Chapter 116: The Claim
The compensation statute is one page and a half and I read it before anybody offered to explain it to me.
I read it in the clinic library, standing at the shelf, with the volume open on my forearm.
Fifty thousand dollars for each year of wrongful incarceration.
Capped at four hundred thousand, which nobody has ever reached.
Six years. Three hundred thousand dollars. I did that arithmetic once and then I did not do it again.
Then subsection (b), the eligibility conditions, and there are four of them.
One. The conviction must have been reversed or vacated.
Met, on the seventeenth of April, at 2:20 in the afternoon.
Two. The charging instrument must have been dismissed, or an acquittal entered. Met, on the twelfth of June.
Three. The claimant must establish actual innocence by clear and convincing evidence.
Reyner had expressly declined to decide that. Paragraph 96. Does not reach, does not decide.
So condition three was not met by anything I already had.
It would have to be litigated again, from the beginning, in the Court of Claims, in front of a different judge.
That is a second trial with a higher burden and no right to counsel, and the clinic could not fund it.
Brandt was prepared to try anyway. She told me she would find the money somewhere and I believe she would have.
Then there is subsection (d), which is four lines long and sits at the bottom of the page.
No award shall be made where the claimant, by his or her own conduct, caused or brought about the conviction.
And then the sentence that decided my life for the second time.
Conduct within the meaning of this subsection includes the making of a false confession or the entry of a plea of guilty.
There is one exception.
Where the confession was procured by threat of physical harm to the claimant or to another person.
Nobody threatened to hurt me. That is the truth and I will not improve it.
I was told a number. I was told two years. I was told it by my mother's sister in my mother's kitchen.
I was lied to with a document that had been drafted before the thing it described had happened.
That is fraud. It is not a threat of physical harm, and the statute says threat of physical harm.
I understood all of that at the shelf, standing up, in about four minutes, before anyone said a word to me.
That is what the certificate is for. That is the only thing it has ever reliably done.
We filed anyway, in February.
Brandt said an unfiled claim is a claim the legislature never hears about, and she was right about that.
Thirty-one pages. Exhibits attached. Filing fee waived on a form.
The State moved to dismiss on the pleadings in April and did not file a single affidavit, because it did not need one.
Their brief was fourteen pages and eleven of them were subsection (d).
The Court of Claims dismissed on the twenty-second of June.
Without oral argument. Nine pages, one of which was the certificate of service.
Page seven contains the only sentence in the whole proceeding that acknowledged what had happened to me.
The court is not unsympathetic to the claimant's circumstances, which are, on this record, severe.
Then the next sentence, which begins with the word However, and runs to the end of the paragraph.
The letter that came with it is ninety-one words long including the caption and the certificate of service.
I counted them at the kitchen table, twice, with the tip of a pencil.
Then I put it in the folder as item nineteen and wrote the description in block capitals on the index line.
CLAIM DISMISSED, SUBSECTION (d). NO AWARD.
An appeal was possible. Brandt did the analysis in three weeks and gave it to me straight.
The statute is not ambiguous. There is no discretion in it. A court cannot read out four lines it does not like.
We would lose, and losing would produce a published opinion making it harder for the next person.
“That's your call,” she said. “It's your claim. But I won't tell you it's close, because it isn't.”
I told her not to file it. That was my decision and I made it in her office in twenty minutes.
A state representative named Halvard Suess introduced a bill the following spring to narrow subsection (d).
I gave written testimony. Four pages.
I sat in a committee room in a borrowed jacket and read it out in six minutes.
Nine people were present. Two of them were staff. One member asked me a question about my parole officer.
The bill died in committee in April and was reintroduced the year after and died again.
So the accounting is this, and I have never once dressed it up.
Six years served. Conviction vacated. Charges dismissed without prejudice.
Compensation, none.
Three thousand four hundred and twelve dollars paid out of my wages, not returned.
Twenty-eight dollars for the record, three hundred and eighty for the resellers' reports and the letters, two hundred and eighty-seven to file the sealing petition.
I came out of the entire process eleven thousand four hundred dollars down, and every dollar of that I had earned in a storage unit off Reddish Road.