Idaho should compensate its wrongly convicted citizens
Charles Fain’s compensation for his 19 years on death row as an innocent man was a jacket and a pair of pants from the prison laundry.
Sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl in Nampa in 1982, Fain was exonerated in 2001 when advanced DNA testing revealed the hairs found on the victim’s body were definitively not his. At his trial, the prosecution had relied on unvalidated “visual hair comparison” evidence as well as the testimony of two jailhouse snitches, one of whom recanted years later. The FBI no longer uses this method of hair analysis and has admitted that it led to erroneous conclusions.
A Vietnam veteran who had served with the 101st Airborne, Fain was released into an unfamiliar world with little money, no place to live and few prospects. Both of his parents had passed away while he aged in a prison cell. Death row provided him no job or technology training, so he struggled to secure steady work and a paycheck.
Mr. Fain eventually found employment at an Idaho assembly plant. But while he worked hard to climb out of the hole left in his life, the state that unjustly put him there did nothing to help him. In fact, being an exoneree in Idaho meant he wasn’t even eligible for the training and benefits available to parolees who were rightfully convicted of their crimes.
Idaho is one of only 15 states that does not have a statute to compensate citizens wrongfully imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. The federal government, the District of Columbia, and 35 states have laws that compensate the wrongfully convicted. Nationally, the average compensation paid to exonerees is $68,000 for each year of wrongful incarceration. Many of the laws also help exonerees address immediate needs upon their release like housing, transportation, medical care and even tuition assistance.
It is impossible to convey all of the difficulties the innocent face upon re-entering society, never mind that their records remain on state lists, so employment and housing searches show them as rapists or murderers. If you’re wrongly convicted in Idaho, your only recourse is to file a federal civil rights lawsuit that often involves years of costly litigation — both for the exoneree and the state. These lawsuits do not help the exonerated when they need it most and end up costing more in the long run than a compensation law would.
Rep. Doug Ricks, R-Rexburg, has introduced legislation that would provide $60,000 per year of wrongful incarceration or $75,000 per year on death row, with an additional $25,000 for years wrongfully spent on parole and the sex offender registry. Any awards they win through the courts would decrease the amount they receive from the state. Exonerees would also be eligible for assistance such as health insurance, mental health counseling, tuition for job training and temporary housing.
Lastly, the legislation would provide exonerees with a certificate of innocence and expungement, meaning their conviction is officially wiped from the books. In the more than two dozen exonerations that our Boise State University laboratory and the Idaho Innocence Project have worked on, this is what exonerees want most. As Christopher Tapp said when he was finally cleared of rape and murder in 2019, “I want my family’s name back.” This bill will go a long way toward doing just that for Idahoans who have been wrongfully imprisoned and proven innocent.