Wrongful compensation bill before Georgia House
Virtually every year, Georgia lawmakers take up legislation providing monetary compensation to people who have been exonerated of a crime after being wrongfully convicted and spending years in state prison.
Three such resolutions are currently before the House Appropriations Committee.
But putting decisions on compensating wrongfully convicted Georgians in the hands of the legislature soon may be a thing of the past. A bipartisan bill before the House Judiciary Committee would scrap that system in favor of a five-member panel that would review cases and make recommendations.
“We really need to update the process from what we have today, which is largely ad hoc,” state Rep. Scott Holcomb, D-Atlanta, the bill’s chief sponsor, told members of a Judiciary subcommittee late last month. “This bill represents an important step forward for these cases.”
Hayden Davis, a policy specialist with the Georgia Innocence Project, said the current system is cumbersome and ill-suited to the needs of exonerated Georgians.
It involves submitting a case for compensation to a Claims Review Board, which was created to take up claims from Georgians who believe an act of a state agency has caused them harm, Davis said.
Examples include a person who has been struck by a state vehicle or slipped on the sidewalk of a state building, he said.
“These cases are different,” Davis said. “They’ve been shoehorned into a process that’s not designed for them.”
Only after a case is pursued through the Claims Advisory Board can an exonerated person seek a legislative sponsor to go to bat for them, Davis said.
“You go through all these stages just to get to Step One where a lawmaker is able to introduce a resolution,” he said.
Then, once a resolution gets before the General Assembly, it’s taken up during a rushed 40-day session by lawmakers who often lack expertise in the criminal justice system, Davis said.
The proposed review panel would consist of a criminal court judge appointed by the chief justice of the Georgia Supreme Court, a prosecutor and criminal defense lawyer appointed by the governor, and two attorneys, forensic specialists or law school professors appointed by the speaker of the House and the president of the Senate.
“It would be done by a neutral panel with real expertise,” Davis said. “There’s less chance of any of these being politicized.”
Davis said the average compensation awarded under the current system is $39,000 for every year a wrongfully convicted person subsequently exonerated has been incarcerated.
Holcomb’s bill calls for a range of compensation from $50,000 a year to $100,000. The amount of compensation also would be indexed to keep pace with inflation.
Holcomb said that would avoid having to go back to the General Assembly for new legislation every time the cost of living goes up.
“Building it in gives some flexibility for it to be increased over time without having a political fight,” he said.
The bill has the support of both the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia and the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
“This has been a longstanding issue,” said Jill Travis, executive director of the defense lawyers’ group. “It would be really great for Georgia to have something in place citizens could count on in these circumstances.”