Written by Spencer Hamilton, L’26
Since 1989, there have been 3,608 documented exonerations according to the National Registry of Exonerations.[1] In total, those 3,608 exonerees spent more than 32,750 years incarcerated for crimes they did not commit.[2] This represents an average of more than nine years spent in prison by each individual exoneree. However, this number is likely a significant underestimate of wrongful convictions, with some researchers putting the number at around 5,000 to 10,000 wrongful convictions each year resulting in 2,000 to 4,000 wrongful prison sentences each year.[3] Much of the research around this phenomenon is, rightfully so, focused on the causes of wrongful convictions and how to prevent them in the future.[4] Similarly, much of the work around wrongful convictions is focused on freeing those actively serving time for crimes they did not commit.[5] But for those freed, the struggles do not end when their incarceration is over.
This essay will focus on two broad categories of problems that exonerees face when they are released. The first section focuses on the financial challenges faced by exonerees through, in part, an examination of federal and state statutes that provide compensation for exonerees, as well as the civil suits and private bills that compensate exonerees for their time spent incarcerated. But beyond the compensation from the state, exonerees face significant obstacles in obtaining employment after release and, in most states, exonerees are not eligible for post-release services. The second section will focus on the harder to measure, but still very tangible, non-financial impact that incarceration has on exonerees. This impact includes lifelong consequences to exonerees’ mental health, physical health, and personal relationships. “Though they are innocent of the charges for which they were incarcerated, there is no reason to think that they are immune from the detrimental effect that prison has on prisoners.”[6]
- The Financial Impact
There are three main avenues for exonerees to seek official compensation: tort claims, private bills from legislatures, and compensation statutes.[7] 42 U.S.C. § 1983 creates an avenue for some exonerees held on federal charges to sue the federal government for violating their constitutional rights.[8] Exonerees may also sue state governments through common law tort claims such as false imprisonment.[9] But, under both of these methods, exonerees face a daunting uphill battle because of the high standards required to prevail on such a claim.[10] It is insufficient to prove only the wrongfulness of the conviction, but rather the exoneree must also show a violation of a specific constitutional right.[11] And even when the violation of a constitutional right can be shown, prosecutors and judges are protected by absolute immunity and police officers are protected by qualified immunity; this immunity prevents exonerees from recovering in cases where the government has made a mistake.[12] Further, the exoneree carries both the burden of proof at trial as well as the burden of instituting the suit in the first place.[13] These suits often take significant time and resources to succeed that exonerees lack after years spent incarcerated; these years of incarceration in turn often result in exonerees losing any financial security they may have had prior to their conviction.[14]
Another option for exonerees is to pursue a private bill, which is essentially a petition to a state legislature for them to compensate the exoneree directly for their time spent wrongfully incarcerated.[15] However, in the states that even allow them, it is a large task to convince a legislature to set aside funds for any individual exoneree, and state legislatures are generally ill-equipped to deal with the growing number of petitions each year.[16]
The final and most consistent option for official compensation is through state statutes, which exist in thirty-three states as well as the District of Columbia.[17] These statutes are no-fault statutes, which relieves exonerees of the burden of proving their conviction was the result of government misconduct.[18] However, most statutes do require that the exoneree show actual innocence, and in eight of the thirty-three states, the acceptance of compensation by statute is at least partially mutually exclusive with any tort claim or private bill.[19] Nevertheless, the existence of the state compensation statute is far from a guarantee that any individual exoneree will actually be compensated. One study found that only around 53% of exonerees that were convicted in a state with a compensation statute even filed for compensation.[20] And of the 53% that filed claims, only 73.5% actually prevailed on those claims.[21] The other major findings of this study were that these results vary significantly by geography and by whether or not the exoneree had assistance in their efforts to obtain post-conviction relief.[22] Dividing the U.S. into rough regions (South, West, Midwest, and Northeast), the researchers found that those in the South and West of the country broadly were associated with lower rates of filing, lower rates of winning, and lower amounts awarded, across both civil claims and statutory claims.[23] There was also a clear statistical association that those exonerees who were assisted by innocence organizations and those who were exonerated by DNA evidence had higher rates of success in receiving compensation than those who were not assisted and those who were exonerated through evidence other than DNA.[24] In sum, the study found that only 42% of incarcerated exonerees received any form of compensation after their release.[25]
Beyond the payments from the federal and state governments, exonerees’ earning power has also been shown to be permanently damaged by the time spent incarcerated, due in part to both perceptions of exonerees as being negatively affected by their time incarcerated and due to the perception that exonerees potentially have some responsibility for their own wrongful incarceration.[26] In one study, researchers found that, despite factual innocence, employers formed negative opinions of exonerees as opposed to individuals in the control group.[27] Employers were more likely to contact multiple references from the exonerees (which they are less likely to have due to years of separation from the workforce) and exonerees were offered less money for the same position if they were even offered a job.[28] The findings also suggested that exonerees were stereotyped in the same way that anyone who had spent time incarcerated were; they were assumed to be less intelligent, competent, and trustworthy than individuals who had not spent time incarcerated.[29]
All of these problems with employment discrimination are exacerbated by the fact that exonerees in many states are not given the same access to reintegration resources that those who are released from incarceration simply due to the completion of their sentence are.[30] Exonerees, unlike non-exonerated former inmates, are seen as no longer being the state’s responsibility once they are released.[31] But the problem with this thought process is that it ignores what some researchers call the “prisonization effect.”[32] Although normally discussed with respect to non-exonerated individuals released from prison, the damaging aspects of prison such as isolation from family and friends, loss of autonomy, overcrowding, and trauma from experiencing or even just witnessing violence effect exonerees in exactly the same way, if not more so because of the additional psychological damage of knowing that you are innocent while experiencing all of those things.[33]
- The Personal Impact
Beyond the financial devastation that a majority of exonerees face is the impact to their mental health, physical health, and personal relationships that years in prison may inevitably cause. Beginning with impacts to mental health, as Dr. Seymour Halleck observed, “[t]he prison environment is almost diabolically conceived to force the offender to experience the pangs of what many psychiatrists would describe as mental illness.”[34] Although Dr. Halleck was referring to non-exonerated offenders, several studies indicate the effects are the same, if not worse, for exonerees, and do not cease when exonerees are no longer incarcerated[35] In one study, nearly half of the participants reported moderate to high levels of depression and anxiety, five participants reported clinically significant manifestations of PTSD symptoms, and almost all participants reported severe sleep pattern disturbances.[36] Although this study involved only thirteen exonerated individuals, other studies with a greater number of exonerees show similar patterns.[37] In a 2013 study of twenty-five individuals released from a sentence of life in prison, researchers found that participants experienced a group of specific and similar mental health problems.[38] This group of problems includes institutionalized personality traits, social-sensory disorientation, and alienation, a grouping that these researchers believe represents a discrete subtype of PTSD that results from long-term imprisonment.[39]
Exonerees must also manage the consequences of physical health problems that they may have as a result of their imprisonment. Prisons are extremely violent places, and many individuals leave prison with not only the mental impact of violence, but also physical injuries due to assaults at the hands of other inmates as well as correctional officers.[40]Incarcerated individuals in general are disproportionately likely to have chronic health problems, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and HIV, and some research shows that these conditions may be greatly undertreated.[41] More specifically, the aforementioned study found that incarcerated people are substantially less likely to be treated compared to the general U.S. population.[42]
Although it contributes to the negative mental health consequences discussed above, the social isolation that prison causes is worth examining on its own. People incarcerated more than fifty miles from their home were shown to be more likely to experience depression.[43] Separation from family and friends has been reported as the most challenging aspect of incarceration by current and former inmates.[44] Even when individuals are still visited by friends and family, the environment in which these visits take place makes it inherently difficult to make meaningful connections with those on the outside.[45] Conversations through glass or via a prison phone make it difficult to feel connected to those on the outside, especially for those facing longer periods of incarceration.
Although in need of further exploration, the available research on the post-exoneration experience shows that we are not doing nearly enough for those who are found to be factually innocent of the crimes they were incarcerated for. States should expand access to resources and increase financial compensation for those wrongfully incarcerated. States also need to do a better job connecting those that are eligible for compensation to those that can help them obtain them. But providing better services for exonerees will be insufficient without dealing with the inherent trauma that incarceration currently causes. Although perhaps more poignant because of their actual innocence, the damage that prison causes to exonerees is, in many ways, no different than the damage that it causes to those who are not exonerated. Serious prison reform is long overdue.
William Widmer, Photograph of Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola, Louisiana, in Alice Speri, “Deadly Heat” in U.S. Prisons Is Killing Inmates and Spawning Lawsuits, Intercept (Aug. 24, 2016, 10:25 AM), https://theintercept.com/2016/08/24/deadly-heat-in-u-s-prisons-is-killing-inmates-and-spawning-lawsuits/.
[1] Nat’l Registry Exonerations, https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/about.aspx (last visited Nov. 3, 2024).
[2] Id.
[3] See Marvin Zalman, An Integrated Justice Model of Wrongful Convictions, 74 Albany L. Rev. 1465, 1473 (2011).
[4] See e.g., Colby Duncan, Justifying Justice: Six Factors of Wrongful Convictions and Their Solutions, 7 Themis: Rsch. J. Just. Stud. & Forensic Science 91 (2019).
[5] See e.g., Our Work, Innocence Project, https://innocenceproject.org/our-work/ (last visited Nov. 4, 2024).
[6] Evan J. Mandery et al., Compensation Statutes and Post-exoneration Offending, 103 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 553, 554 (2013).
[7] Id.
[8] 42 U.S.C. § 1983.
[9] Mandery, supra note 6, at 556.
[10] Id. at 556-57.
[11] Id. at 557.
[12] Id. at 557-58.
[13] Id. at 558.
[14] Id.
[15] Id.
[16] Id.
[17] Jeffrey S. Gutman & Lingxiao Sun, Why Is Mississippi the Best State in Which to Be Exonerate? An Empirical Evaluation of State Statutory and Civil Compensation for the Wrongfully Convicted, 11 Ne. L. Rev. 694, 707 (2019).
[18] Id.
[19] Id.
[20] Id. at 699.
[21] Id.
[22] Id. at 702.
[23] Id.
[24] Id.
[25] Id. at 700.
[26] Megan M. Trafford, Life as an Exoneree: An Examination of the Causes and Consequences of Wrongful Conviction, EBP Soc’y (Mar. 24, 2023), https://www.ebpsociety.org/blog/education/548-life-as-an-exoneree.
[27]Id.
[28] Id.
[29] Id.
[30] Benjamin Alexander-Bloch et. al, Mental Health Characteristics of Exonerees: A Preliminary Exploration, 26 Psych. Crime & L. 768, 768 (2020).
[31] Id.
[32] Katie Rose Quandt & Alexi Jones, Research Roundup: Incarceration Can Cause Lasting Damage to Mental Health, Prison Pol’y Initiative(May 13, 2021), https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2021/05/13/mentalhealthimpacts/.
[33] Id.; Alexander-Bloch, supra note 30, at 769.
[34] Quandt & Jones, supra note 32.
[35] Alexander-Bloch, supra note 30, at 769.
[36] Trafford, supra note 26.
[37] Alexander-Bloch, supra note 30, at 768; Quandt & Jones, supra note 32.
[38] Mariek Liem & Maarten Kunst, Is There a Recognizable Post-incarceration Syndrome Among Released “Lifers”?, Int’l J. L. & Psychiatry(2013).
[39] Id.
[40] Quandt & Jones, supra note 32.
[41] Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Chronic Health Conditions May Be Severely Undertreated in U.S. Prison Population(Apr. 19, 2023), https://hub.jhu.edu/2023/04/19/chronic-health-conditions-in-prison/.
[42] Id.
[43] Quandt & Jones, supra note 32.
[44] Id.
[45] Id.