Last-ditch attempt for new wrongful conviction compensation process fails in Georgia legislature
A late-session attempt to revive an effort to standardize the compensation process for people who’ve been imprisoned on wrongful convictions in Georgia failed to make it across the finish line.
Six men who’ve been exonerated of crimes the courts now say they didn’t commit will not receive compensation from the state for the decades they spent in prison.
The House last week attempted to amend a Senate bill to include language that aims to fix what lawmakers call a “very laborious process” that many are often hesitant to get involved with. But senators voted 31-20, with Democrats voting in opposition, to strip the compensation measure out of the bill.
State Rep. Scott Holcomb, an Atlanta Democrat, sponsored the compensation legislation last year, but it stalled in the Senate.
In the past two years, four state representatives have filed resolutions on behalf of the six men to compensate them between $910,000 and $1.8 million. The House has overwhelmingly passed all six resolutions.
And all six have stalled in the Senate. Four got hung up in Senate committees last year and were not revisited this session. The most recent, House Resolutions 901 and 902, never received a Senate committee hearing.
“I’m sorry for the exonerees,” Holcomb said. “The system failed them again.”
Senate Majority Whip Randy Robertson of Cataula opposed Holcomb’s measure. Robertson, a former sheriff’s deputy who led the effort to stop all compensation legislation last year, said he thinks the system has been “hijacked” by organizations such as the Georgia Innocence Project, which uses DNA evidence and research to clear people’s names.
“They’re confusing exoneration with cases that are sent back,” Robertson said. “If a district attorney chooses not to retry a case because of a technicality, that’s not exoneration, that’s a technicality.
If there’s not evidence that shows they’re not guilty of a crime, that’s not exoneration to me.”
The two chambers have tried to reach a compromise in recent years, but each comes from a vastly different view.
The House has taken the position that anyone who was wrongfully convicted, later exonerated and freed should receive compensation, whether the reason for the release is from DNA proof or by evidence the police, prosecuting attorney or judge did something wrong. It has overwhelmingly passed versions of compensation process overhauls the past several years.
Some Republican Senate leaders, on the other hand, have expressed different views. They believe exonerees should only be compensated if the government was at fault for the wrongful conviction — instances such as evidence tampering or shady prosecution.
“When discussing Rep. Holcomb’s bill in committee in the past, the Senate and House had such vastly different starting points, I didn’t see how we could move forward,” said Senate Judiciary Chair Brian Strickland, a McDonough Republican who has been supportive of the framework of Holcomb’s efforts in the Senate.
Under Georgia’s current process, once a judge or prosecutor has thrown out the charges against someone who had been convicted, they must find a legislator who is willing to sponsor a resolution that would compensate them, a process that often gets bogged down by politics.
They must also present their case to an advisory board under the secretary of state’s office that’s designed to process smaller claims from people harmed by state agencies before it comes before the Legislature. The board does not have guidelines for wrongful conviction compensation.
Holcomb’s measure would have created a panel of appointees, all experts in wrongful convictions or criminal justice, to vet compensation claims while laying out clear guidelines for who qualifies.