Bid to aid more people wrongly imprisoned

California pays compensation to wrongfully imprisoned inmates, but the standards are so tight that few qualify. Newly proposed legislation would ease those rules a bit, and one possible beneficiary is a San Jose man who spent more than 30 years in prison based on scientific evidence that has now been recanted.

Under state law, former prisoners whose convictions have been thrown out are entitled to $140 for each day they spent behind bars, but only if they can persuade a judge, or a hard-to-convince state compensation board, that they were actually innocent of the charges. That’s especially difficult in old cases where the evidence has been destroyed.

SB1094, introduced in the state Senate last month, would extend the compensation to former inmates whose charges are dropped by prosecutors after a court overturns their convictions.

It would also cover those who are granted a second trial and are found not guilty — a verdict that means only that prosecutors failed to prove their case, and not necessarily that jurors believe the defendant is innocent. The current compensation law requires a defendant to establish innocence by proving that the charges were probably unfounded.

“Not that any money in the world can make up for their lost liberty, but (state compensation) gives them a better shot at transitioning into our soci- ety,” Missy O’Connell, a lawyer with the Northern California Innocence Project at Santa Clara University, said Monday.

The Innocence Project is sponsoring the bill, authored by Sens. Joel Anderson, R-Alpine (San Diego County) and Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, with Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda, as co-author.

Current law “forces exonerees to essentially reprove their innocence over and over” to receive compensation, said Anderson, who also sponsored a new state law requiring the state to help the wrongfully convicted find jobs and housing. He said imprisonment of the innocent is “an affront to the concept of a fair system of justice.”

Since 2006, the state Victim Compensation Board has ap- proved 26 ex-convicts’ applications for compensation and denied 50. O’Connell said SB1094 would benefit about 20 former prisoners who were turned down or haven’t applied because they would be ineligible under the current law.

One is Glenn Payne, who was convicted in 1991 of molesting a 2-year-old girl in San Jose and was released on parole more than 13 years later. The felony, and a lifetime requirement to register with police as a sex offender, remained on Payne’s record until January, when the central evidence against him — expert testimony matching the victim’s hair with a hair found on Payne — was repudiated by the original witness, who said he had relied on a study that no longer has scientific support.

Payne, now 55, has not sought state compensation for two reasons: The original evidence against him has mostly been destroyed, and the law would have required him to apply within two years of his release in 2005.

SB1094 would let him apply for state funding within two years of the date he was exonerated and the charges were dropped, and would no longer require him to prove he was innocent. The bill, as drafted, wouldn’t apply retroactively to old cases, but it would cover cases like Payne’s in which the deadline has not yet expired.