Senate Bill 1584 allows exonerated individuals to receive compensation.
More than a year after Oregon passed a law to compensate people wrongfully accused of committing a crime, only two people have received compensation, according to a report in HuffPost.
Moreover, HuffPost reported its review of court records shows the state’s Department of Justice routinely fights compensation requests.
State Sen. Kim Thatcher (R), the bill’s chief sponsor, told HuffPost, “That was not the intention. There was no intention to have to have a court battle.”
Thatcher introduced Senate Bill 1584 after having a conversation with her handyman, who was cleared in 2000 after being falsely accused of child sex abuse. The bill passed and took effect in March 2022.
The wrongful compensation bill allows individuals to receive $65,000 for each year they spent in prison and $25,000 for each year they were on parole or the sex offender registry if they could demonstrate through “a preponderance of evidence” that they had no involvement in the crime for which they had been found guilty.
The statute also gave the state the authority to provide exonerees social services, such as job training, housing help, and counseling.
“These people have been fighting against wrongful convictions for years, even decades. And they won,” said Ben Haile, senior counsel at the Oregon Justice Resource Center.
Haile accused the DOJ of “setting the bar too high,” adding that S.B. 1584 “is designed to compensate people who are truly innocent, but it’s not working that way.”
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Exonerees must first file a notification with the Department of Administrative Services and then a petition in court, providing Oregon’s Justice Department with a chance to refute any allegations they believe to be unfounded to be eligible for compensation.
HuffPost reported the Justice Department is fighting vigorously against those requesting money, and as a result, most petitioners must go through the drawn-out and perhaps traumatic process of reiterating their innocence in court.
As of late October, 28 individuals had submitted notices of intent to pursue compensation, of which around 12 had submitted court applications. Records examined by HuffPost show the Justice Department seems to oppose payment in almost all cases brought before the courts, including those on the National Registry of Exonerations, a list of every known exoneration in the United States since 1989.
Lawyers for the DOJ attempted but were unable, to prevent a compensation petitioner from bringing up his listing on the exonerations registry. They claimed the information was “frivolous and/or irrelevant to the issue of whether or not he actually committed the crime for which he was previously convicted of.”
Janis Puracal, the Forensic Justice Project’s executive director, told HuffPost, “People just don’t understand the ongoing hell that these exonerees go through. There is a stigma that attaches to a person once you’ve been in prison that never leaves you. And it does not matter whether you’ve been exonerated or not.”
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