Oregon Department of Justice prioritizes loopholes over compensation, advocates argue
An Oregon law to compensate people wrongly convicted of crimes has been ineffective since it was enacted two years ago, as the state's Justice Department fights against paying those who have been exonerated, argue advocates.
Senate Bill 1584, which unanimously passed the state legislature in 2022, requires Oregon to pay $65,000 per year to a person for each year they were wrongfully imprisoned by the state. The law also says a person must receive $25,000 for each year they spend on parole or on the sex offender registry.
Lawmakers on the state's Joint Committee on Judiciary heard testimony for the second time this year from exonerees who say the state is attempting to block payments to people who were imprisoned and later released when courts vacated their convictions, according to KOPB.
"I am one of few people who have been through levels of hell that most people can’t even fathom," exoneree Earl Bain, a disabled combat veteran who was wrongfully convicted in 2009 of sex abuse and spent six years in prison, told lawmakers. "I'm still not okay from all that."
"DOJ, they fought the compensation every step of the way," Bain said, adding that he settled for "pennies on the dollar" compared to what he would have been entitled to under the law due to the threat he feared he and his daughter could face in a lengthy court case.
More than 52 claims of wrongful convictions have been made under the 2022 law, with just three of those cases reaching a settlement where an exoneree received compensation, Bain being one of them, KOPB reported. Exonerees must demonstrate that they are not guilty of the crime and that they had no involvement in the crime to receive compensation, and the state Department of Justice has adopted the practice of challenging most claims under the 2022 law.
The State Department of Justice said it is reviewing the evidence on a case by case basis to make sure it meets the requirements in the law.
"If we were to award compensation for every single case where a case was reversed on appeal, we would be rewarding compensation to a massive number of people … we would be awarding compensation to people who are certainly guilty," Oregon Department of Justice legislative director Kimberly McCullough said.
Advocates for exonerees argue that the state Department of Justice is re-traumatizing the wrongly convicted by not looking at what has already been decided in court and taking great lengths to avoid handing out compensation.
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"We're seeing that Department of Justice lawyers are looking for loopholes in the statute, so that the new evidence of innocence doesn’t come in at trials, so we're just retrying from the transcript for the original criminal case and what already happened," said Forensic Justice Project executive director Janis Puracal, whose brother was freed after being false accused of drug trafficking in Nicaragua.
"Instead of reviewing that new evidence of innocence and seeing what everyone else saw, the lawyers at DOJ that have been handling these cases have been looking for loopholes in the compensation statute," Puracal added.
McCullough said. said: "If a prior court found the person innocent under certain circumstances or there was a statement by the governor, perhaps that’s a policy choice that the legislature would like to make to simplify the statute. But as it is right now, that’s not the standard in the statute."
Lawmakers on the Judiciary Committee pressed the state Department of Justice representatives on Tuesday and suggested they would like to adopt changes to the law to allow for future cases to be settled faster.
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Oregon, advocates have noted, is an outlier when it comes to compensation laws.
State Sen. Floyd Prozanski, a Democrat who chairs the committee, pointed to a recent trip some lawmakers had taken to Texas to examine how the Lone Star State has addressed compensation for wrongful convictions.
"What we saw in Texas were individuals willing to state a mistake was made," Prozanski said.
Oregon's current attorney general, Democrat Ellen Rosenblum, who oversees the Department of Justice and its approach to the compensation law, is not running for a fourth term.