Vernon Horn, Marquis Jackson, and Stefon Morant en route to getting their money.
A state panel Friday gave a thumbs up to paying three New Haveners a combined $16 million for spending decades in prison on wrongful convictions — while putting on hold plans to compensate another two.
The vote took place at a hearing of the General Assembly’s Judiciary Committee.
Under the chairmanship of New Haven State Sen. Gary Winfield, the committee debated whether to approve a proposed combined $37.5 million package of settlements for a total of eight Black men — including the five from New Haven — who were wrongfully incarcerated for murders they should never have been convicted of committing.
At the end of the hearing the committee members voted to approve a $5,843,985 award for Stefon Morant, a $4,817,954 for Vernon Horn, and a $5,312,921 for Marquis Jackson.
A state claims commissioner held hearings last year for all three men’s cases. The award amount in each case was determined by a formula set in state law: multiply the years served by 200 percent of the median family income in Connecticut, which is currently $96,300. (The law also empowers the claims commissioner to increase the proposed award by 25 percent depending on evidence presented by the claimant.)
Those awards for Morant, Horn, and Jackson now head to the full state legislature for a final vote.
The committee members voted to delay final determinations on two other recommended awards for two other wrongfully incarcerated Black male New Haveners. They did so in order to get further information from the state claims commissioner as to whether or not they are truly eligible for such funds under state law.
The proposed awards that the committee remanded back to the claims commissioner for eligibility review on Friday were $7.9 million for Adam Carmon and $6.7 million for George Gould.
Each case involves a long journey in the life of a New Haven man, as told in previous Independent stories:
• Click here to read about Carmon’s case and lawsuit against the city.
• Here to read about a judge’s dismissal of Jackson’s charges in 2019.
• Here to read about Horn’s ongoing fight for freedom, even after release.
• Here to read about the corrupt-cop case that put Morant in prison.
• And here to read about Gould’s exoneration in 2010.
Horn said he wanted to attend Friday’s hearing, but he heeded his attorney’s advice not to.
The day marked the culmination of trying to resolve his complaint with the city, then finding a legislator — his state senator, Gary Winfield — to pick up the cause.
“Everybody thought this wasn’t going to happen. All the lawyers told me this wasn’t going to happen,” Horn told the Independent Friday. “Then I got into Gary Winfield’s ear. Once he heard the story, he and his colleagues got this bill [started]. I can’t believe how he moved to get this done.”
Horn said that if the bill passes and he receives the money, “it’s never going to change traumatic issues I deal with every day. But it gives me courage. I can tell my daughter, ‘Your father was dealt with unjustly. But I’m here to help make your world a little bit better.’”
Veteran New Haven defense attorney Kenneth Rosenthal wrote in to the committee with separate letters of support for his clients, Morant and Jackson.
“Mr. Morant’s 21+ years of wrongful incarceration was the result of extraordinary misconduct on the part of law enforcement officials and false testimony brought about at their behest, as documented by an extensive FBI investigation following the conviction of Mr. Morant and his co-defendant,” Rosenthal wrote in one of those letters.
In support of Jackson’s award, he wrote, “Notwithstanding the devastating impact of Mr. Jackson’s wrongful incarceration for more than 19 years, during what should have been the prime of his life … he has devoted the period since his release to constructive endeavors and contributions to the New Haven community of which he has been a part his entire life.”
The committee members did not go into detail on Friday on any of the proposed awards up for their consideration. Republican State Rep. Craig Fishbein of Wallingford and Democratic State Rep. Steven Stafrom of Bridgeport did press Claims Commissioner Robert Shea, Jr. to explain how and why certain claimants were legally eligible for these awards.
Fishbein pointed to a state law — amended last year — that details exactly who is eligible for a wrongful incarceration award.
In order to be eligible for such an award, he said, a person’s conviction had to have been vacated or reversed on “grounds of innocence or grounds consistent with innocence” or on grounds that a state actor, like a police officer or prosecutor, engaged in “malfeasance or serious misconduct” in that person’s case.
Fishbein questioned whether or not Carmon qualifies for a wrongful incarceration award from the state based on these criteria. He cited state Judge Jon Alander’s decision to vacate Carmon’s conviction, in which the judge “expressly says there are no findings of innocence here. There was bad procedure.” Fishbein pressed Shea to explain on what grounds he believed Carmon was eligible.
Shea responded by stating that the attorney general’s office and Carmon’s attorneys mutually agreed that Carmon was eligible for such an award, and had agreed to informally resolve the claim without a hearing. The same was true in Gould’s case.
Stafrom didn’t question the merits of Carmon’s or Gould’s claims for wrongful incarceration awards, but he too pushed the claims commissioners to explain why he believed these cases are eligible for awards if he never held a hearing on their eligibility. Shea again said that the attorney general’s office and the claimants’ attorneys had agreed not to litigate eligibility, and his office was relying on their determination.
Later on during Friday’s hearing, state Deputy Attorney General Eileen Meskill assured the legislators that “we do take a hard look at eligibility under the statute” for each of these cases. She said she’d be happy to provide documentation to the committee explaining why her office believed each claimant on Friday’s agenda was eligible for an award.
In the end, the committee members decided to send Carmon’s and Gould’s proposed awards back to the claims commissioner for him to formally weigh in on whether or not they are eligible for such government funds.
Carmon’s attorney, Doug Lieb, submitted a letter to the state legislators on his client’s behalf in advance of Friday’s hearing. “Mr. Carmon spent nearly 29 years in prison for a murder he did not commit and that another man, unrelated to Mr. Carmon, had credibly taken responsibility for,” he wrote. “Mr. Carmon has demonstrated remarkable resilience notwithstanding his unjust conviction and prolonged incarceration.”
A review by CT Mirror found that, if approved, the new round of compensation will bring the state’s total wrongful-conviction awards to $128.9 million — an average of $5.2 million paid to each of 25 claimants, all but one since 2015.
Five of the eight awards on the agenda Friday are for Black men convicted and imprisoned for murders in New Haven, a city responsible for the biggest share of wrongful conviction awards — about $60 million, including the latest claims. The most recent of the verdicts were returned 25 years ago.
“It would be easy to say, ‘Hey, it wasn’t us.’ But it is troubling to us. It’s troubling that that happened to people in the past,” said New Haven Police Chief Karl Jacobson, who was promoted to chief of police in 2022 after 15 years as a New Haven cop. “And it’s real important that we get it right.”
Changes in procedures and technology have raised the standards for corroborating and recording witness and suspect interviews in their entirety, a check against misleading or leading questions, he said. In some wrongful conviction cases, lawyers alleged witnesses were fed information, shown biased photo arrays of potential suspects, or both.
George Gould and Ronald Taylor were convicted in 1995 of the robbery and murder of a bodega owner in New Haven on the strength of testimony from a single witness, a heroin addict, whose story changed repeatedly. She identified them from a photo array, claiming she followed hints from police.
She complained of leading questions and favors from both police and, later, a defense investigator. The cops, she said, helped her buy heroin.
Gould was sentenced to 80 years and exonerated in 2024, helped by lawyers with the Innocence Project, as well as a review of the case by a Conviction Integrity Unit established by the chief state’s attorney in 2020. Gould is on the agenda Friday for a $6.7 million award. Taylor died of cancer in 2011.
Click here to read a previous story on this proposed compensation deal by CT Mirror’s Mark Pazniokas, who contributed to this story.