Summary
- Wrongfully convicted individuals in North Carolina face significant barriers to receiving compensation
- A Pardon for Innocence is the only post-exoneration way to become eligible to even petition for compensation
- Creating an additional post-conviction pathway to eligibility would improve the process.
By Miles Kirkpatrick, Research Associate
On July 17th, 1995, Dontae Sharpe was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. He was innocent. For the next 24 years, he was incarcerated and would reject multiple plea offers, saying, “My momma always told me if you didn’t do something, don’t own up to it.” After a staggering amount of time and legal challenges, on August 22nd, 2019, Judge G. Bryan Collins Jr. of North Carolina’s Pitt County Superior Court vacated his conviction, and Dontae was finally released.
The State of North Carolina stole twenty-four years of Dontae Sharpe’s life due to a wrongful conviction. Unfortunately, he isn’t the only one. There have been at least 76 individuals exonerated in North Carolina since 1989, with the rate of dismissals increasing over time; nearly half occurred in the last decade. Many of those people, like Quincy Amerson, who was exonerated earlier this year, have served decades in prison. It’s unknown how many more people are currently in North Carolina prisons who were wrongfully convicted, although estimates nationally hover between 4 and 6 percent.
Recognizing the clear injustice, North Carolina, like most states, has provisions to compensate the wrongfully convicted. Article 8 of Chapter 148 of our general statutes lays out “Compensation to Persons Erroneously Convicted of Felonies.” This statute even lays out the amount of compensation: $50,000 dollars per year of incarceration, not to exceed $750,000. However, getting that compensation is anything but easy.
Compensation is overseen by the Industrial Commission, which, in a hearing, decides if a person deserves compensation. Of course, the Industrial Commission does not specialize in wrongful convictions. They also administer the Workers’ Compensation Act, the Tort Claims Act, the Childhood Vaccine-Related Injury Act, the Public Safety Employees’ Death Benefits Act, the Act to Compensate Individuals Erroneously Convicted of Felonies, and the Eugenics Compensation Program. This is why, for wrongful convictions, they specifically look for Pardons for Innocence or the defendant being found innocent by the Innocence Inquiry Commission as sufficient for the awarding of compensation.
Yet both of these pathways have significant hurdles. The Innocence Inquiry Commission is a special, three-judge panel created in 2006 to investigate and evaluate post-conviction claims of factual innocence. The IIC is outside the regular judicial process, requires petitioners to waive all privileges, and has only resulted in 15 exonerations so far. Individuals exonerated through more conventional pathways like Amerson and Sharpe to petition for compensation need a Pardon for Innocence from the governor’s office. However, this sort of pardon can be harder to receive.
The process for a gubernatorial pardon for innocence has been described as “slow, secret, [and] political” in the Charlotte Observer. The Governor’s Clemency Office has four employees. It has only issued 17 pardons during Roy Cooper’s tenure. Lawyers and Applicants alike have been waiting years for a response – although the office would not release how many pending pardons or how old the oldest request is to the Charlotte Observer – and observers like Chris Mumma, the executive director of the North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence have pointed out how “It seems like the only time pardons are addressed is when there is… somebody camping out in front of the Governor’s Mansion.”
While this process is also inefficient and delays compensation for exonerees, the burden of rendering individuals eligible to just petition for compensation should not rest on the governor or the Innocence Inquiry Commission. Judges should be able to issue something resembling a certificate of innocence when they vacate a conviction if they believe the exoneree is factually innocent, which the Industrial Commission can consider in a potential hearing.
The cards are already stacked against wrongfully convicted individuals. Simply getting exonerated is a herculean task; however, due to the convoluted pathway to compensation, it borders on Sisyphean. Requiring a gubernatorial pardon for innocence after someone has already been exonerated for them to even petition for compensation is an unnecessary burden.
Creating another pathway through establishing a certificate of innocence system would keep the existing claim system substantially the same: there would still be multiple layers of oversight and application. In cases where innocence is still disputed at the time of an exoneration, a judge can and should still refuse to grant a certificate. However creating this additional pathway would provide a much more efficient path for those who have suffered the injustice of a wrongful conviction to receive the compensation they deserve.
