In Massachusetts, as elsewhere, a significant number of people have served long prison terms for crimes they did not commit. Many of them have been freed years after their convictions, when DNA or other newly discovered evidence demonstrated their innocence. Some, tragically, died in prison before their innocence could be established.

In the last several days of the 2002 legislative session, there was a serious effort in the Massachusetts legislature to pass a bill that would have provided some compensation for innocent people who have been imprisoned. A bill sponsored by State Representative Patricia Jehlen of Somerville passed the House, but failed at the last minute in the Senate when a "hold" was put on it at the request of the District Attorneys’ Association.

The House bill would have provided compensation for people who had received pardons from the governor, or whose convictions had been overturned by a court decision. Applicants for compensation would have been required to prove that they were actually innocent of the crimes for which they had been convicted, or any related offense, and to demonstrate that they would not and could not be charged with the same offense again. It was unclear from the text of the bill what evidence might have satisfied the last requirement, which seemed unnecessarily onerous. The bill’s $400,000 ceiling on compensation was far from generous, considering that several victims of wrongful convictions have been imprisoned in excess of 10 years; that the money would be subject to federal income tax; and that the services of an attorney would be required to collect it. Yet despite these shortcomings, the bill’s proponents were prepared to pass it as the best they could achieve at present.

The district attorneys should be ashamed of themselves for killing this bill. Many of the innocent people in question went to prison at least in part because of improper or misguided actions taken by prosecutors. Indeed, when the death penalty was still on the books in Massachusetts, some innocent people were sentenced to death. Lawyer Johnson, for example, went to death row and then prison for murder because the DA made a deal with the real killer and then exploited the racial tension in Boston during school busing to convict Johnson, an African-American, before an all-white jury. In his closing argument, ADA Thomas Mundy said of the victim, "When that white man went into those projects, he was like a sheep separated from his flock, and they set upon him like a pack of wolves." Marvin Mitchell spent years in prison for a rape he did not commit because the prosecutor adopted a pose of willful blindness to obvious perjury committed by police officers. Co-defendants Peter Limone, Louis Greco, and Henry Tameleo were sentenced to death row and then life in prison, and Joseph Salvati received a life sentence, because of perjury manufactured by corrupt FBI agents. Throughout the proceedings, prosecutors blithely looked the other way, untroubled by the fact that their principal witness was a stone-cold killer who had changed his story four times before trial. Convictions of innocent people frequently result from questionable eyewitness-identification testimony, shaky forensic evidence, and testimony purchased from jailhouse snitches. Historically, some DAs have been less than vigilant about these problems. Of course, there are DAs with integrity doing a job that must be done. But as a group, DAs should be more than sheepish about objecting to compensation for wrongfully convicted people, or proposing unnecessary requirements for obtaining relief that undermine the purpose of the legislation.

At present, it is extremely difficult for innocent persons freed from prison to obtain any redress. Their only hope are civil-rights suits, which face an endless series of technical defenses made available to law-enforcement defendants. Most claimants cannot clear these hurdles and receive nothing for the years that were stolen from them. Jehlen’s bill would have provided compensation based on the innocence and suffering of the claimant, without requiring proof of official misconduct. It is shameful that as a result of the politics practiced by district attorneys, justice will continue to go begging in these cases.