Beyond handouts, Exonerees Work for Justice
John Thompson is an exoneree, and the founder and director of Resurrection After Exoneration;
Ora Nitkin-Kaner (AVODAH ‘08-’09) is a former exoneree advocate with RAE.
RAE is hosting its first organizational fundraiser on June 19th in New Orleans’ French Quarter to bring awareness of the issues of wrongful conviction to a larger audience. For more information, visit www.r-a-e.org
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I returned home from Angola prison in May 2003. At the time, there was no compensation statute to ensure Louisiana would make reparations for my 14 years spent as an innocent man on death row. In May 2005, I filed a civil suit against the district attorney’s office. Months later, the state legislature passed a bill offering compensation of $15,000 per year of incarceration with a maximum payout of $150,000 to exonerees, with a statute requiring claimants to waive their right to sue the state in order to collect the paltry sum. Adele Bernhard, associate professor at Pace Law School, wrote that “the statute was designed primarily to indemnify the state from its own wrongdoing and only secondarily to assist the wrongly convicted.” Still, in 2006, I filed my own compensation claim. Today, seven years after my exoneration, my civil suit is awaiting hearing in the United States Supreme Court, and my compensation claim is awaiting hearing in the fall of 2010.
Since Louisiana’s 25 exonerees are primarily older men, our age and gender usually makes us ineligible for social service programs, especially job-training. And, because exonerees no longer have a conviction, we are also often excluded from traditional re-entry services offered to the formerly incarcerated. Suspended between when we file for compensation and when the system decides – if ever – to recognize our claims, we’re stuck with little chance of supporting ourselves. For these reasons, we created Resurrection After Exoneration (RAE), a non-profit run for and by exonerees that provides direct support while also encouraging exonerees to be agents promoting awareness and change. I and other exonerees from Louisiana travel around the country to educate citizens about wrongful incarceration.
Like my fellow exonerees, I’ve done my best to support myself with the skills I developed in prison; in my case, advocacy and the ability to speak on behalf of the voiceless. Most exonerees try to provide for themselves without relying on an absent government. But a prison record, regardless of whether the guilty verdict was actually correct, repeatedly closes us out of the few jobs we would otherwise be qualified for. Without options, we often tumble into depression, or drugs and alcohol, or return to the only relatively safe place we know: prison. Even after we’re exonerated from death or life sentences, our lives are on the line. Several of us have died in the months following our release from ill health, unable to pay for medical treatment.
At present, RAE’s exonerees are working with the Louisiana legislature to improve the 2005 compensation bill. A new bill, HB 505, asks for revision of the 2005 bill and adjustment to reflect the very real needs of exonerees. It passed through the House Criminal Justice committee with no objection, is now in House Appropriations and is headed to amendment on the House floor. If the state of Louisiana does its part to provide the means and opportunities for this population to do so, these men and women will not only work to support ourselves, but contribute to the culture and economy of this state in a unique and meaningful way. Through private support of organizations like RAE, and public support for bills like HB505, exonerees can make the first step – beyond a $5 handout – to get their lives started again.
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