencer can provide some information on this?

In Fountain’s case, he was homeless in five years, rearrested, and now he’s gone off the map. Most of the others released report they cannot find steady work.

According to Jeff Blackburn, one of the lead attorneys with the Innocence Project of Texas:

These wrongly convicted men get "a double-whammy screw job." There's little help from the government to transition back into society and they're still viewed as criminals once they're out of prison. They don't have any services available to them, not even $100 and a cheap suit.

Updated:   A special thanks to Grits for Breakfast for providing the following commentary:

It's even worse than "average" services. Because they're not on parole, they can't even get service received by people who actually committed crimes.

Our relatively new wrongful conviction compensation law authorizes a lump sum payment of $50K per year incarcerated, taxable.

Until recently, nobody gave a second thought to what happened to these folks when they're out. Now that there are so many of them, it's becoming extremely clear that the injustice done to them did not end at the prison gates, and can never be fully compensated with money alone.

This story appeared late last night in The Dallas Morning News and discusses the case of Thomas Clifford McGowan Jr. who has spent 23 years in prison after being convicted of rape and burglary in 1985. State District Judge Susan Hawk is expected to recommend McGowan be released from prison today, after agreeing new DNA evidence proves he could not have committed the crimes.

Failing to follow proper identification standards is scary indeed. Too often police officers are under so much pressure to solve a crime that they end up putting pressure on themselves to make the facts fit. While this issue usually surfaces more regularly in cases where the defendant is poor and does not have the resources to hire a high-powered criminal defense attorney, it is something that could happen to anyone. I like to hear about these kinds of cases—not only because the defendant is exonerated, but also because it gives me hope that the media exposure will force law enforcement officials to follow the law. Here are highlights from the article:

What is remarkable about Mr. McGowan's case, according to one of his defense attorneys, is the ordinariness of the process that ultimately branded him a rapist.

Click to read more ...

On March 25th, Adam Liptak, legal columnist for the New York Times, wrote this article discussing the rate at which innocent people are convicted of felonies. Yesteday, Capital Defense Weekly had this article titled "Another one: North Carolina sees the release of another innocent man", which provided in part:

[Glenn Edward] Chapman [sentenced to death for the 1992 murders of Betty Jean Ramseur and Tenene Yvette Conley in Hickory] becomes, according to the DPIC list, number 128 [found innocent of the crime for which he was convicted]. Not to sound too psychic or that much of an insider, 129 & 130 aren’t that far behind, and we may even see 131 this year. Two of the three are purportedly potential DNA exonerations, the other is just a matter of when, not if, the DA will concede error.

It seems as if Capital Defense Weekly is "psychic or that much of an insider." Number 129 could quite possibly be Michael Clancy, who was released from Rikers on Monday, when Bronx Supreme Court Justice Denis Boyle handed down a decision vacating Clancy's 1999 murder conviction.  The New York Daily News has more here.