Louisiana Voice

I thought you might like to peruse a sample chapter from my newest book, 101 Wrongful Convictions in Louisiana. This chapter reveals the cost of wrongful convictions – in costs to arrest and hold a person, the cost of his prosecution and conviction, the cost of his housing and medical care, the cost to taxpayers when he is finally exonerated by evidence that should have been revealed at his trial, but wasn’t and last but not least, the cost to society in the fact that the guilty person may still be free to commit more acts of violence. (You may order a copy of the book for $25 by credit card by clicking on the YELLOW BUTTON, below right, and following instructions, or by sending a check for $25 to: Tom Aswell, 107 North College Street West, Denham Springs, Louisiana 70726.)

Exoneree Compensation

            Dozens of Louisiana exonerees would like – deserve – to be compensated for their wrongful convictions but, like Jerome Morgan, they’re finding their efforts make for a long, arduous battle. Morgan, moments after his release when Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro dropped efforts to re-try him, reiterated that he never knew sixteen-year-old murder victim Clarence Landry and couldn’t have killed him, based on evidence from a police report that a jury at his trial was never allowed to see. Cannizzaro’s refusal to sign onto Morgan’s claim of innocence blocks compensation for Morgan because the Louisiana attorney general has refused to compromise on a 2005 statute that requires former inmates to prove “factual innocence” by “clear and convincing evidence.” That’s a higher bar than it required to free Morgan.

            Louisiana’s rigid interpretation of the statute was drafted as a technicality to force the innocent to prove a negative so as to prevent payments to freed inmates from receiving compensation, advocates claim. The stakes are a relatively modest – forty thousand dollars per year, capped at four hundred thousand dollars spread over ten years – or a lump sum of two hundred fifty thousand dollars. There were, at the time this was written, about twenty former inmates receiving a cumulative six hundred thousand dollars for having served a combined three hundred fifty years in prison.

            It took Earl Truvia, wrongfully convicted, along with Gregory Bright, for the murder of a fifteen-year-old, years to recover a cent. The two were freed in 2002 after twenty-seven years in prison after it was revealed that a schizophrenic heroin addict was the lone witness in their trial and that he testified under an alias. The money recovered by Truvia, he said, barely covered the cost to his family to maintain contact with him and to feed his commissary fund during his imprisonment. “It was real disheartening to know the state of Louisiana acknowledged my criminal conviction was dismissed with volumes of evidence, and then they fought in opposition of a small compensation,” he said.

            Of course, there are always those who manage to exploit the system. When Huwe Burton was exonerated almost twenty years following his 1989 wrongful conviction for a murder he did not commit, he left prison with no money, no credit, and no one to borrow from. So, while his lawsuit for compensation crawled through the legal system, he took an advance of five hundred thousand dollars from a company whose investors include Further Global Capital Management and Blackstone Group, one of the largest private equity firms in the world. USClaims, a Florida company, charged Burton 28 percent annual interest on the advance.

            With literally billions in potential payouts at stake, companies offering high-interest cash advances while the exonerated pursue their claims are attracted like flies to a carcass in efforts to victimize the wrongfully convicted a second time. Because civil litigation may languish in the court system for years, exonerees may find themselves paying back more than double their advance. It’s a win-win for all concerned in one sense. It’s a short-term bet on an almost sure thing for the company and for the exoneree whose litigation fails, there’s no obligation to repay the advance. Still, with compensation almost a certainty, it’s a smart investment for the company. Felipe Rodriguez, for example, is another exoneree. When he settled with the state of New York for five million dollars, he repaid five hundred ninety thousand dollars on his advance of three hundred eighty thousand dollars. That represented an accrued interest rate of 55.3 percent.

            Sometimes, when the state resists payment, forcing a lawsuit to recover, the strategy can backfire. In North Carolina, the state refused to compensate Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, two black, intellectually disabled half-brothers who spent thirty-one years in prison for the rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl, a crime they did not commit. They sued and a jury in their federal civil rights suit awarded the seventy-five million dollars – thirty-one million dollars each and thirteen million dollars in punitive damages.

            As of July 1, 2022, anyone convicted in Louisiana whose conviction has been vacated and who can prove factual innocence may file a petition for compensation of up to forty thousand dollars per each year of wrongful incarceration, with a maximum award of four hundred thousand dollars. That’s up from the twenty-five thousand dollars per year, up to two hundred fifty thousand dollars maximum. Exonerees have the option of receiving a payment of forty thousand dollars per year for up to ten years or of receiving a one-time payout of two hundred fifty thousand dollars.

            Where some awards are made by boards or commissions, Louisiana and several other states allow the courts to determine if an award shall be made. In Louisiana, that decision rests exclusively with the Nineteenth Judicial District Court, located in Baton Rouge.

            In January 2024, a Shreveport television station, relying on figures obtained from the National Registry of Exonerations, which in turn relied of a study by High Rise Financial, a pre-settlement legal funding company, said thirty-seven Louisiana exonerees had received more than fourteen million since 1989 – an average payout of about three dollars for each of Louisiana’s 4,600,000 million residents.

            The report was only off by more than twice that amount because it neglected to factor in additional payouts of more than eighteen million dollars for wrongful convictions in Louisiana. That bumped the per capita share up to $7.08, third-highest in the nation behind Connecticut’s $14.04 and higher than Maryland’s $5.98 per capita rate.  New York had the highest payout with, more than three hundred thirty-eight million dollars to two hundred forty-four exonerees. Texas was second with one hundred fifty-five million dollars to one hundred forty-one wrongfully convicted persons.

            Louisiana is among thirty-five states and the District of Columbia which have laws to compensate the wrongfully convicted up to fifty thousand dollars for each year of wrongful incarceration.

            Several other Louisiana exonerees had claims or lawsuit pending as this book went to press. Sullivan Walter was convicted of rape but later DNA results showed he was not guilty. That information was withheld by the prosecutor who even asked that the criminologist who testified at his trial to “fudge” his findings in an appeal hearing. Walter is seeking four hundred thousand dollars in state compensation.

            In May 2023 the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld an appeals court ruling that Wilbert Jones was “factually innocent” of a 1971 rape for which he was convicted and spent the next forty-six years in prison largely on the strength of withheld information about eyewitness identification or that a different person had been arrested for similar rapes in Baton Rouge within the same time frame. The Supreme Court’s decision cleared the way for him to claim state compensation for more than four decades behind bars for a crime he did not commit. Then-Attorney General (since elected Louisiana’s governor) Jeff Landry opposed Jones’s compensation claim, arguing before the state’s highest court that the appeals court had misinterpreted the litmus test for wrongful conviction compensation.

            That same month, the largest wrongful conviction lawsuit settlement was agreed upon when New Orleans agreed to pay John Floyd five and one-half million dollars. Floyd had been wrongfully convicted of a 1980 double slaying after he was allegedly beaten into confessing by detective John Dillman, who was implicated in at least two other wrongful convictions.

Not all exonerees are awarded compensation nor do most of them prevail in litigation they initiate. Most struggle to find and keep jobs, reestablish long lost family ties, or pay for every day essentials. Innocence Project New Orleans attorney Zac Crawford put it in perspective when he said, exonerees “come home with a ten-dollar bus ticket. That’s all the state gives you when you get out of prison. You’re thrown back into a world that you don’t recognize. You are forced to work for a living, despite having really no skills gained in prison.” He said that’s without even addressing the “trauma and stress” enduring by exonerees while waiting for some kind of compensation for having years, even decades, taken from them.

Three successive Louisiana attorneys general fought compensations. Charles Foti compensation for two of the four exonerated during his tenure. His successor, Buddy Caldwell, opposed nine of twenty-seven during his eight years and Landry, who served from 2016 until his election as governor in 2023, opposed ten of twelve cases.

            Landry relied on DNA evidence to convict criminals but refused to recognize DNA evidence that cleared Wilbert Jones and Malcolm Alexander for their compensation, according to New Orleans television investigative reporters Lee Zurik and Dannah Sauer.

            Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams, elected in 2020 largely on a platform to reform and to correct past errors and misconduct by his predecessors, suddenly found himself on the defensive when two men exonerated of unrelated convictions in 2021 filed separate lawsuits against the DA’s office in an effort to get compensation for their time wrongfully imprisoned. Kaliegh Smith served nearly fourteen years in prison and Kuantau Reeder was behind bars for twenty-eight years.

            Williams, whose civil rights division was instrumental in obtaining the men’s release, said that his taxpayer-supported office should not be held financially accountable for the sins of his predecessors, Harry Connick, Sr., and Leon Cannizzaro.

            In order to collect compensation for a wrongful conviction, it’s not just a simple matter of having a conviction overturned or even to be exonerated; he must prove “factual innocence” by “clear and convincing evidence.” That’s a higher legal standard than is required for freedom. Proponents of compensation claim that requirements amount to proving a negative in order to qualify.

            Following is a list of thirty-five Louisiana exonerees who have been paid state compensation, lawsuit judgments, or both:

• Reginald Adams:        $330,000 state compensation, $1.25 million lawsuit settlement;
• Gene Bibbins:             $250,000 compensation, $1.15 million lawsuit settlement;
• Dan L. Bright:             $251,320 compensation, $78,000 legal fees;
• Gregory Bright:          $330,000 compensation
• Dennis Brown:            $357,871 compensation, $1.4 million lawsuit settlement;
• Nathan Brown:           $330,000 compensation;
• Gerald Burge:             $150,000 compensation, $5,030,000 lawsuit settlement;
• Clyde Charles:            $250,000 compensation, $200,000 lawsuit settlement;
• Royal Clark:                $330,000;
• Allen Coco:                 $150,000 state compensation;
• Rodricus Crawford:    $25,000 lawsuit settlement, compensation pending                          
• Glenn Davis:               $330,000 compensation;
• Douglas Dilosa:          $330,000 compensation;
• Jack Favor                   $55,000 lawsuit settlement
• John Floyd:                 $330,000 compensation, $5.5 million lawsuit settlement
• Larry Delmore:           $330,000 compensation;
• Roland Gibson:          $11 million judgment reversed on appeal;
• Darrin Hill:                 $330,000 compensation;
• Willie Jackson:           $330,000 compensation;
• Henry James:             $330,000 compensation;
• Anthony Johnson:      $330,000 compensation, undisclosed lawsuit settlement amount;
• Rickey Johnson:         $245,000 compensation, confidential federal lawsuit settlement;
• Robert Jones:             $2,050,000 lawsuit settlement;
• Wilbert Jones:            $400,000;
• Curtis Kyles:               $150,000 compensation;
• Terrence Meyers:        $330,000 compensation;
• Jerome Morgan:          $330,000 compensation, $800,000 lawsuit settlement;
• Michael Shannon:       $313,750;
• Kia Stewart”               $259,646 compensation;
• John Thompson:         $330,000 ($14 million lawsuit judgment overturned on appeal)
• Eddie Triplett:             $250,000 compensation;
• Earl Truvia:                 $330,00
• Archie Williams:        $330,000 compensation;
• Calvin Williams:         $330,000 compensation
• Michael Anthony Williams: $330,000 compensation;
• Calvin Willis:              $330,000 compensation;