The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
Wrongfully imprisoned Ohioans got settlements that amounted to one of the highest totals in the country when compared to other states, according to a national analysis.
Ohio has paid nearly $51 million in compensation to those exonerated for crimes since 1989, making it the third-highest payer of exonerees in the country, behind only New York and Texas.
The legal funding firm High Rise Financial used the data from The National Registry of Exonerations, a research project from the University of California Irvine’s Newkirk Center for Science & Society, the University of Michigan Law School, and the Michigan State University College of Law.
When calculated per capita using the population of the state, Ohio came in sixth overall in cost to taxpayers. According to the analysis, each Ohioan paid about $4.29 in compensation, compared with Michigan’s $4.77, Texas’ $5.32, Maryland’s $5.98, Connecticut’s $14.04, and New York’s $15.97 per person.
Receiving wrongful imprisonment compensation isn’t automatic in Ohio. Those hoping to receive payment have to apply for the money through the state’s court of claims. According to the Ohio Court of Claims, the two-step process started with a ruling of wrongful imprisonment by a county court of common pleas.
After the ruling is issued, individuals have to file a civil claim for monetary damages. Someone who has been found to be wrongfully imprisoned is entitled to fines and court costs, attorney’s fees and “other expenses associated with the criminal proceedings and appeals, and expenses incurred to obtain discharge from confinement,” according to the court of claims.
The individual is also entitled to a sum for every year they were imprisoned, an amount that is pro-rated if partial years were served, plus lost wages or earned income, and “cost debts” recovered by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
Every year, the Ohio Auditor of State determines the new sum wrongfully incarcerated individuals will receive for each year they served in prison. In a letter to the Ohio Court of Claims, Auditor Keith Faber said the amount paid to those individuals in 2023 and 2024 was set at $64,186.92. The amount is based on the Consumer Price Index yearly average over the last two years.
The court of claims reported 24 individuals from across the state who received a wrongful imprisonment notice from their county’s common pleas court since 2004.
But the amount of judgments paid to individuals from the Ohio Court of Claims was 78 in the same time period. Judgment amounts have seen drastic peaks and valleys of the years in the state, but seem to be trending upwards, according to court of claims data.
The national Innocence Project, which works to get those who have been wrongfully convicted released, says those convictions occur “when a factually innocent person is convicted of a crime they did not commit.”
“It is a symptom of a broken criminal legal system that must be fixed,” the Innocence Project stated on the topic.
The Ohio Innocence Project, housed at the University of Cincinnati, says wrongful convictions and imprisonment can happen for a number of reasons, but the basic reason being “because we are human.”
“In some wrongful conviction cases, a person acts with hatred, bias or fear to help ensure that an innocent person is convicted,” the Ohio Innocence Project noted on their website. “But much more frequently, wrongful convictions occur when well-intentioned, honest, intelligent people make mistakes.”
The nationalInnocence Project data found that 63% of cases they take up involve “eyewitness misidentification” and 53% of the cases involve “misapplication of forensic science.”
Of those who have been exonerated or released with the help of the Innocence Project, 64% were Black and/or Latinx.
