Oklahoma, Not OK

I never followed up on what happened in the case of Marvin Haynes, the Minnesota man who was wrongly convicted of murder in Minneapolis 20 years ago when he was 16. Just a few days after I wrote, he was exonerated and released. The Star Tribune wrote (gift link) about what was next for him, including whether the state would compensate him.

In Minnesota, a person like Haynes can be compensated "no less than $50,000 per year of imprisonment — and there's no cap on payment for emotional distress and injuries." 

That's the good news in this post.

I thought of that when, a few weeks later, I saw a Washington Post story (gift link) about Glynn Simmons, an Oklahoma man who has been in prison for more than 48 years, originally on death row. "By the time the state of Oklahoma conceded that he’d not gotten a fair trial and there wasn’t enough evidence to retry him, he was approaching 71, a worn-down man beset by a string of health issues..."

Those "health issues" include stage 4 colon cancer that has spread to his liver, directly related to bad health care access in the prison. And Oklahoma has a $175,000 cap on compensation for people who are wrongly imprisoned. 

$175,000 for this man's entire adult life. $3,645 a year.

To make that measly amount of money even worse, the payment will take a while to arrive. His attorney thinks it will be anywhere from a few months to a few years. Years. When we're talking about a 71-year-old man who has colon cancer and shouldn't have to work because he's been deprived of any chance to earn retirement savings.

Simmons was put on death row for this:

Simmons and another Black man were convicted of capital murder for the 1974 killing of a young white woman at a liquor store in Edmond, Okla., despite no physical evidence linking them to the crime scene and multiple witnesses insisting Simmons was in Louisiana on the night of the shooting. The case hinged on the testimony of an 18-year-old eyewitness, who identified both in a lineup despite telling police she did not remember much and only saw the gunmen for a split second.

The two Black men had never met before they were IDed in the lineup, and the other man had an alibi as well. The murder trial wasn't even 72 hours long.

I wonder how many cases there are like this in the United States.