BPW compensates wrongfully convicted person
The Maryland Board of Public Works approved financial compensation for another wrongly convicted individual Wednesday, marking the 20th such award since the passage of a law regulating the process.
The state awarded $723,147.14 — including $8,470.54 in attorneys fees — to David Anthony Veney, who was wrongfully charged with and convicted of first-degree rape and first-degree burglary in 1996.
He is being paid through the Walter Lomax Act, which compensates erroneously convicted individuals so that they can rebuild their lives after prison. Veney’s first payment will be $89,100.
“To walk into my home at the time, and the first thing I see was my face on the TV wanted for a rape that I certainly did not commit and then found out didn’t happen at all, it has been a burden that I can’t articulate and I’m thankful that 26 years later I’m finally vindicated,” Veney told Gov. Wes Moore, Comptroller Brooke Lierman and Treasurer Dereck E. Davis, all of whom are Democrats, during Wednesday’s meeting.
Because of his wrongful incarceration, Veney spent almost nine years, or, as
Moore described it, “2,853 days,” in prison.
“We cannot put a price tag on that — on what you lost,” the governor said. “But the payments that we are authorizing today, they do represent a formal acknowledgment from the state of Maryland for the injustice that was caused.
“It breaks my heart to know what you’ve gone through, and I know that I speak for the entire state when I say that I am deeply sorry — that none of this should have happened,” Moore continued.
After his conviction was overturned and he was released, Veney said, he wrestled not only with the injustice of being wrongly incarcerated but also the lack of reentry programs available to him.
“I am overwhelmed, I am extremely grateful,” Veney said. “This apology means so much to me, this moment means so much to me.”
Moore, Lierman and Davis — the only members on the powerful board — all stood and applauded Veney.
In 2021, the General Assembly passed the legislation to allow people who were wrongly convicted of crimes to file a petition for compensation with an administrative law judge. The individual seeking compensation is eligible if they have received a pardon from the governor stating that their conviction was erroneous, if their conviction was reversed or if they were found not guilty at retrial.
The act is named in honor of Walter Lomax, who was convicted of a fatal shooting in 1968 he maintains he did not commit. After nearly 40 years behind bars, Lomax was released in 2006. The charges against him were dropped in 2014, and he was pardoned by Republican Gov. Larry Hogan as one of his last acts in office earlier this year.
Payments authorized by the Board of Public Works are not given to awardees in a lump sum, but on a schedule. The first payment amounts to one year’s median salary for Maryland as calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau. The timeline for the remaining installments owed to the wrongfully convicted are left to the discretion of the board, which has up to six fiscal years to make the full payment.
According to David Bohannon, the Board of Public Works’s general counsel, $4,559,612.46 has been paid out of the $9,449,612.97 in approved payments by the board since the Lomax Act went into effect on July 1, 2021.
Bohannon clarified that the total amount paid out does not include the payment being processed from Wednesday’s meeting, but the full amount approved for Veney is included in the total amount approved to be paid.
The state is still paying out settlements to wrongly convicted individuals from before the law’s enactment — “to date, $14,224,507.00 out of an approved $23,636,576.00,” Bohannon wrote in an email.