New law will fairly compensate wrongfully convicted Georgians
ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - A bill signed into law this month will help Georgians who spent years – sometimes decades – behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit.
The Wrongful Conviction and Incarceration Compensation Act took nearly four years to the legislature. It offers a structure for compensation to people who were convicted and served time while innocent.
According to the Georgia Innocence Project, 52 Georgians have been wrongly convicted since 1989, and those are only the cases they’re aware of.
Prior to the bill’s age, exonerated individuals had to enlist the help of a state lawmaker to essentially sponsor their case, introduce a resolution laying out, often times, arbitrary amounts of compensation, and get it ed by both the state House and Senate. It almost never worked. The Innocence Project says only around a dozen people received compensation through that process, and for not nearly enough.
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“The process was extremely variable,” said the group’s executive director, Kristin Verrill. “It’s a lot easier now.”
“Very few of these folks coming out of prison are going to have the resources, the know-how, the means to make that happen,” said Brian Robinson, president of Robinson Republic Communications, who volunteered to help advocate for the bill over the past few years. “Of course it’s going to be unfair and arbitrary, of course we’re not going to get consistent results out of a system like that.”
The new law dictates compensation of $75,000 for each year wrongly served behind bars, and an additional $25,000 for time wrongly served on death row. It equates to about $205 per day incarcerated.
Robinson said it’s a good start for these exonerees who often come out with nothing.
“I’ll ask you this: would any of you trade a million dollars for 25 years in prison? Would anybody do that? No,” said Robinson. “They haven’t had job skills, they haven’t been paying into Social Security, they haven’t advanced up the career ladder. They come out in their 40s and 50s with nothing, nowhere to start. This gets them on their feet.”
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For people like Michael Woolfolk, it means getting his life back on track after serving nearly two decades in prison. In 2002, Woolfolk was at a party with friends when an argument broke out.
“Next thing I know, they were shooting at us,” he said, “and I shot one time in self-defense.”
Woolfolk’s bullet hit and killed Jakesha Young, who was the enger of a fleeing car that night. Woolfolk and another man were convicted two years later of murder, and sentenced to life without parole.
But Woolfolk felt police had buried evidence and key witnesses weren’t called to the stand in his trial. After almost 20 years behind bars, an investigator tracked down the driver of the car Young was in, who testified that she had indeed fired first that night. Woolfolk was exonerated on grounds of self-defense.
“It was shocking,” he said, of being freed. “I never stopped fighting, and that was a good thing because if I would’ve probably stopped searching and fighting I probably would’ve died in prison.”
But when he was released, another fight began. With no money, no job or credit history, and not much family by that time, Woolfolk was left with virtually nothing to start his life over with.
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“It’s still like being a baby,” he said. “I have to ask for help and stuff.”
He’s hoping that the new law will finally give him and fellow exonerees a chance to get what they feel they’re owed. Woolfolk is currently going through the first steps of getting compensated and said the process is giving him hope.
“I come home, I don’t have any kind of moral , background, but it’s going to get better,” he said. “Starting over is going to be difficult but with the help of the compensation, it should help me get on my feet.”
Said Verrill: “Before this law was ed, there was a sense of sort of despondency and hopelessness about their ability to sort of move forward and move past their wrongful incarceration. And now there is a great deal of joy and hope.”
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