https://www.nj.com/news/2020/07/in-reversal-nj-will-now-pay-innocent-man-locked-up-for-years-on-rape-conviction.html

Dion Harrell, seen in 2016 after his conviction was overturned, spent years on a sex offender registry before he was cleared through DNA evidence for a 1988 rape.

By S.P. Sullivan | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com

After spending over two years fighting to deny compensation to a man wrongly convicted of rape, Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration has agreed to settle its case and pay Dion Harrell for some of his lost time.

Harrell and officials in the state Treasury reached a settlement agreement in June and began finalizing the agreement last week, according to Harrell’s attorney, Glenn Garber.

Garber declined to disclose the settlement figure, citing his client’s concern for privacy. But the state’s Mistaken Imprisonment Act allows former prisoners to recoup up to $50,000 for every year spent wrongly in prison, in addition to legal fees.

Harrell was wrongly imprisoned for four years.

He was falsely accused of rape in 1988 and ended up serving four years in prison, as well as more than two decades as a registered sex offender.

He wasn’t exonerated until 2016, after the Innocence Project took up his cause and obtained new DNA testing ruling him out as the man who raped and robbed the 17-year-old victim in a Long Branch parking lot.

“People looked at me the wrong way,” Harrell told NJ Advance Media in a February interview. “I come to a barbecue, people say, ‘Watch out for the kids, he’s here.’”

In 2018, Harrell sued the state for compensation, but the state Attorney General’s Office, which represented Treasury officials in the case, argued that the law required him to file his claim within two years of his release from prison, meaning the window for his payment had long closed.

That would have required Harrell to sue the state claiming wrongful conviction back in 1997, as a convicted rapist out on parole.

His case seemed lost after a state appeals court sided with the Murphy administration, finding the two-year window meant Harrell didn’t qualify, even though courts had previously determined he served time for a heinous crime he “indisputably did not commit.”

Officials in the Treasury and state Attorney General’s Office initially said they were enforcing the letter of the law, but facing public pressure over the use of state resources to deny an innocent man compensation, authorities reversed course.

A spokesman for the attorney general confirmed Wednesday that a settlement had been reached but declined to comment further.

“This was a difficult situation, but we’re certainly happy that they did the right thing and agreed to settle,” Garber said in a phone interview Wednesday.

Garber said the settlement will also allow Harrell to seek additional payment if a bill currently before the state Legislature expanding the type and amount of compensation for mistaken imprisonment becomes law.

In recent years, state legislators have looked to expand existing laws, recognizing the burdens of people like Harrell who also spent years on parole or sex offender registries for crimes they did not commit.

But the law that allowed state authorities to deny Harrell’s payment remains on the books unchanged despite pledges from Murphy and state lawmakers to fix it.

A bipartisan bill pending in the state Legislature that would increase the pool of wrongly convicted people eligible for compensation, address the deadline issue Harrell faced and allow people who spent years wrongly on a sex offender registry to receive additional payment has stalled over several sessions.

The current version, introduced in January, has yet to receive a hearing in the state Assembly or Senate.

“When people have been wrongly convicted, we need to be accountable as a society,” said Sen. Declan O’Scanlon, R-Monmouth, one of the bill’s sponsors. “We need to be generous and just, and I’m glad this bureaucratic problem was solved (though a legal settlement).”

O’Scanlon said the Legislature had been sidelined on a number of important issues by the coronavirus pandemic, but said his colleagues remained committed to passing the bill.

According to Treasury data obtained by NJ Advance Media through an Open Public Records Act request, New Jersey has compensated just nine wrongly convicted persons over the last decade, for a total of $3.1 million dollars.

Advocates say untold others got nothing for years taken from them because of provisions in the existing law disallowing people who took plea deals and were later exonerated through DNA or other means from being compensated.

Michelle Feldman, state campaigns director for the Innocence Project, said legislation putting a price tag on taking away someone’s freedom is a powerful tool at a time when policymakers are taking a close look at law enforcement oversight.

“When states have to pay for wrongful convictions, that gives them motivation to pass laws that rein in problematic policing and rein in prosecutorial misconduct,” she said.