HARRISBURG – The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing last week on legislation that would set a framework for providing compensation to individuals who are incarcerated for crimes they didn’t commit.
The hearing was dominated by the riveting testimony of Vincent Moto, a Philadelphia man who described the devastating and life-changing impact of being convicted and spending a decade behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit.
Moto noted that his parents spent their life savings on his defense and said that due to the gravity of the crimes he was convicted of, including rape, he’s been unable to find work since being set free, even after being exonerated. Moto was convicted based on testimony from the victim who identified Moto as one of the men who’d assaulted her, but he was later exonerated based on DNA evidence.
Moto said that he continues to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder due to the trauma of life behind bars and expressed despair at the fact he was in prison while his children were young and that to this day he doesn’t have the wherewithal to help them financially. He described how he wanted to give his grandchildren a few dollars to reward them for having gotten good grades only to have the children decline to take money from him.
More than 100 people have been exonerated after being incarcerated in Pennsylvania, according to a tally by the National Registry of Exonerations.
That includes seven men exonerated last year alone.
Earlier this year, a lawsuit filed by a Fayette County man who spent 26 years behind bars was settled with an $8.75 million award.
Nineteen states, including New Jersey and Ohio, provide $50,000 or more for each year the individual was incarcerated following a wrongful conviction.
Gov. Tom Wolf has previously urged the General Assembly to pass legislation that would provide compensation to exonerated prisoners.
The legislation, House Bill 2794, jointly sponsored by Rep. Frank Ryan, R-Lebanon, and Rep. Regina Young, D-Philadelphia, would award compensation based on the length of time that individual spent behind bars.
The legislation would provide $100,000 for every year spent on death row; $75,000 for every year spent behind bars and $50,000 for every year spent on parole or probation due to a wrongful conviction. The amounts would increase each year based on the rate of inflation.
Republican lawmakers on the Judiciary Committee questioned how to calculate an appropriate amount to pay those wrongfully convicted and questioned how the legislation would define who’s entitled to compensation.
Rep. Jerry Knowles, R-Schuylkill, who is retiring and won’t be in the chamber if the General Assembly takes up the bill in 2023, said that lawmakers should proceed slowly to determine the proper formula for compensating exonerees.
“I don’t want to sound like a cold-hearted son of a gun,” Mr. Knowles said, but the compensation should not be like “winning the lottery.”
Supporters of the bill said that compensation is warranted based on lost income and lost opportunity to save for retirement, not even considering all the other ways wrongful convictions cost exonerees.
The comment about winning the lottery rankled lawmakers, including Rep. Tim Briggs, D-Montgomery, who called Mr. Knowles’ remark “offensive.”
Rep. Barry Jozwiak, R-Berks, questioned how the law would define who is entitled for compensation due to a wrongful conviction. If a conviction is overturned and prosecutors decide they are unlikely to succeed at another trial, the incarcerated individual might be deemed not guilty, but that doesn’t automatically mean the person was actually innocent, he said.
The hearing took place a day after prosecutors in Maryland announced that they were dropping charges against Adnan Syed, who spent more than two decades behind bars after being convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend.
Syed was released from prison last month and Maryland prosecutors announced that they were dropping the charges based on the results of DNA testing.
Maryland is one of the 35 states that provide compensation to those who were wrongfully convicted. Maryland’s wrongful conviction legislation stipulates that payments should equal the state’s annual median income, averaged over five years, for each year someone was wrongly incarcerated.
First Published: October 16, 2022, 4:00 a.m.
