People wrongfully jailed

Clogging up the system are the wrongful incarceration claims that are lumped in with the cases against agencies.

Bills for four men who were wrongfully incarcerated never saw their way to a committee hearing this year after appearing before a special master. It was the first year for Leonard Cure of Dania Beach, who was exonerated in 2020, but Barney Brown of Miami-Dade County, Robert Earl DuBoise of Tampa and Scotty Bartek of Ocala have been trying for years to get compensated for the years they wasted away in prison.

If they had no prior convictions, they would not have to go through the claim bill process, and instead could have filed a claim with the state attorney to get paid $50,000 for each year they were wrongfully incarcerated. A “clean hands” clause unique to Florida’s compensation law keeps people with unrelated prior crimes from using the state attorney route.

“That has been a point of contention for an increasingly long time, several years,” said Mark Schlackman, senior program director for the Center for the Advancement of Human Rights at Florida State University. “In large part, these are leadership decisions.”

The last time the Legislature approved a wrongful incarceration claim was in 2020.

Rep. Traci Koster, R-Clearwater, filed a bill to streamline the process by eliminating the clean hands clause, but her bill suffered the same fate as other sponsors who filed similar legislation in the years before her.

“I don’t know what to take away from it. It was a great bill, an important issue,” Koster said. She hopes to file it again next year, in conjunction with the Innocence Project of Florida, which helped draft it.

The Innocence Project has helped exonerate dozens of wrongfully convicted inmates over the years.

But they often have a hard time getting compensated for their time in prison. Of the 78 exonerated in Florida, only 10 have been received the money.

Koster said she agreed to sponsor the bill because it seemed like the right thing to do. “These folks paid their debt to their original crime and now why are they paying again for a crime they didn’t commit,” she said. “If we could fix the clean hands policy and open the door it would eliminate these roadblocks.”

Given time, she said, she thinks her fellow legislators will come around.

“I need to educate my colleagues,” Koster said. “Sometimes people think the Innocence Project is soft on crime, but there was no crime. They are innocent.”