Life after wrongful conviction

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. – It’s hard to imagine worse luck than getting locked up for a crime you did not commit. And yet for people who have been convicted and later cleared – almost 1,800 in the United States since the late 1980s – the unlucky streak may continue. It turns out that where you spent your prison years determines how much help you get starting over, if you get any at all.

Take Mark Schand, who spent 27 years in the Massachusetts prison system for the 1986 murder of Victoria Seymour, a 25-year-old killed by a stray bullet outside a nightclub in Springfield.

For years, defense lawyers argued that Schand, who at the time was preparing to open a clothing store, was miles away from the crime, that witnesses had been coerced and that evidence had been manipulated. Schand eventually brought in investigators from the New Jersey innocence organization, Centurion Ministries, who persuaded a crucial witness to recant. In 2013, a judge granted a motion for a new trial based on newly discovered evidence, and he freed Schand. The local district attorney later dismissed the charges.

By then, Schand had missed out on raising three sons, pursuing a career in retail and living with his wife, Mia. Yet he wasn’t particularly bitter.

“I was just happy I was out,” he said. “And I figured I’d just focus on that day forth.”

But after the initial euphoria of freedom, Schand assumed the state would come knocking to make things right. After all, offenders in Massachusetts get housing assistance, job training, health care, even help opening a bank account after they’re released. Isn’t an innocent man equally deserving?

He discovered it’s a different story for the wrongfully imprisoned, at least in Massachusetts.

“If you’re innocent, there’s nothing for you,” said Schand, now 51 and living in Windsor, Connecticut. “They just send you home.”

The Massachusetts Department of Correction confirms this: Once a judge vacates your sentence, you’re out of the system and ineligible for most of the services given to those on parole or probation.

“That was a little shocking to me,” Schand said.

But surely, he thought, he’d at least get restitution money so he could take some time to figure out his next step?

Not necessarily. Shortly after his release, Schand filed a claim against Massachusetts, but to get any money, he’ll have to prove his innocence in court. Even if he wins, Massachusetts’ cap for wrongful conviction is $500,000.

That may sound like a large lump sum, but “it’s about what you’d make at McDonald’s for 27 years,” said one of Schand’s lawyers, John Thompson, who specializes in criminal appeals. “It wouldn’t compensate in any way for the emotional damage that serving a prison sentence for something you didn’t do would cause a person.”

Across the country, inmates who have won their freedom are learning the same thing: While DNA evidence has increased the number of exonerations, restitution laws lag behind. By how much? That depends on the state where you were convicted.

“What we find, in state after state, is it’s incredibly complicated, and it varies,” says Rebecca Brown, the director of policy for the Innocence Project in New York, which has been working to improve restitution for the exonerated across the country.

Only 30 states, as well as the federal government and the District of Columbia, have laws about compensation for the wrongfully imprisoned.

New Hampshire, for example, has a $20,000 cap, no matter how long you were in prison, and no re-entry services. Texas offers $80,000 for every year behind bars, as well as $25,000 per year on parole or as a registered sex offender. It also offers lifetime yearly payments, job training and other re-entry programs. Montana offers nothing but “educational aid.”

“It’s a patchwork,” said Maurice Possley of the National Registry of Exonerations, a project of the University of Michigan Law School. “Every state can concoct or devise their own compensation scheme as they see fit, or not. It takes some legislative will to do these things.”

The most common reason a state compensation law is voted down or weakened, Possley told me, is that legislators don’t want to run the risk of giving taxpayer money to a guilty person who was released on a legal technicality. A conviction can be overturned because the defendant showed he had an incompetent lawyer, for instance, and not because of new evidence. But, as Possley said, “one person’s technicality is another’s constitutional right.”

More than a dozen states don’t pay if they deem the defendant contributed in some way to his or her conviction – say, by pleading guilty in exchange for a lighter sentence.

If this labyrinth is hard to follow, imagine what it’s like for people who have been traumatized by prison, who haven’t had a driver’s license in years, who have never even held a cellphone.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Brown of the Innocence Project, “and frankly, the state has a moral responsibility to bring people back to where they were as best they can.”

Some states have been trying to make their restitution rules more friendly to the wrongfully convicted. In 2013, California passed a law streamlining its compensation process; in 2015, it raised its compensation to $140 from $100 for each day in the prison system.

Other states have blocked reform efforts. In January, the Wisconsin State Assembly unanimously voted to raise the per-year compensation to $50,000 (up from $5,000), with a cap of $1 million, but the bill died in the Senate.

There is a way around the inconsistent state laws on restitution. The exonerated can sue, as Schand did in 2015. But civil litigation can be expensive, slow and unpredictable, and it usually requires hard-to-get proof of official misconduct.

“There are so many factors that go into whether you’ll be compensated under a civil claim,” Brown told me, “including how good your lawyer is.”

And since most crimes are under state jurisdiction, the federal government can’t do much to change the picture. In 2015, Congress did pass a law making compensation packages, state or federal, tax-exempt. Some advocates also want improved Social Security benefits for the exonerated to make up for all the years they couldn’t pay into the system.

But most of the change will need to happen on the state level. That means passing compensation laws where there are none (Hawaii may be next, if the governor signs a bill that passed the state Legislature this month) and expanding those that already exist.

In its model legislation for states, the Innocence Project recommends a few baseline components, including payments of at least $64,000 per year of wrongful imprisonment, another $64,000 for every year on death row, and $32,000 per year on parole or on a sex offender registry; an immediate “subsistence” payout for short-term needs such as clothing and housing; and long-term access to job training, education, and physical and mental health care. Pleading guilty or making a false confession would not disqualify you from getting money or help.

Any changes, state or federal, would come too late for Schand. For more than two years, he’s been filling out job applications online. Most ask if he’s ever been convicted of a felony, and few employers call back. His latest job is on the assembly line at a gun manufacturing plant.

Schand can’t help thinking of his lost potential and the decades he missed with family and friends.

“Nothing can make that whole again,” he said. But he’d like the state to try. Karen Brown is a reporter at New England Public Radio.