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Wilton Dedge
Innocent ex-con wants
state to pay
By Beth Kassab,
Tallahassee Bureau, Orlando Sentinel, March 24, 2005
TALLHASSEE -- Wilton Dedge
left prison in September without so much as a bus ticket home
after spending 22 years locked up for a crime he didn't commit.
On Wednesday, the Port St.
John man appeared in front of a House committee, hoping to convince
lawmakers that men and women who are wrongfully convicted deserve
compensation for the years they spent behind bars.
Dedge did not speak to the
committee, preferring to leave the talking to his attorneys,
but he said afterward that he was encouraged that the lawmakers
were open to the idea of establishing a system for wrongfully
convicted people to seek compensation from the state.
Last year, DNA evidence exonerated
him of the rape of a 17-year-old girl that sent him to prison
in 1982.
Florida provides no legal avenues
for those wrongfully convicted to sue the state or the prosecutors
and police who helped put them in prison.
House Claims Committee Chairman
Rep. John Quinones, R-Kissimmee, said he would work to come up
with a system for wrongly convicted men and women to apply for
compensation from the state Legislature. Quinones, however, made
no promises about when a separate measure specifically seeking
compensation for Dedge and his parents would be heard this year.
Dedge, 43, is asking for $4.9
million, in part to repay his parents for the money they spent
on his rape trial.
"Try to put together a
process that's fast and will lead to a result," urged former
Florida State University President Sandy D'Alemberte, who is
representing Dedge. "Don't leave these people bouncing between
the courts and the Legislature."
Jenny Greenberg, director of
the Florida Innocence Initiative, said Florida needs to provide
monetary compensation, as well as mental and general health care,
for those who are proven innocent while serving a sentence.
Leon County State Attorney
Willie Meggs said there are very few people who would be eligible
for such compensation and cautioned the committee against allowing
those who pleaded guilty to go after money from the state. He
also said that in order to be eligible for compensation, a person
must offer convincing evidence of their innocence after the conviction.
"There is no prosecutor that I know of who wants to see
an innocent person convicted of any crime," Meggs said.
After the hearing, Dedge, who
is now working part time and taking a class to get certified
in wastewater management, said he would continue to talk to lawmakers
about his personal plea for compensation as well as the creation
of a new system for others who might end up in his situation.
He accepted an apology from
Rep. Phillip Brutus, R-North Miami, for the years he spent in
jail as an innocent man.
"It's the least I can
do," Brutus said. "I apologized to him because I think
somebody in the government should."
Beth Kassab can be reached
at bkassab@orlandosentinel.com or 850-222-5564.
Copyright © 2005, Orlando
Sentinel
Senate to look at compensation
for wrongly convicted
JACKIE HALLIFAX, Associated
Press Feb. 09, 2005
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Prompted
by the case of a man who spent 22 years in prison for a rape
he didn't commit, the state Senate will study how to compensate
people wrongly convicted and imprisoned.
Wilton Dedge, 43, wants lawmakers
to give him $5 million for the nearly 8,000 days he spent in
custody, for his lost wages, the money his family spent to defend
and visit him and the work done by the lawyers who fought for
his exoneration.
Six months after being cleared
by DNA results, Dedge is facing a hard battle in his fight for
restitution.
Senate President Tom Lee said
Wednesday that the existing process for deciding whether to compensate
for wrongs caused by the state doesn't work for cases like Dedge's.
It's a sad situation and lawmakers
have a lot of empathy, Lee said.
"The people that are involved
in this very tragic situation have undergone a lot, have lost
a lot of life and it's a very precious thing to lose," he
said.
But, he added, there could
be more DNA exonerations and laws must "deal with everyone
equally and similarly," Lee said.
Traditionally, claims bills
in the Legislature are based on awards that victims win in lawsuits.
The cases have to go to the Legislature because the state's sovereign
immunity statute shields it from liability above $100,000 per
person and $200,000 per incident.
Dedge's attorneys have not
filed a lawsuit in his case. The preliminary pricetag Dedge has
put on his claim for compensation includes $1.6 million for his
loss of freedom, $1.7 million for lost wages and money for the
expenses incurred by his family for his defense and for the attorneys
who fought for his exoneration and freedom.
Talbot "Sandy" D'Alemberte,
a former president of Florida State University and the American
Bar Association, is representing Dedge. He called Lee's decision
a good thing.
"It seems to me he's responding
to a problem, larger even than Wilton Dedge. I think that shows
the right concern," D'Alemberte said.
But Dedge would continue to
seek a hearing in the Legislature for his case, D'Alemberte said.
"An innocent citizen,
in essence, has been forced to work for the state for 22 years,"
he said.
In the House, state Rep. David
Simmons has filed a claims bill for Dedge but the Longwood Republican
said Wednesday he supports only "modest" restitution
- something far less than $1 million, much less $5 million.
"We're not in the business
of providing a lottery to someone who's been wrongly convicted,"
Simmons said.
Simmons also said he didn't
know if lawmakers would be able to reach a conclusion on Dedge's
case this year or if it would take longer.
Dedge, who lives in Cocoa,
works part-time in home improvement and landscaping. He was released
last summer after serving 22 years in prison for the December
1981 rape of a 17-year-old girl in Brevard County.
Despite testimony of six people
who swore he was at a garage nearly 45 minutes away, Dedge was
convicted, based on an identification by the victim, microscopic
hair analysis and "scent" identification by a dog that
has since been discredited.
A year and a half later, an
appeals court overturned the conviction. But Dedge was prosecuted,
convicted and sentenced again. And the sentence was even harsher
- life rather than 30 years.
In June 2001, the first DNA
lab test came back in Dedge's case: DNA showed the hair at the
crime scene couldn't be his. But it wasn't until a second DNA
test in August 2004 on crime-scene semen that prosecutors stopped
fighting defense attorneys and Dedge walked free.
Case Closed?
By Sally Watt, Orlando Weekly,
August 5, 2004
Wilton Dedge's 22-year fight
to get out of prison for a rape that DNA testing indicates he
didn't commit may be coming to a close soon, but not because
the physical evidence in the case proves he is innocent.
On July 21, Dedge's attorneys
asked 18th Circuit Court Judge Preston Silvernail for a new trial,
based on DNA tests that exclude him as the rapist of a then 17-year-old
girl in the Brevard town of Sharpes. Silvernail is still considering
the request, and will likely make a decision before the end of
August.
But if Silvernail orders a
new trial, the prosecution may have a hard time convincing the
victim, now 39, to participate. Contacted for this story after
the July 21 hearing, state prosecutor Chris White said the woman
is "no longer sure she wants to go forward."
Dedge, now 42, was convicted
of the rape in 1982 and given a life plus 30 years sentence.
The victim told police her assailant cut off her clothes, made
65 superficial cuts on her body and raped her twice. She identified
Dedge weeks after the attack when she saw him and his brother
in a convenience store. At the time of the attack, she told police
the rapist was 6 feet tall and weighed 200 pounds. Dedge is 5
feet 6 inches tall, and weighed 125 pounds 22 years ago. He had
no prior arrests.
In 1994, Dedge contacted the
Innocence Project for help. "I just saw Barry Scheck on
TV," he wrote. "Can you help me?"
The Innocence Project
a legal team that specializes in exonerating prisoners through
DNA testing was co-founded by Barry Scheck in 1992. To
date the organization has been involved in the release of 143
wrongfully convicted inmates across the country.
They took Dedge's case, and
in 2000, he became the first inmate in Florida to have DNA testing
on evidence used to convict; in Dedge's case, a semen sample.
The test proved inconclusive because the semen sample was old
and degraded. But a DNA test on two pubic hairs found on the
victim's bed sheets did yield results: The hairs did not belong
to Dedge. The same hairs had been used to convict Dedge. Prior
to DNA testing, an FDLE analyst stated that the hairs were consistent
with Dedge's in all their characteristics.
State prosecutors fought to
keep the DNA tests of the hairs out of court, but in May the
Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the evidence was admissible.
Dedge returned to the 18th Circuit Court July 21 asking for a
new trial. At his first trial, Dedge relied on an attorney who
had never tried a criminal case. This time around he's represented,
pro bono, by Innocence Project attorneys.
Still, the surprises keep coming
in Dedge's case. Defense witness Dr. Sudhir Sinha, president
of ReliaGene Technologies in New Orleans, told prosecutor Robert
Wayne Holmes about a new type of DNA test developed within the
last two years, Y-STR, that could possibly extract results from
the degraded semen sample. Even though Sinha testified that the
test results would likely be inconclusive, prosecutors asked
the judge to order the test. Silvernail did just that.
Meanwhile, the victim says
she isn't certain she could go through with another trial. White
won't say if she is hesitating because she now doubts her identification
of Dedge, or because she simply doesn't want to repeat history.
"[I] said everything [I] can think of to persuade her not
to back down," the prosecutor said in a phone interview
after the July 21 hearing.
Dedge's Y-DNA test results
are due back later this month. When he gets the test results,
Judge Silvernail has two choices: He can order a new trial, or
overturn Dedge's conviction.
Not far from the courtroom
where the July hearing took place, the victim who identified
Dedge more than two decades ago watched the proceedings on closed-circuit
television. Now 39, her hair is sprinkled with gray. She has
a teenage daughter of her own. This was her first look at Wilton
Dedge since she pointed at him from the witness stand and said
with absolute certainty that he was the man who raped her.
Nina Morrison, Dedge's Innocence
Project attorney, says she is not surprised that the victim may
not want to go through with another trial. "I'd be shocked
if she didn't have some doubts whether she made a bad ID,"
says Morrison. "She's been told all this time that the hairs
belonged to Wilton.
 Prosecutors Fight DNA Use for
Exoneration
By ADAM LIPTAK, New York
Times, August 29, 2003
HARPES, Fla., Aug. 26 - After
seeing more than 130 prisoners freed by DNA testing in the last
15 years, prosecutors in Florida and across the country have
mounted a vigorous challenge to similar new cases.
Prosecutors acknowledge that
DNA testing is reliable, but they have grown increasingly skeptical
of its power to prove innocence in cases where there was other
evidence of guilt. Defense lawyers say these prosecutors, who
often relied on the same biological evidence to convict the defendants
before DNA testing was available, are more committed to winning
than to justice.
The fight has become particularly
heated in Florida, where prisoners will soon be barred from seeking
DNA testing for old cases under a 2001 law that set an Oct. 1
deadline for such requests.
In this state, the cases of
two prisoners illustrate both the power and limits of DNA testing.
In one case, Wilton Dedge was
convicted of rape based in part on two light-brown hairs found
in the victim's sheets here in 1981. It was the only physical
evidence against him. The hairs were, the prosecutor said at
his trial, "microscopically identical" to those of
Mr. Dedge.
In a 1983 trial of another
man, Richard McKinley, for the rape of an 11-year-old girl in
Homestead, the prosecutors told the jury that semen recovered
from the girl matched his blood type.
DNA testing, which was not
available at the time of either trial and which was performed
recently only after fierce resistance from two sets of Florida
prosecutors, showed that the hairs and the semen could not have
come from the defendants.
Yet both men remain in prison
serving life terms, and the prosecutors who relied on the biological
evidence to convict them now say the DNA testing is not proof
of their innocence.
Other Florida prisoners may
never have the chance to argue about whether DNA evidence exonerates
them. In 2001, the state Legislature opened a two-year window
for DNA retesting in older cases. The window will close on Oct.
1, after which courts cannot hear the cases of hundreds of inmates
who say that testing could free them, and lawyers across the
state are in a race against time to file motions on behalf of
such clients.
While prosecutors concede that
DNA can prove whether someone is associated with a given piece
of biological evidence, they insist that is not the same thing
as proving whether a defendant committed a crime.
In the cases of Mr. Dedge and
Mr. McKinley, for example, the prosecutors say that the remaining
evidence in those cases was strong enough to uphold the men's
convictions.
Defense lawyers say these arguments
amount to prosecutorial vindictiveness. Prosecutors respond that
it is time to reconsider the power of DNA evidence, saying its
usefulness in many cases is overstated.
The debate about the value
of DNA evidence also rages in other states.
In Houston, prosecutors have
resisted an appeal for an unconditional pardon by Josiah Sutton,
who was cleared by DNA testing in a 1998 rape and has been freed.
The victim continues to maintain that she identified the right
man.
"If this is not categorically
dispositive evidence of innocence," said David Dow, a lawyer
for Mr. Sutton, referring to the results of the DNA testing of
sperm collected from the victim, "there is no such thing."
Chuck Rosenthal, the district
attorney in Houston, saw things differently. "From the standpoint
of the law, he's innocent until proven guilty," he said.
"Whether he's actually
innocent, I don't know," he said. "I'm not about to
call the victim in this case a liar."
Mr. Dow said this exchange
illustrates a trend. "What we're seeing is a double standard,"
he said. "Evidence will be considered more than sufficient
by prosecutors if it establishes guilt and questionable or insufficient
if it established innocence."
Barry Scheck, the cofounder
of the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School in New York, said
prosecutors in New York, Illinois and many Texas counties have
embraced DNA testing. But in Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Louisiana,
Michigan, Mississippi and New Mexico, Mr. Scheck said, prosecutors
often resisted testing requests on the ground that even a positive
result would not conclusively establish innocence.
On Monday, for instance, Lonnie
Erby was released in St. Louis after 17 years in prison for rape.
The prosecutor there, Jennifer Joyce, had opposed efforts to
perform DNA testing, calling it pointless because tests could
not conclusively clear Mr. Erby, since biological evidence was
available in only two of three rapes with which he was charged.
She changed her mind after testing excluded him as a suspect
in those rapes.
In Florida, Mr. Dedge had to
sue to have the evidence in his case retested, over the objections
of prosecutors who said that the state's interest in finality
and the victim's feelings should preclude it.
Judge Winifred J. Sharp dissented
in a 1998 appeal ruling that initially turned down his request.
"The results of the tests, if successfully performed, will
likely be absolutely conclusive of either guilt or innocence,"
she wrote.
The tests were performed in
2000. Though the victim said that only she, her sister and the
rapist could have left the hairs in her sheets, the tests excluded
the sisters and Mr. Dedge.
But prosecutors say that Mr.
Dedge has not proved his innocence or his entitlement to a new
trial. They rely on three other pieces of evidence against him.
The victim, who was 17 at the
time, identified him. But she first said that her assailant was
6 feet tall, weighed 200 pounds and had a hairline receding to
the point of baldness. Mr. Dedge is more than six inches shorter
than that and weighs about 145 pounds; at the time of the crime,
according to court records, he was about 125 pounds. He still
sports a full head of hair.
A prison informant testified
that Mr. Dedge had confessed to him in a passing conversation.
The informant received a 120-year reduction in his sentence in
exchange for his testimony. A truck confiscated by the state
was also released to the informant's wife as part of the same
deal.
And an expert witness was allowed
to testify that his dog had compared the victim's sheets three
months after the rape to a selection of sheets from the local
jail and had picked out Mr. Dedge's sheets. Such "scent
line-ups" have since been questioned by the Florida courts.
In June, a trial judge, J.
Preston Silvernail of Brevard Circuit Court in Viera, ruled that
Mr. Dedge could pursue his motion for exoneration.
"There is," he wrote,
"a reasonable probability that the defendant would have
been acquitted if the DNA evidence excluding the defendant as
the contributor of the pubic hair had been introduced at trial."
Prosecutors appealed that decision.
Robert Wayne Holmes, the prosecutor
in the case, did not return repeated calls for comment. In court
papers, he emphasized the justice system's interest in finality,
the hardship that a retrial would inflict on the victim and the
strength of the remaining evidence. "The fact that it can
now be said that the defendant was not the source of the hair
has little significance," he wrote.
Mr. Dedge, a steely man who
wore a bright-red prison jump suit, handcuffs and leg shackles
during an interview at the detention center in Cocoa, Fla., disputed
that.
"They used it against
me," he said of the hair evidence, "and now they say
it doesn't matter."
Mr. Dedge, now 41, presented
six witnesses at his trial who said he was working as an auto
mechanic and was on the job at the time of the rape.
In the McKinley case, prosecutors
concede that DNA testing of the sperm found in a rape of an 11-year-old
girl shows that it could not have come from the defendant. The
prosecutors now say that doesn't matter. "The DNA is a sideshow,"
said Edward Griffith, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade state attorney's
office.
More important than the DNA,
Mr. Griffith said, was a police officer's testimony that he saw
Mr. McKinley atop the girl with his pants down.
The DNA evidence does not contradict
that testimony, he added, because the girl had had sex with another
man not long before the rape. She also said that Mr. McKinley
had not ejaculated.
Testimony about the girl's
earlier sexual encounter was excluded under a Florida law that
bars introduction of a victim's sexual history in a rape trial.
"That's insane," said Mr. Scheck, who represents Mr.
McKinley in his current request. "Whoever had sex with an
11-year-old committed a crime."
He said that Mr. McKinley deserved
at least a retrial. "There is no question that the prosecution
took the position at trial that the semen came from McKinley,"
he said.
Other prisoners in Florida
may never be able to seek DNA testing because of the Oct. 1 deadline.
Almost 500 inmates have contacted lawyers and groups that represent
potentially innocent people asking for help in reviewing transcripts,
finding evidence and making motions. Teams of volunteer lawyers
and law students are working furiously to beat the deadline.
They have been able to review
about 280 cases, said Jennifer Greenberg, the director of the
Florida Innocence Initiative, and have concluded that about 20
have viable DNA-based innocence claims. Each will now require
quick and intensive litigation to file motions before the deadline.
Many other files remain unexamined,
and letters keep arriving. "We have 202 people for whom
we've done nothing," Ms. Greenberg said. "We've been
inundated."
Defense lawyers plan to ask
the Florida Supreme Court to extend the deadline, and they hold
out hope that federal courts would allow retesting even after
the deadline passes.
But these lawyers say they
are concerned with one aspect of the testing law: Except in death
penalty cases, in which biological evidence must be saved until
60 days after execution, the law allows the destruction of DNA
evidence.
Mr. Dedge said that his experience
shows the deadline should be extended. "There's no statute
of limitations on murder one," he said. "How can there
be a statute of limitations on proving your innocence?"
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