Wrongly imprisoned deserve much more than bus fare

In 1993, Kirk Bloodsworth became the first death-row prisoner in the USA
to be exonerated by DNA evidence. After serving nearly nine years in a
Maryland prison for raping and murdering a 9-year-old girl, he was set
free.

But Bloodsworth's wrongful conviction continued to haunt him. He had
trouble finding work because employers were loath to hire someone with a
prison record. When he finally landed a job at a tool company, co-workers
left newspaper clippings about the crime at his work station. Later, while
working as a door-to-door fundraiser, a homeowner yelled "child killer" at
him.

Outrageous? Absolutely. But not unusual. USA TODAY reported last week that
exonerated prisoners have great difficulty finding jobs, regaining their
reputations and adjusting to life as free men.

During the past 15 years, 328 prisoners have been exonerated of crimes,
nearly half because DNA evidence proved their innocence, a University of
Michigan study found.

Incredibly, they get less help returning to a normal life than convicts
who serve out their terms. While those paroled typically receive
job-placement assistance, temporary housing and counseling, the exonerated
get little more than a new overcoat or bus money.

Only 18 states - along with Washington, D.C., and the federal government -
have compensation laws for the wrongly convicted. Even then, awards vary
widely, and the exonerated may wait years to collect, if at all. In some
states, they need an official pardon or a court to declare them innocent.
Filing suit against prosecutors is virtually impossible unless misconduct,
rather than an honest mistake, can be proved.

Finding jobs is also an uphill fight because arrest and conviction records
aren't automatically expunged. So an employer who spots the record on a
background check may decline to even interview the former inmate.

Earlier this month, Congress passed an anti- crime bill that eases the way
for federal prisoners to obtain new DNA tests of evidence. It also provides
$25 million to help states defray the costs of post-conviction testing,
and increases the maximum amount of damages for unjust imprisonment in
federal
cases to $50,000 per year for most felonies, and $100,000 per year in
capital cases. Congress urged states to provide reasonable compensation to
those unjustly convicted.

New York's law, enacted in 1984, could serve as a model. To collect, an
inmate must prove his innocence - not just show his conviction was
overturned on a technicality. But he needn't show misconduct by prosecutors
or police. A judge decides the case and the award, which averages $125,000
for each year a person was wrongly imprisoned.

False convictions are rare, and prosecutors worry that if DNA tests become
routine, thousands of guilty prisoners will inundate officials with demands
for them. But that seems trivial when the alternative is to insist that
innocent people stay in prison for crimes they didn't commit.

No sum of money can fully compensate innocent people who've lost years of
their freedom. But at a minimum, states can make amends for their
egregious errors by helping repair lives they've torn apart.

---

Source : The USA TODAY

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/ed ... view_x.htm

Book tells full story of a man's wrongful death-row conviction

Gretchen Parker
Canadian Press

October 24, 2004

Kirk Bloodsworth talks about a passage from "Bloodsworth," a book about him published last month by author and attorney Tim Junkin. (AP/Todd Dudek)

CAMBRIDGE, Md. (AP) - Kirk Bloodsworth thinks people may finally be getting it.

He sees it when he testifies before Congress, when he speaks to law students at Duke University, when readers wait in line at a bookstore for the chance to hug his neck and tell him how sorry they are for what happened to him.

Finally, he says, people believe he is an innocent man. And they say that once the news becomes real to them, the fact that he spent nine years in prison - two of them on death row - is truly frightening.

Eleven years after Bloodsworth became the first person in the United States to be exonerated by DNA evidence after being convicted in a death penalty case, he's getting the chance to tell his full story. Bloodsworth, written by author and lawyer Tim Junkin, was published last month by Algonquin Books.

"It literally scares people," says Bloodsworth, who was wrongly convicted twice of raping and bludgeoning a nine-year-old Baltimore County girl to death. "They don't want to believe something like this could happen."

The book tells for the first time Bloodsworth's story in detail: why he was picked up for the crime (one anonymous tip out of 500 told authorities he looked like a composite sketch) and how he was convicted by two juries (eyewitnesses testified they saw someone nearby who looked like him).

Junkin, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who spent childhood summers on Bloodsworth's native Eastern Shore, tells the details from Bloodsworth's point of view - the bewildering, terrifying ordeal that spun out of control within hours of his arrest.

"He felt stained, gnawed down, a bone-bare scarecrow of a human," Junkin wrote. "When he glimpsed up, in every look he saw disgust. He saw the look people give a sick-minded monster."

Junkin spent six months interviewing those who worked to put Bloodsworth away. He talked to all the prosecutors, the judges who tried him, his defence lawyers and the appellate lawyers, and he gathered thousands of pages of police and FBI records, notes and reports. And the author thinks he knows why they were so willing to help, he said.

"I think they feel bad about what happened to Kirk and what they did," he says. "They almost executed an innocent man. They put him in prison for almost a decade."

They believed they were doing the right thing at the time, Junkin concludes. But arrogance kept them from revisiting their decision, he says.

When Bloodsworth, a former water man from this town on the Choptank River, was cleared of the crime in 1993, people here didn't fully understand. While in prison he had researched the forensic use of genetics for years and pressed relentlessly for tests that would clear him. But in the early 1990s, the public still knew little about DNA technology. They thought he'd been cleared on a technicality.

He was forced to photocopy his pardon to show managers at a Black & Decker plant when he applied for a job. They didn't believe that he had been cleared. He was chased out of a neighbourhood when a man pointed at him and screamed over and over, "Child killer in the area!" Meanwhile, prosecutors said publicly they weren't prepared to declare Bloodsworth innocent.

The book reads like a legal thriller. The ending is part of the title, "The first death-row inmate exonerated by DNA." However, readers not familiar with the case won't know until the last pages just how weird Bloodsworth's horror story became.

As Junkin searched for a way to wrap up his book, authorities finally checked DNA from the crime scene with a national database and found the real killer of Dawn Hamilton. The same DNA that had cleared Bloodsworth 11 years before now damned Kimberly Shay Ruffner, who pleaded guilty this year to the crime.

Bloodsworth had known the man in prison, delivering library books to him and lifting weights with him.

The attorney who prosecuted Bloodsworth in both of his trials travelled to Cambridge to tell him in person. Sitting at a table inside Burger King, Bloodsworth cried when she told him the news.

Now Bloodsworth, 43, is using Ruffner's conviction and the book as a new start.

He already was a longtime advocate for the Justice Project, pushing for passage of a bill to give convicted felons and rape victims more access to DNA testing. He now has a paid position with the organization.

And in the last days of its session this month, Congress passed legislation he had pushed, sending it to President Bush. It would ensure access to DNA testing for those serving time in prison or on death row, and it would provide $755 million in grants over the next five years to clear a backlog of 350,000 untested DNA samples in rape evidence kits.

Bloodsworth had a difficult time easing back into his old life after his release, but his work as an advocate helped revive him. Joining other exonerated death-row inmates at seminars offered a bonding experience similar to that of a war veterans' group or Alcoholics Anonymous, he says. It was healing.

He still counts the days until he has time to crab again - this time for fun - in his new work boat, christened Freedom. But he can't relax until he brings something positive out of his ordeal. The legislation is a start. The book is a start, a way of spreading firsthand the word that issuing a death penalty isn't always a sure thing.

When he signs books in stores around the country, he reminds readers of that.

"If it can happen to me, it can happen to them," Bloodsworth says. "I just want to leave them with that thought in their head."

-

On the Net:

Algonquin Books: http://www.algonquin.com

Justice Project: http://justice.policy.net
© The Canadian Press 2004
http://www.canada.com/news/national/sto ... cda90e3446

A most compelling case for killing death penalty
Wednesday, December 01, 2004
Most of us believe -- or want to believe -- that innocent people do not
get themselves entangled with the criminal justice system and face death, and
are even killed by the state -- by us -- for crimes they did not commit.

That level of belief is only strengthened in direct proportion to the
number of chances the state has to prove guilt. If someone is convicted twice of
the same murder, then how could that person possibly be innocent?

The criminal justice system isn't always about truth. We shouldn't believe
it is.

It's also about winning trials and clearing calendars. It's about very
human cops who make mistakes -- or fake evidence. About prosecutors pressed to
find and convict the guilty and public defenders who are underpaid and
understaffed. About unjustified belief in the persuasive power of eyewitness
testimony.

The criminal justice system is about jurors as vulnerable to prejudices in
packs of 12 as they are as individuals. A small hill of little mistakes that
could add up to a mountainous tragedy, the conviction -- and, maybe, eventual
execution of an innocent.

Like Kirk Bloodsworth, convicted twice of a murder he didn't commit.

He didn't die. He is no longer in prison, but he spent nine years there.
Wrongly.

And the other day, Bloodsworth was in New Jersey, at Princeton University,
because the state is about to make decisions about the death penalty. About to
make itself vulnerable to the same mistakes that almost cost Bloodsworth his
life.

Making us -- you and me, as citizens -- unwilling abettors of wrongful
death.

"I cannot accept the death penalty because it means innocent people could
die," Bloodsworth told a group of students and others, most opponents of the
death penalty.

His appearance was part of the campaign of New Jerseyans for Alternatives
to the Death Penalty, a small group of activists who have, so far, stymied
executions, persuaded the Legislature to call for a study of the death penalty
-- vetoed by former Gov. James E. McGreevey -- and are now pushing for life
without parole as an alternative.

First, about Bloodsworth. No, he didn't get off on a technicality. He
didn't murder Dawn Hamilton, a 9-year-old, on July 25, 1984, in a woods outside
Baltimore. Someone else did -- someone the police did not pursue, someone who
could have killed other kids while prosecutors congratulated themselves they had
found the right man.

Bloodsworth is the first death row inmate exonerated by DNA evidence.
Nearly 10 years after he was convicted, he was released -- and waited another 10
years for Maryland to use the same DNA to find the killer. A man Bloodsworth met
in prison.

What you should know about Bloodsworth -- and why he probably was
suspected -- is that he is not an articulate, well-groomed, urbane kind of guy.
His country accent didn't echo easily off the polished walls of gothic McCosh
Hall.

"I don't need no other moral question," he elaborated on his opposition to
capital punishment.

He's 44, with a paunch, but when the cops picked him up 20 years ago, he
was 22, dirt poor, unemployed, a drinker and drug-user. Although an honorably
discharged Marine without a record, Bloodsworth looked like a loser who hung
with other losers.

So maybe, to you and me, he looked like the kind who might murder someone.


Then he was fingered because he resembled a composite sketch put together
by two witnesses -- two children, 7 and 10, who later identified him in court as
the man they saw take Dawn into the woods from which she never emerged alive.

Eyewitness testimony -- the best, right? The most compelling. Only it was
wrong -- and too often is. It was wrong in both of Bloodsworth's trials. The
children initially said the killer was 6 feet 5 inches tall. Bloodsworth is 6
foot; the real killer was 5 feet 8 inches tall.

Find more details in a new book, "Bloodsworth," written by
lawyer-journalist Tim Junkin, published by Algonquin Books.

The first execution in New Jersey since 1963 could come in January if
death-row inmate John Martini loses his last appeal. No one's arguing Martini is
innocent -- of course, only Bloodsworth argued that he was -- but the execution
of a guilty man doesn't render the death penalty good, just, moral, less
barbaric, infallible or a deterrent.

It just makes it more likely an innocent person will eventually be killed
-- with your tax dollars and mine doing the killing, putting the poison into the
IVs.

State hearings will be held soon on new rules for how death should be
administered.

"It's really something people should see and hear," said Celeste
Fitzgerald, NJADP's executive director. Her group had the original regulations
overturned.

"The hearings will go into every detail about how people die from lethal
injections. Guilty people, and innocent. People should know what they're paying
for."

Wrongly convicted walk away with scars


Even after his pardon, they called Kirk Bloodworth a child killer. After
nearly nine years in prison, Bloodworth walked away in 1993 when DNA tests
showed he was wrongly convicted of raping and murdering a 9-year-old girl.

He was now a free man, the first death row prisoner exonerated because of
DNA evidence. But his trials weren't over.

Employers were leery of hiring someone who'd spent so long in jail. When
he landed a job at a tool company, co-workers left newspaper clippings
about the crime at his workstation. Suspicions followed him like a shadow.
Bloodworth got a door-to-door fundraising job, but a homeowner recognized
him and began yelling "child killer" at him as Bloodworth stood on the
front stoop.

"I never got a fair shake," says Bloodworth, 44, of Cambridge, Md., who
works as a crab fisherman on his boat, Freedom, and is a program officer
with The Justice Project, a group that campaigns for criminal justice
reform. "It's hard to come back to this world and be accepted after you've
been in prison so long, especially to the workplace. That's very sad."

With the advent of DNA testing, more prisoners are being freed after
wrongful convictions. The pace of exonerations has jumped sharply, from
about 12 a year through the early 1990s to an average of 43 a year since
2000, according to a study by the University of Michigan. There have been
at least 328 exonerations since 1989, and about half of those since 1999
were based on DNA evidence. There are at least 41 Innocence Projects in 31
states providing legal assistance to inmates.

But as the number of exonerees grows, concerns are mounting about the
difficulties these former prisoners experience in finding employment once
they're free. While prison parolees typically get free job placement
assistance, temporary housing and counseling, the exonerated often are
released into an employment no-man's land.

They get scant help finding work. They have rsum gaps from spending years
in prison. The average time from conviction to exoneration is more than 11
years, according to the University of Michigan study. They often get
little more than a new overcoat or bus money.

Only 18 states, the federal government and Washington, D.C., have laws for
compensating the exonerated. Compensation can take years to get, and the
laws often aren't used by exonerees because they may need an official
pardon or a court must declare them innocent.

Compensation amounts can vary widely. Some states, such as West Virginia,
have no cap on the amount that can be received; others, such as Maine, set
a maximum of $300,000.

Employers are leery of hiring convicts who may have been wrongfully
convicted. Job skills are so obsolete that some exonerees have never sent
an e-mail or typed on a computer.

A large number of these men - more than 95% are men, according to the
Michigan study - grapple with emotional problems. Some have narrowly
escaped execution on death row. Others have been assaulted by other
inmates or kept in isolation. Many are angry. Some resort to crime after
their release.

"Innocent people do some of the hardest time. They never reconcile
themselves to why they're in prison. They feel their lives have been taken
away," says Justin Brooks, executive director of the Innocence Project
chapter at California Western School of Law in San Diego. "We expect them
to just start functioning in the workforce. But there's a stigma to having
been incarcerated."

Help finding jobs

Now, new efforts are getting underway to provide some employment help. A
project, Life After Exoneration, formed last year to provide support
services to the wrongly convicted after they're freed. The Berkeley,
Calif.-based group is negotiating with a private job agency in hopes of
launching a first-ever national employment services program for the
exonerated. The program would include skills assessment, training for
three or four months and job placement.

What help states offer

Just 18 states, Washington, D.C., and the federal government have
compensation laws for the wrongly convicted. Amounts are sometimes
determined by a state agency, sometimes by a court and can be capped by
law.

Final payments vary widely:

Alabama: Minimum of $50,000 for each year served.

California: $100 a day for each day served.

District of Columbia: No cap.

Illinois: Maximum $15,000 for up to 5 years; $30,000 for six to 14 years,
$35,000 for more than 14.

Iowa: $50 a day for each day served and lost wages up to $25,000 a year,
plus attorneys' fees.

Maine: Maximum $300,000. No punitive damages.

Maryland: No cap on compensation described as "actual damages sustained."

Montana: Free tuition to any school in the state's university system.

New Hampshire: Maximum $20,000.

New Jersey: Capped at twice the amount earned the year before
incarceration or $20,000, whichever is greater.

New York: No cap.

North Carolina: $20,000 a year, total not to exceed $500,000.

Ohio: $25,000 a year of incarceration, plus lost wages and attorneys fees.

Oklahoma: $175,000 maximum. No punitive damages.

Tennessee: $1 million cap.

Texas: $25,000 per year of incarceration, total not to exceed $500,000,
plus 1 year of counseling.

Virginia: 90% of the average Virginia income for up to 20 years; $10,000
in tuition to enroll in the state's community-college system.

West Virginia: No cap.

Wisconsin: $25,000 cap.

Federal government: $5,000 cap.

(sources: Adele Bernhard, professor of law at Pace University; The
Innocence Project)


It's a potent need: A survey of nearly 60 exonerees found 1/3 are
financially dependent on family or friends after they are freed.

"Exonerees identified employment as their No. 1 need," says Ernest Duff,
executive director. "These are pretty macho guys. They don't want to go
right into counseling. What they want is to go back to work."

But they have no legal right to get their former jobs back. And many find
that new employers are wary of hiring anyone who's been in jail, even if
it turned out to be a wrongful conviction.

Ray Krone, 47, of Dover, Pa., has become a public speaker against the
death penalty, traveling across the country and to Europe. He was
convicted of the 1991 murder of a female bartender and sent to Arizona's
death row. In 1995, that conviction was reversed and a new trial was
ordered. A second jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to life in
prison. In 2002, new DNA evidence cleared him of the crime. He was free.

Before serving a decade in prison, he'd held a $30,000-a-year job as a
postal worker. Now, he had nothing. He thought about getting his job back
but realized it was a long shot because the U.S. Postal Service was under
no legal obligation to rehire him. So he moved to a small town to be
closer to his family and now does speaking engagements and odd jobs, such
as mowing lawns, to help get by.

"Employers ask you what your job history is. What are you going to tell
them as an exoneree?" Krone says. "Coming out, it's like you're an 18- or
19-year-old again."

The past also follows the exonerated when they apply for jobs. Job
applications typically ask if applicants have an arrest or conviction
record. The exonerated must still answer "yes," even if their conviction
has been thrown out by a judge.

Employment experts say that an affirmative answer can scare off potential
employers. Some desperate exonerees even take pardon papers to job
interviews in hopes of allaying concerns.

Records often not updated

In other cases, exonerees may be freed, but their records will continue to
show they were arrested, tried and convicted. Records are not
automatically expunged, even in cases of a gubernatorial pardon. That
means that employers doing a background check may come across the
information and opt not to interview the applicant, especially with
unemployment at 5.4%, as it was in September.

There are exceptions. Some exonerees have put themselves through law
school, have parlayed their experiences into careers by going on the
public-speaking circuit, or - in a very few cases - have been hired back
by employers.

After a judge overturned his 1986 rape convictions, Lonnie Erby was freed
in 2003. He'd served 17 years. He was rehired at the DaimlerChrysler plant
in Fenton, Mo., where he'd worked before his sentence.

Some exonerees win millions of dollars in civil lawsuits, but legal
experts say that's rare. Winning a case often means exonerees must show
that those who prosecuted them engaged in misconduct. Some government
agencies also have immunity if they acted in good faith.

Instead, many exonerees get by with help from friends and family. In some
cases, the lawyer who helped clear the client sets up re-entry help, such
as counseling, or finds the client a job.

Gary Gauger considers himself one of the lucky ones. He worked as an
organic farmer before being sentenced to death for killing his parents in
1993. He was freed in 1996, and a year later 2 members of a motorcycle
gang went to prison for the murders. He received a gubernatorial pardon.
He was able to live temporarily with his sister and return to farming.
Without that fallback, he says, he would have been lost.

"I was lucky that I could go back to farming and had an established
career," says Gauger of Richmond, Va. He inherited his parents' farm. "I
was screwed up. I didn't want to talk to anyone. All the money I had I
gave to my lawyer. I still don't trust anyone."

Many exonerees feel such anger or alienation. Landing and keeping a steady
job can be difficult because of the emotional fallout from years of
resentment over the time they lost to prison.

Dana Holland can't find a job. The 36-year-old spent 10 years in prison
but was released in June 2003 after a judge found him not guilty in a
retrial of the 1993 attempted murder and armed robbery of a woman in
Chicago. He also was convicted of rape, but DNA evidence helped clear him.
He was sentenced to more than 100 years for both crimes.

The father of two teenagers worked at an industrial laundry facility
before his incarceration. But after winning his freedom, Holland says,
he's been unable to find work. He's received no compensation and is living
with his brother. He says he is in the process of trying to get some
compensation from the state, but that takes time.

He has applied to Walgreen's, food stores, meat companies and UPS. No
employer will hire him, he says, because the crimes he was acquitted of
are still on his record.

At first, he tried not telling employers about convictions. Now, he tells
them and tries to show them records from his lawyers regarding his case.

"I'm a burden on my family," Holland says. "I'll do anything that pays
bills and puts food on the table. But once you're a convicted sex
offender, employers aren't going to hire you, because they think they'll
put their company in jeopardy. You get all this publicity when you get
out. Then it dies down and you get forgotten."

(source: USA TODAY)