by John Knight
On Sunday, the Columbia Missourian ran a story about Ted White Jr., a man wrongfully convicted of assaulting his 12-year-old stepdaughter in 1999. White was exonerated in 2005 after his attorneys discovered that Detective Richard McKinley, the officer responsible for leading the investigation against White, was having an affair with White’s wife, a fact that was never disclosed in the conviction.
The Missourian reported that in 2008, White was awarded $16 million as compensation by Lee’s Summit, the Illinois city where he was convicted. But four years later, White is still waiting to receive the promised money. According to the city’s mayor, paying White would violate McKinley’s constitutional rights as a city employee, a claim one of White’s attorneys calls “rubbish.”
White told AP reporters, “They’re saying ‘We don’t care about you, your family, the money you spent to defend your honor.’ That’s just not right.”
To read the full story, click here.
White’s situation is not uncommon. Many states offer financial compensation to exonerees, but state officials are usually immune from lawsuits brought against them by those wrongfully convicted. However, as James Newsome recounts in the Voice of Witness book Surviving Justice: America’s Wrongfully Convicted and Exonerated, officials are not always immune. On top of the maximum compensation of $140,350 Newsome received from the state of Illinois, where he was wrongfully convicted for murder and armed robbery, he also received $1 million for each year he served after a federal jury ruled that two of the detectives from his case framed him by coaching eyewitnesses.
Kevin Green, another exoneree who received state compensation after his wrongful conviction on charges of second-degree and attempted murder, says that compensation is the least the state can do. “It has become a bureaucratic pile of crap,” Green says in Surviving Justice about compensation laws passed in California, “taking up to three years for people to actually see any money. That’s wrong. That’s just wrong. I think one of the hurdles that somebody faces coming out of prison is not being able to establish themselves: have a place to live, have transportation to have a job. All those things need to be immediate. Somebody coming out with a finding of factual innocence should be immediately handed something and then go through the process of getting the rest.”
