Legally deserving

California’s compensation standards for wrongfully imprisoned people are so strict that few are found eligible even if a court overturns their convictions. A new bill would lower the incredibly high standards so that more people who wrongfully spent years of their lives behind bars stand to benefit.

“This is our state’s way of making sure people have a fair stake again,” said Missy O’Connell, a staff attorney with the Northern California Innocence Project. “They deserve the opportunity to re-enter society and be successful.”

The Northern California Innocence Project is one of the sponsors of SB1094, authored by state Sens. Joel Anderson, R-Alpine (San Diego County), and Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley.

SB1094 would extend California’s compensation system, which offers wrongfully imprisoned prisoners $140 for each day they spent behind bars, in two ways.

It would now cover two classes of prisoners whose convictions are overturned based on new evidence — those whose charges are dropped by prosecutors, and those who endure a second trial and are found not guilty. Including both groups is important because district attorneys still have the ability to retry prisoners who win a conviction reversal based on new evidence. (SB1094 does not affect the direct appeal system.)

The number of people expected to be affected by SB1094 is very small — and very important.

O’Connell said the state Victim Compensation Board has received 93 ex-convict applications since 2001, and it has approved 30 of those. Under SB1094, the board would’ve approved an additional 23 applications.

One of them would have been Glenn Payne, a San Jose man who spent 13 years in prison on a molestation conviction. His conviction was overturned in January after the forensic analyst who had provided expert testimony in his case recanted it.

California can and must do better by those we’ve wronged. The state Legislature should pass SB1094 with all deliberate speed.