KY would begin compensating people imprisoned on wrongful convictions under GOP bill

FRANKFORT — A Republican bill to financially compensate Kentuckians exonerated after wrongful convictions unanimously cleared its first legislative hurdle, the House Judiciary Committee. 

House Bill 206 could cost Kentucky an initial $3 million over the course of three years and between $650,000 to $900,000 each year after in payments and other benefits to innocent people who spent time behind bars and on parole for crimes they didn’t commit. 

It passed unanimously out of committee Wednesday. 

Majority Whip Rep. Jason Nemes, R-Middletown, is the bill’s primary sponsor. He said in order to receive compensation, a person would need to have been wrongfully convicted in Kentucky and prove innocence. 

Such a person would then receive $65,000 for each year of wrongful imprisonment — $75,000 in cases of a death sentence — and an additional $32,500 for each year spent on parole or wrongfully registered as a sex offender. 

The bill also would provide exonerated individuals with a tuition waiver to cover 120 credit hours at any public college or university in Kentucky, enough hours to earn a bachelor’s degree. 

Winnie Ye, the state policy advocate with the Innocence Project, said there have been 22 people wrongfully convicted in Kentucky since 1989, when the organization started tracking that data. 

Those people have lost a total of 200 years to those wrongful convictions, Ye said. 

‘Nothing partisan about this issue’ 

Nemes brought with him several people who were wrongfully convicted. 

One of them, Mike VonAllmen, said he was exonerated in 2010 after being imprisoned since 1983 in an “incredible case of mistaken identity.” 

“When we look at wrongful conviction and face value, we see there is nothing partisan about this issue,” VonAllmen told the committee. “We universally agree that confining someone for years over a mistake is wrong and then to open the doors and let them go free only is wrong as well. This bill addresses that wrong.” 

Johnetta Carr spent four years in jail, starting when she was 16. 

“When I walked into the interrogation room, I thought that if I just told the truth, I would get to go home, which is what I was told,” Carr said. “I did tell the truth, that I was innocent. From there, I got booked into the Jefferson County Detention Center, where I sat until I was 18, awaiting the trial that never happened.” She entered an Alford plea in which a defendant denies guilt but agrees to be sentenced. 

Former Gov. Matt Bevin pardoned Carr in 2019, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, and she is challenging her conviction in federal court after a police witness and jailhouse informant recanted statements they had given police against her.

She told lawmakers she still faced barriers to employment. 

“Wrongful conviction is something that I will live with for the rest of my life,” Carr said. “But I am not a victim. I just find it appalling that as a person who had to go for a certain time and get treated like a criminal for a crime that I did not commit, that people that are actually guilty of crimes get more resources than we do.” 

She said the tuition waiver would be “very, very impactful for me.” Before her wrongful conviction, she wanted to be a paralegal, and would still like to pursue that, she said.  

Rep. Daniel Elliott, R-Danville, who chairs the judiciary committee and is a co-sponsor of the bill, said “$65,000 a year for each year that you were wrongfully in prison really isn’t that much money when you think about your life being totally taken away for you for that period of time.” 

Ye with the Innocence Project said wrongful convictions are “a symptom of our broken criminal legal system” and a “ grave injustice” that must be addressed. 

If Kentucky made HB 206 law, the state would join 38 other states and the District of Columbia in having compensation laws on the books for the wrongfully convicted, Ye said. 

Suzanne Hopf, the directing attorney of the Kentucky Innocence Project, said the bill is “long overdue.” 

“I don’t know if anybody can understand the impact that prison really has on you when you’ve been in there for several decades,” Hopf said. “But the reality of their life is that they’re walking out with no job skills, no home, family members that may have been deceased.” 

Kentucky has, on average, 1.2 exonerations every year, Hopf said. Each of those has spent an average of 15 years in prison.