State board OKs $131K initial payment to man wrongfully imprisoned for four years
COLUMBUS — State officials on Monday approved paying an initial payment of nearly $131,000 to a Canton man who was wrongfully imprisoned for more than four years.
Aaron Culbertson, sentenced to 8 years in prison in November 2018, was freed in late 2022 after the Ohio Innocence Project, the nonprofit representing him, presented new information showing he was not one of two men who held up a Canton woman at gunpoint in February 2018, when Culbertson was 16.
Culbertson was convicted in part on courtroom testimony from the robbery victim, who on the stand was asked for the first time whether Culbertson — the only Black boy in the courtroom, and who prosecutors already asserted was guilty — was her assailant.
In 2021, Brian Howe, an attorney with the Ohio Innocence Project at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, reviewed a surveillance photo of the robbery and concluded that the robber holding the gun wasn’t Culbertson but a former schoolmate of his named Alonso Stimson. Howe then used Stimson’s social-media account to find LaKim Woody, who matched with information Culbertson heard via high-school rumors about who committed the crime.
Stimson and Woody, each of whom were already serving time for separate crimes, confessed to being the ones in the surveillance photo.
Presented with this evidence, the Stark County prosecutor’s office joined Culbertson’s attorneys in seeking to free him from prison. County prosecutor Kyle Stone has said he doesn’t intend to charge Stimson or Woody.
On Monday, the Ohio Controlling Board unanimously approved a $130,859.46 preliminary judgment payment to Culbertson without comment or debate. That’s about half of the money Culbertson is owed under state law, which currently pays $64,186.92 to wrongfully imprisoned people for each year they were incarcerated.
The preliminary judgment amount equates to about $88 for each of the 1,484 days Culbertson was wrongfully behind bars. The money will come out of the state’s general-revenue fund.
The Ohio Court of Claims approved the payment late last month.
In recent years, the Ohio Controlling Board has signed off on similar payments to other Ohioans found to be wrongfully imprisoned, including:
■ $3 million in December to the estate of Isaiah Andrews of Cuyahoga County, who spent more than 45 years in prison for the murder of his wife.
■ $1 million in 2021 to ex-Death Row inmate Joe D’Ambrosio of North Royalton, who, after more than two decades behind bars, was released in 2010 because of prosecutorial misconduct.
■ $1.8 million in 2021 to Anthony Lemons of Cleveland, who was acquitted of murder charges in 2014 after 18 years in prison.