Laura Glesby File Photo
Adam Carmon (left), one of five wrongfully incarcerated New Haveners on tap to receive $M, per state Judiciary Committee votes on Friday.
Adam Carmon served 28 years in prison as the man convicted of killing a 7‑month-old girl and paralyzing her grandmother, a verdict a judge belatedly concluded was a miscarriage of justice produced by prosecutorial and police misconduct in New Haven.
“I cannot return to you the 28 years of life,” Superior Court Judge Jon Alander told Carmon on June 13, 2023, as he dismissed the case and interrupted an 85-year prison sentence. “I can give you the certainty that this long nightmare is finally over.”
On Friday, the legislature’s Judiciary Committee will be asked to ratify compensation of $7.9 million for Carmon, a sum calculated by the state claims commissioner employing a formula enshrined in state law: multiply the years served by 200 percent of the median family income in Connecticut.
Vernon Horn on WNHH in 2022.
Carmon’s is one of eight wrongful-conviction awards totaling $37.6 million to be reviewed Friday, an unprecedented day in Connecticut’s 18-year-long struggle to atone for sending wrongfully convicted men to prison. Four served at least 23 years; Collectively, they spent 151 years behind bars.
(Click here to read about Carmon’s case and lawsuit against the city; here to read about a judge’s dismissal of Marquis Jackson’s charges in 2019; here to read about Vernon Horn’s ongoing fight for freedom, even after release; here to read about the corrupt-cop case that put Stefon Morant in prison; and here to read about George Gould’s exoneration in 2010.)
A review by The Connecticut Mirror found that 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 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.
The three others recommended for compensation by the state claims commissioner in New Haven murders are: Vernon Horn and Marquis Jackson, each convicted in 2000 in the same robbery-murder, $4.8 million each; and Stefon Morant, $5.8 million.
The estate of Richard Lapointe, who was convicted in 1992 in a murder in Manchester and sentenced to life without parole, was recommended for a $5.9 million award. Exculpatory evidence had been withheld, and his lawyers claimed police had coerced a confession from the mentally disabled suspect.
Lapointe was released in 2015 after 26 years in prison. He died in 2020 after a bout with COVID.
The eighth award of $1.1 million was recommended for Andre Dawson of Norwalk, who served four years in prison on a gun possession conviction overturned in 2021 by the state Supreme Court.
The General Assembly voted unanimously last year to broaden eligibility for compensation to include convictions overturned by “grounds consistent with innocence.” The threshold had been actual innocence or a conviction tainted by malfeasance or serious misconduct by authorities.
It also allowed awards to the estates of deceased claimants, permitting the award to Lapointe’s estate.
The number and amount of awards to be reviewed Friday is unprecedented.
“It’s unprecedented, but not completely unexpected, because we knew there was a backlog of these cases,” said Rep. Steven Stafstrom, D‑Bridgeport, co-chair of Judiciary. “It’s not like this is coming every year.”
Legislators say the new claims commissioner, Robert Shea Jr., is aggressively attacking the backlog of claims that arise from everything ranging from defective highways to wrongful convictions.
Still, Stafstrom acknowledged, it was jolting to get eight major wrongful conviction cases at the same time, the majority from a single jurisdiction. They will be reviewed in a hearing Friday afternoon then most likely accepted in a committee vote.
“I think there definitely will be thematic questions involving the fact there a lot of awards, and they are big,” Stafstrom said. “Part of the reason we do these hearings is not just to approve payment but to look at whether there is legislative action that should be taken to prevent this from happening again.”
“It’s all about due process,” said Rep. Craig Fishbein, R‑Wallingford, the ranking House Republican on Judiciary.
New Haven’s police chief, Jacobson, said some of the changes in police procedures have been dictated by new laws; others were developed internally, represent best practices established by the Connecticut Police Officer Standards and Training Council, or incorporate reforms demanded by a Connecticut Supreme Court decision in 2005 that took note of the changing science around eyewitness testimony.
“Our police department today is a very, very different police department than in the 1990s,” said Justin Elicker, who was elected mayor of New Haven in 2019. “There’s a number of things, a lot of things that we do differently today. We use evidence-based practices to ensure the integrity of witness information and testimony. I think there’s been a lot of research over the years that sometimes witness testimony cannot be accurate.”
David Borden, the justice who authored the opinion, told lawmakers in 2011 that in 75 percent of the first 270 DNA exonerations nationally exposed wrong witness identifications of the accused, demanding reform.
The General Assembly voted unanimously that year to set standards for eyewitness identifications, either in lineups or by photo arrays. As recommended by experts, Jacobson said New Haven police use random, sequential photo arrays in which the police cannot see which photo the witness is viewing.
Lawmakers already had first-hand experience with faulty identifications.
In 2007, prior to any formal compensation program, the General Assembly voted unanimously to award $5 million to James C. Tillman, who was convicted of a rape in Hartford in 1989. The victim identified him from a photo array or lineup.
He served 16 years of a 45-year sentence before DNA testing arranged by the Innocence Project exonerated him and led investigators to the actual rapist.
Shea says other wrongful conviction claims are pending.