[Vision2020] Wrongfully Convicted Often Find Their Record, Unexpunged, Haunts Them

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

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May 5, 2013
Wrongfully Convicted Often Find Their Record, Unexpunged, Haunts Them By JACK
HEALY<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/jack_healy/index.html>

In Wisconsin, Audrey
Edmunds<http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/wiEdmundsSummary.html>served
11 years in prison in the shaking death of an infant girl for whom
she had been baby-sitting. In 2008, a mountain of new medical evidence cast
so much doubt on the case that a higher court overturned her conviction and
set her free. Leaving prison, Ms. Edmunds hoped that would be the end of
it.

But a few months later, as she applied for a secretarial job with an
office-supply company, her conviction for first-degree reckless homicide
popped up in a background check. Sorry, she was told. She tried to get work
with an airline, but heard a similar rejection.

“I hate it,” said Ms. Edmunds, 52, who now lives in northern Wisconsin.
“They put us through enough to begin with. They don’t give us any
assistance. I’m glad to be out, but there’s got to be more support. I don’t
like having this awful nightmare of a cloud hanging over me.”

Across much of the country, sealing or clearing a criminal record after a
wrongful conviction is a tangled and expensive process, advocates and
former prisoners say. It can take years of appeals to courts and pleas to
governors to wipe the slate clean. Even then, many felony convictions
remain on federal databases and pop up during background checks or at
traffic stops.

Aside from the practical challenges — a criminal record can impede big
things like finding housing and employment, and smaller things like getting
a hunting license — people who have been exonerated say they feel unfairly
marked, branded with a scarlet letter from a justice system that should not
have locked them up in the first place.

“It was destroying my life,” said Sabrina
Butler<http://witnesstoinnocence.com/view_stories.php?Sabrina-Butler-33>,
who was sentenced to die in Mississippi for the 1989 death of her infant
son, then exonerated in 1995. “It’s always there.”

Clearing a criminal record can take years and cost thousands of dollars in
legal fees, and differs widely state to state. Many require that defendants
return to court to prove their innocence, a higher hurdle than showing that
charges were dismissed or a conviction was overturned. In some states, a
governor’s pardon is needed. It can be a complex process, which advocates
say is made even more difficult by a lack of support services for the
exonerated.

Ms. Butler said she realized her arrest was still on the books after she
failed a criminal-background check while trying to buy a shotgun. She said
she applied for jobs at restaurants and retailers, and was turned down
every time. After she petitioned the state, her record was expunged last
July — 17 years after she was released.

With hundreds of men and women now freed from prison by exculpatory DNA
tests or successful appeals by advocacy organizations, more states are
grappling with questions of what they owe the wrongfully convicted, and how
to prevent former prisoners from slipping into poverty or back into prison.

A study of 118 exonerated inmates led by Evan Mandery and Amy Shlosberg,
two criminal-justice researchers, found that one-third still had criminal
records, sometimes more than a decade after their release. They found that
former convicts with clean records were less likely to return to prison
than those whose records had not been expunged.

Some states, including New York and Illinois, have a straightforward
process for erasing or sealing criminal records after a wrongful
conviction. But legal researchers say that most state laws are out of date
with the recent waves of exonerations, and require onetime convicts already
declared not guilty to once again prove their innocence.

“Even in the best case, it is difficult to move beyond a prison sentence,”
Mr. Mandery and Ms. Shlosberg wrote in their study, which is now under
review at The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. “The wrongful
conviction serves as a permanent, undeserved stigma.”

Of course, blotting out a criminal record does not solve everything.
Researchers have found that high percentages of the wrongfully convicted
slide into poverty or substance abuse as they struggle to rebuild a life
outside prison. How do you explain a 10-year gap on a résumé? How do you
answer a yes-or-no question from a prospective employer asking whether you
have ever been convicted of a felony?

“Employers, if they see a homicide conviction, dismissed or not, they’re
not going to get past that,” said Saundra Westervelt, an associate
professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro,
who has written extensively about exonerated death-row inmates. “The
conviction is still there. You’re stuck.”

In Alabama, Gary Wayne
Drinkard<http://www.law.northwestern.edu/wrongfulconvictions/exonerations/alDrinkardSummary.html>said
he was pulled over for a routine traffic stop after being released
from prison. His 1995 murder conviction had been overturned, and a second
jury trial found him not guilty. But, he said, the charges popped up when
the officer ran a background check. Mr. Drinkard said he was held in the
squad car for 30 minutes while the police checked out his story.

“They knew I’d done something wrong,” he said. “And here I was on the
street.”

So far, he has not tried to have his record expunged. “I don’t even know
how to file the petition,” he said.

Sometimes, the lingering record reflects a court system that views
exonerated defendants as not guilty, but not innocent. In Philadelphia, Vincent
Moto <http://caselaw.findlaw.com/pa-supreme-court/1568988.html>spent a
decade behind bars on charges that he and another man had dragged a woman
into a car at gunpoint, robbed her and raped her repeatedly. He was
convicted after the victim identified him as one of her attackers, but DNA
testing later showed that none of the samples from the crime scene had come
from Mr. Moto. In 1995 his conviction was vacated and he was freed in
1996.

In the 17 years since, he said the charges have trailed him like a shadow,
frustrating his efforts to get work. He is unemployed and lives on a
monthly disability check from the federal government. But he is behind on
property taxes on his Philadelphia home, and worries that a foreclosure is
coming. He does not sleep much these days.

“It’s still on your record,” he said. “Who wants to take a chance on
someone who was locked up for 10 and a half years?”

In 2007, he filed a petition asking that his record be expunged, but
Pennsylvania fought the effort, arguing that based on the victim’s
testimony, the state still viewed Mr. Moto as the assailant, even though
prosecutors did not believe they could convict him again. After conflicting
rulings from lower courts, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled that the
charges should stay on Mr. Moto’s record.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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