During the 2017 legislative session, the people of Highlands
Presbyterian Church sent a petition to Republican and Democratic leaders. They
asked legislators to compensate citizens who have been wrongfully convicted and
imprisoned as do 32 other states and the District of Columbia. Specifically, they
asked that Wyoming compensate Andrew Johnson for the nearly 24 years he spent
in prison for a crime the state knows he didn’t commit.
Not a single legislator from either party bothered to reply.
You may not remember Andrew and the grave injustices visited
upon him by both the criminal justice system and the criminal malpractice of
the Wyoming legislature.
In 1989, he was convicted of a rape. There was no DNA
testing then, only false accusations. Before the verdict, he said, “I thought
the trial was going in my favor. I knew there was no evidence I had committed a
crime.” Andrew was wrong. It took the jury 20 minutes to find him guilty.
Years later, DNA tests provided proof. He was innocent.
Andrew was released from prison with little more than the shirt on his back. He
had no job, no home, his mother died while he was incarcerated. With the
injustices of the legal system corrected, Andrew then faced the injustices of
the legislative system.
In 2014, a bill compensating Andrew for those lost years
passed both houses of the legislature, in different forms. The bill landed in a
conference committee, a well-known playground for mischief. Former Laramie
County District Attorney Scott Homar and his accomplice, Cheyenne legislator
Bob Nicholas, argued disingenuously that DNA proved nothing. Andrew was, they
said, still guilty. And although Homar didn’t have enough evidence to retry
Andrew, he used his political influence to further ruin this man’s life.
The late John Schiffer, chair of the Senate Judiciary
Committee was the bill’s chief proponent. After the bill died in the conference
committee, he said, “This is something we need to do in this state, it just
wasn’t meant to be this year.” However, more than three years later,
legislators seem satisfied with doing nothing ever.
So, Andrew remains uncompensated for those lost two-and-a-half
decades. His attorneys threw a “Hail-Mary” pass and filed a federal court
lawsuit. That court has now rejected Andrew’s plea for someone, anyone to
recognize the enormity of the injustice he has experienced.
He finds himself hemmed in between two Latin terms. One is
often employed by courts when they deny justice, i.e. res judicata, meaning “the thing has been decided.” It means that if
you look long enough through a bunch of dusty, dead, old law books, you’ll find
a reason to deny justice.
The other Latin term explains Wyoming lawmakers. Una sals victis nullam sperare salutem,
is intended to tell people like Andrew, “The only hope of the vanquished is not
to have any hope at all.”
A year after Nicholas and Homar killed the compensation bill,
an Albany County legislator, Charles Pelkey, then a freshman Democrat in the
State House, briefly took up the cause. He introduced but then withdrew a bill
to provide compensation to the wrongfully convicted. Since then, nothing.
Criminal prosecutions are undertaken in the name of the
people. When the conviction turns out to have been wrong, that wrong is
likewise perpetrated in their name as well. The people of Wyoming through their
elected representatives are guilty of a grave injustice. As the “Innocence Project”
explains, “With no money, housing, transportation, health services or
insurance, and a criminal record that is rarely cleared despite innocence, the
punishment lingers long after innocence has been proven. States have a
responsibility to restore the lives of the wrongfully convicted to the best of
their abilities.”
Legislators will say the state just doesn’t have the money.
Well, the state had plenty enough money to pay the cost of wrongfully
convicting Andrew. They had the money to pay for his prison cell for 24 years.
Justice and common decency dictate they find the money to make right this
terrible wrong.
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