Setting a Price on Injustice

Setting a Price on Injustice

By: Stephanie Marino

In February, Gene Bibbins was awarded $150,000- the first person in Louisiana to be compensated for a wrongful conviction under a new law. Bibbins spent 17 years in Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for an aggravated rape and burglary he did not commit.

The law, enacted this past September, set up the Innocence Compensation Fund that allows wrongfully convicted individuals to collect a maximum of $15,000 per year in prison for up to 10 years. 

Without the law, Bibbins would likely have been released with nothing more than an apology, if that.

Not all states have laws that compensate the wrongfully convicted, and passing the legislation is usually difficult and time consuming. Groups and individuals around the country devote their time and resources to help promote such laws.

"Our policy center educates and advocates legislators about the issues," said Jane Fox, the development and communication associate at the Innocence Project in New York. "We work with them to frame the issues and we have exonerees speak with committees of lawmakers telling them their story."

The Innocence Project has a policy analyst who is actively involved in lobbying around the nation, state by state. The project also offers materials about compensation legislation including a seven-page model of legislation for states to consider.

In its compensation fact sheet, the project urges states to pass statutes that are straightforward and fair, offering a fixed sum or a range of recovery for each year spent in prison.

Fox said the difficulty the Innocence Project usually faces is legislators that are uneducated about the issue of compensation.

"They are used to seeing it in the framework of 'our system works, we don't make mistakes, we don't convict innocent people,'" Fox said.

Other groups are also involved with educating legislators. Part of the mission of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law is to help exonerated former prisoners cope with the difficult process of reintegration into free society but the center also works with lawmakers.

"We have testified before various legislative committees, lined up sponsors for bills, but without much success to date," said Robert Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions.

Warden and his staff have written extensively on the subject of getting elected officials to support legislation including a recent article published in The Chicago Sun-Times calling for a change in the Illinois statute which limits compensation to $160,000 and allows individuals to also file a lawsuit. Warden argues that it would be preferable to increase the amount substantially but require that a wrongfully convicted person waive the right to sue.

Each state has the choice to enact a statute that compensates wrongfully convicted individuals, and there are reasons why some states have the laws and others do not.

"There are two reasons why states pass legislation," said Adele Bernhard, associate professor at Pace Law School in New York. "Either there's a particularly egregious story about an exoneree that received media attention or the state worries about lawsuits due to a large number of exonerations."

Leading up to the Louisiana legislative session, wrongfully convicted men like Gregory Bright and Michael Williams started making appearances to gain press coverage.

Williams spent 24 years in prison on rape charges as an innocent man and upon his release was given $10. Bright was sentenced to life and spent 27 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. He also received $10 and an apology.

The Innocence Project in New Orleans and a few state representatives pushed a bill that would create a fund to pay wrongfully convicted individuals $25,000 for each year spent in prison.

The bill passed, but exonerees are only entitled to $15,000 per each year spent in prison with a maximum of $150,000.

"Sometimes you have to approach legislation by smaller inroads," Fox said. "Some of the states where we had success it didn't come right away, it took a lot of work."

Bernhard said that the Louisiana statute was defensive. Louisiana was ranked in the top ten for the number of exonerations between 1989 and 2003, according to a 2004 University of Michigan Law School study. Having to pay lawsuits to each of those individuals would have cost more than coming up with legislation that specified a certain amount.

Some states might find that it is more reasonable and less expensive to have a statute with a certain amount for wrongfully convicted individuals rather than awarding damages from lawsuits.

"I think some of the huge jury awards will soon start sinking in to officials that a better policy would be to indemnify the wrongfully convicted generously," Warden said. He mentioned a jury award of $15 million to a man in Illinois who was wrongfully convicted.

Currently 21 states, the District of Columbia and the federal government have statutes that compensate wrongfully convicted individuals. The statutes vary greatly in awards and requirements.

Louisiana awards the second-lowest amount per year, higher only than Wisconsin's $5,000 per year with a maximum of $25,000.

Bernhard outlined the aspects of fair compensation statutes in her 1999 article "When Justice Fails" in University of Chicago Law School Roundtable. Although Louisiana lags behind in the monetary amount, the law has a few components advocates praise. For example, a wrongfully convicted person has two years to claim compensation. Bernhard said this is standard and reasonable.

From her research on compensation statutes, Bernhard thinks the New York law is the best model for legislation. The compensation amount has no cap and judges decide on a case-by-case basis how much each individual will receive from the state.

"Recently, they have been giving out $100,000 to $150,000 a year," Bernhard said.

California law awards individuals $100 per day of incarceration. Kenneth Marsh was awarded $756,900 in January for spending 21 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Marsh's payment was the largest California has approved for a wrongful conviction.

Compared to Marsh's award, Bibbins' $150,000 seems modest. But for the wrongfully convicted in the 29 states without statutes, compensation funds would help tremendously in their efforts to be indemnified for the price they had to pay because of the wrongs of the justice system.

Word Count: 1,053