After the Exoneration

By Amanda Ripley/Raleigh

One unlucky evening in 1984, Ricky Daye was riding in a Buick with a broken taillight in San Diego. The police pulled the car over and thought they recognized Daye's face from a WANTED sketch. He was arrested and five months later convicted of the brutal rape and kidnapping of a young San Diego mother. Daye spent 10 years in California prisons, insisting all the time that he was innocent. Finally, in 1994, a DNA test showed he could not have been the culprit, and he was freed.

A happy ending? Not entirely. For months afterward, strangers who recognized Daye from TV talk shows would corner him in K Marts and gas stations and ask, "You got paid at least, right?" Yet six years later, Daye, 42, has not received a cent. He sued the city of San Diego, its police and its prosecutors for millions of dollars. But last year a jury declined to award any damages.

Despite the wonderful clarity of DNA evidence, which has exonerated more than 80 Americans of crimes for which they had been imprisoned, two-thirds have never been given any compensation for their lost years. In a country in which some slip-and-fall claims win millions of dollars, it is startling to realize that decades wrongly spent in maximum-security prisons are typically worth nothing. "In America, when someone is wronged, we pay them," says Adele Bernhard, a Pace University law professor. "It may not be a perfect system, but that's what we do. Why don't we do that here?"

In 36 states, according to Bernhard, no laws explicitly provide for compensating the wrongly imprisoned, while other laws protect police and prosecutors from lawsuits. The reasoning is that public servants could not do their job if they constantly had to fear being sued. As long as officials do not jail the wrong person intentionally (and they almost never do), they are not to blame--and in our justice system, someone has to be blamed before anyone pays. Even in the 14 states that do have laws to compensate victims of courtroom mistakes, the caps on awards are often miserly. For those coming out of federal prisons, damages cannot exceed a laughable $5,000.

There have been exceptions in cases involving blatant police or prosecutorial misconduct. Last year four men who collectively spent 65 years in prison settled with Illinois officials for $36 million. In New York State, even in the absence of police misconduct, victims can sue under a no-fault compensation law. And some people have managed to get paid by persuading state legislatures to pass special bills awarding them damages.

By and large, though, the law is messy and outdated. In Texas a 1985 statute allows wrongly imprisoned people to collect as much as $25,000 in compensation for pain and suffering. That works out to slightly less than $6 a day for the 12 years Kevin Byrd spent in prison for a crime he didn't commit. The state agreed to pay it in May 1999, but Byrd has yet to see any money. In Texas, officials in the Attorney General's office say the state legislature needs to meet in order to appropriate funds to pay Byrd--but it still hasn't done so. State senator Rodney Ellis plans to introduce a bill in January to make it easier to collect compensation, but observers say it is not likely to pass. The situation is somewhat better in California, where in September Governor Gray Davis signed a law to pay innocent men and women $100 for every day spent in prison. But it won't affect Ricky Daye--the law doesn't apply to older cases.

Not everyone feels sorry for Daye. Despite the evidence, the rape victim has said she still believes Daye is the one who attacked her. And like many of those exonerated by DNA tests, Daye has been convicted of other, less serious crimes, both before and after his release. Contends San Diego city attorney William Donnell, who defended the police against Daye's civil suit: "Those 10 years [in prison] kept him alive."

Daye disagrees. "There were 6,000 guys at Folsom prison," he says, "and I was the only one from Iowa." He learned to make a knife out of a sardine can and sew a steel tray into his coat as body armor. "They put my life in far more peril than I was ever in on the street." Daye, who makes $7 an hour as a cook in Raleigh, N.C., still hopes that his lawsuit, now under appeal, will help set things right.