Opinion/Natarajan: It’s time to pass wrongful conviction compensation bill
Radha Natarajan
Radha Natarajan is the executive director of the New England Innocence Project.
If you live in Rhode Island and are convicted of a crime you did not commit, wrongfully imprisoned for decades, and then exonerated based on evidence of your innocence, the state that unjustly took away your freedom and subjected you to the trauma and hardship of incarceration will give you absolutely nothing to compensate you or provide you with assistance after you are released from prison.
For a small number of Rhode Islanders, the experience of wrongful conviction has tragically been their reality. The New England Innocence Project knows all too well that there is nothing we can do to give back the countless holidays and birthdays spent behind bars. We can’t rebuild the careers lost and opportunities missed or repair families torn apart. But we can and must compensate the wrongfully convicted to
They studied how eyewitness evidence is used in the courtroom and offered science-based recommendations going forward.
But it left many people who were convicted before the report still in prison. Hocus-Pocus
James Watson was 20 years old in 1979 when Boston police officers said they wanted to ask him questions about the murder of a cabdriver named Jeffrey Boyajian.
“ ‘Did anybody hear anything or see anything?’ ” Watson recalled the officers ask. “You know, they knock on people s doors. They knocked on my door. And then they stayed at my door.”
At the time, Watson was unemployed, a new father of an infant son. He told police he knew nothing about the crime. But they said two eyewitnesses saw him get into Boyajian’s cab the night he was killed.
WHEN FIREFIGHTERS ARRIVED at 102 Belair Street in Brockton, Massachusetts, in the predawn hours of April 17, 2003, they observed two teenagers poking their heads out of second-floor windows. One of the teens was 17-year-old Frances Choy, who, awakened by her mother’s scream of “Frances, there’s a fire!” had called 911 on her cell phone. The other was Kenneth Choy, Frances’s 16-year-old nephew. Inside the house, a fire was burning with such intensity that it had melted wall fixtures, and thick smoke had trapped Frances, Kenneth, and Frances’s parents Jimmy and Anne Choy in their bedrooms.
Anne Choy would be pronounced dead later that morning at Good Samaritan Hospital, but as a headline in the next day’s