The price of freedom is pathetically low in Florida, and the cost of injustice is much too high.
The going rate is $50,000 for every year people languish in prison before being exonerated for crimes they did not commit. That’s less than $6 an hour, much less than the minimum wage.
The necessity for this reality is a deeply flawed system where wrongful convictions are commonplace. There have been 3,326 exonerations since records have been kept since 1989, including 85 in Florida. How many more are out there?
Florida is making amends for its two latest miscarriages of justice, Nos. 84 and 85, (including 13 in Broward, more than any other county). Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation providing $817,000 to Leonard Cure, who served 16 years in prison for a robbery someone else committed in Dania Beach, and whose claim was strongly supported by State Attorney Harold Pryor. Robert DuBoise of Tampa, who lost 37 years of his life, three on death row, for a murder he had nothing to do with, will receive $1.85 million. They did time for crimes they didn’t commit, and the real criminals got away.
Inadequate relief
Both men also qualify for 120 hours of free tuition at a Florida college, university or career center. That and the money are well-intentioned, but they hardly make up for years of lost liberty, inability to earn a living and save for retirement, and the anguish of being punished severely for what they knew they hadn’t done. If the right people had not helped them they would still be locked up for life.
They should have received the standard benefits promptly after their exoneration three years ago but were barred by a so-called clean hands provision that denies these benefits to people who had either one other violent felony conviction or more than one for a nonviolent crime. It doesn’t matter how irrelevant those records might be.
A bill eliminating the clean hands rule (SB 382) cleared three House committees and the full Senate without a dissenting vote in this year’s session but died before the House voted on it. There’s no excuse for that.
Finality over fairness
Neither is there any excuse for a criminal justice system with too few opportunities for people to successfully challenge wrongful convictions. The appeal process is a thicket of procedural hurdles, harsh precedents and dead ends that exalts “finality” over fairness. In the normal course, there’s no opportunity to prove that an old conviction, upheld on appeal, was still a miscarriage of justice.
Cure and DuBoise owe their freedom to the nonprofit Innocence Project and to conviction review units established by former Broward State Attorney Mike Satz and former State Attorney Andrew Warren in Hillsborough. Their purpose is to reopen doors of justice that have slammed shut. Only four other circuits have similar programs. All 20 should have them, and there should be one with statewide jurisdiction, too.
Nothing other than apparent disinterest prevents Attorney General Ashley Moody and 14 other state attorneys from implementing review programs. If they don’t, the Legislature should demand it.
Like many other exonerees, Cure and DuBoise had prior criminal records that drew law enforcement’s attention. Cure’s picture was in the sheriff’s files, and a witness picked him because she said the robber of a Walgreens was a well-dressed Black man. A picture of Cure fit the bill.
Even though no physical evidence linked Cure to the crime, the court allowed that wildly erroneous identification to overcome Cure’s well-documented alibi that he was at work far away. With a fresh look at what evidence there was and wasn’t, the Broward conviction review unit said Cure should not have been convicted. A court agreed.
DuBoise was convicted of rape and murder on the basis of a dentist’s bite-mark testimony disdained as “junk science” and on the perjury of a jailhouse informant. Warren, the ex-prosecutor who created the Hillsborough unit, agreed to DNA testing that exonerated DuBoise and implicated two others who are in prison for other crimes. On the day Warren identified the other men, DeSantis suspended him from office on ludicrously pre-textual charges.
Signed into law
The compensation for Cure and DuBoise were two of six claim bills signed into law this month. Eight other claim bills failed without votes, which illustrates another festering Florida problem that must be fixed.
Claim bills are a vestige of the ancient rule that “the king can do no wrong.” Known as sovereign immunity, the law sets a limit of $200,000 for claims against a government agency from any one person or $300,000 if there are multiple claims. Attempts to increase obsolete and arbitrarily low payment caps fail year after year.
Those caps and binding even when an agency admits fault and wants to settle — as the South Broward Hospital District did in the case of Jamiyah Mitchell, a teenager who suffered brain injury at birth and has learning disabilities.
The family had to hire a paid lobbyist, but the district paid her family $200,000 and will pay another $795,000 under another claim bill DeSantis signed (SB 16).
No system is perfect. But the arbitrary, needlessly drawn-out claim bill system should be replaced with a court of claims, like the federal government’s, to deliver justice more promptly and fairly.
It took four years before the Legislature compensated Jamiyah Mitchell’s family. She will soon be 15 years old.
The Orlando Sentinel’s Editorial Board includes Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson, Opinion Editor Krys Fluker and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Anderson. Send letters to insight@orlandosentinel.com.
