The man who served the US’s longest wrongful imprisonment for a 1974 murder he has always denied committing has now won a rare ruling declaring him to be actually innocent of the crime.
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Glynn Simmons’s murder conviction was dismissed in July after a judge in Oklahoma determined that prosecutors withheld some evidence in the case, including a police report that documented how a witness may have identified alternate suspects. The 71-year-old was freed from prison, and state prosecutors later said they would not retry him in the case because there was no longer any physical evidence.
Nonetheless, despite all of that, authorities had stopped short of formally recognizing that Simmons had not actually been involved in the killing that sent him away to prison for more than 48 years. The implication was that Simmons was considered wrongfully imprisoned because of serious violations of legal procedure rather than because he was innocent.
Simmons subsequently applied for what is known as a finding of actual innocence, and the Oklahoma state judge Amy Palumbo granted it on Tuesday.
“The offense for which Mr Simmons was convicted, sentenced and imprisoned … was not committed by Mr Simmons,” the ruling said.
Palumbo’s finding of actual innocence for Simmons is relatively uncommon in the US justice system, where criminal trials aim to determine whether or not defendants have been proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Defendants do not have to prove themselves innocent to be found not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
The ruling from Palumbo makes Simmons eligible for up to $175,000 in wrongful conviction compensation from the state. Simmons’s attorney, Joe Norwood, told the Associated Press on Wednesday that the ruling also facilitates the filing of a federal lawsuit that would seek damages against the law enforcement and government entities involved in his client’s prosecution, though the process could take years.
For now, Norwood said to the AP, Simmons is financially supporting himself through donations to an online GoFundMe campaign, all while he undergoes treatment for cancer that was not discovered until after his release from prison.
“That’s literally how the man is surviving right now, paying rent, buying food,” Norwood said to the AP, referring to the GoFundMe page. “Getting him compensation – and getting compensation is not for sure – is in the future, and he has to sustain himself now.”
Simmons had been convicted of the December 1974 murder of a woman named Carolyn Sue Rogers, who was shot to death during a liquor store robbery in Edmond, Oklahoma. He has always said he was in Louisiana at the time of Rogers’s killing.
But in 1975, he and his co-defendant Don Roberts were both found guilty of murder, and they were initially sentenced to death.
The death sentences for Simmons and Roberts were reduced to life imprisonment in 1977 after key capital punishment-related rulings from the US supreme court.
Roberts was granted parole in 2008. Yet Simmons remained imprisoned until Palumbo freed him in July.
Simmons was imprisoned for 48 years, one month and 18 days, making him the longest incarcerated person in the US to then be exonerated, data from the National Registry of Exonerations shows.
Norwood said Oklahoma stole from Simmons “the prime of his work life”. Simmons “had 50 years stolen from him,” Norwood added, according to USA Today. “He could have been getting experiences, developing skills. That was taken from him, by no fault of his own, by other people.”
USA Today reported that Simmons reacted to Palumbo’s ruling on Tuesday by saying: “This is the day we’ve been waiting on for a long, long time.
“We can say justice was done today, finally, and I’m happy.”
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