Will the state pay you for a wrongful conviction? From millions to nothing, state compensation laws vary dramatically.
Jerome Morgan, 43, was only a teenager when he was wrongly convicted of murder. He was released after 20 years in prison and later exonerated, but it still took years to get compensation for the time he served.Malcolm Alexander has a complicated relationship with time.
in January 2018, he married Brenda, his middle school sweetheart and the mother of his now-grown child, also named Malcolm. "I am, at 59 years old, more of a retirement age, and I'm doing like a 20-year-old man's job," Alexander said. "It's just the thing of standing on my own is what I'm fighting to try to get to," he said. "The institution was easy because I didn't have no overheads. Here I have overheads and it piles up each day."
New York has no limit to how much an exonerees may be awarded. California allows for a maximum award of $140 per day wrongly imprisoned, so had Alexander being wrongfully convicted and imprisoned there, he could have been owed upwards of $2 million. Robert Norris, assistant professor of criminology law and society at George Mason University and the author of "Exonerated," said there's a moral and practical struggle in determining compensation laws.
For his part, Gutman thinks that there are going to be more and more states adopting some form of compensation. Morgan walked out of prison in January 2014 and was formally exonerated in May 2016. It was ruled that he would be awarded compensation in March 2017, but it wasn't until August 2018 that he received his first payment of $25,000.
Jerome Morgan uses a technique that he learned while serving 20 years in Louisiana's notorious Angola prison, relying only on a razor blade and cheap plastic comb for a sharp look rather than the latest tools. "It could have helped me not go into debt, maybe build up some credit to advance myself either further," he told ABC News. "It's just as simple as that. Once you go into debt, then the credit's messed up and you can't get help."
"I feel I would at least have a home by now, at least two vehicles," Morgan said. "I'd be able to help my child, my son, my nieces and nephews, you know, have stuff saved up for when they get caught in a jam or help them out. I have none of that."
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