09/11/2019
From False Justice:
“The importance of seeking truth before indicting: Yesterday, September 10, 2019, Utah Third District Court Judge Royal I. Hansen vacated the 1997 s*xual assault convictions of Christopher Wickham, who spent 15 years behind bars, and, after his parole in 2014, struggled as a person on the s*x offender list.
The Rocky Mountain Innocence Center picked up the case after Wickham’s parole. Their investigation uncovered exculpatory evidence that prompted the judge’s action without objection from the office of the attorney general. Wickham could not have committed the crimes. At the time hospital medical records indicated he was being treated at a local hospital for injuries following an automobile accident. Another man convicted of the crime also provided a statement that Wickham was not part of the assault.
The state will pay Wickham $615,960 in compensation for his fifteen lost years.
This is the second exoneration for s*xual assault in Utah in the past week. David Hawkins was exonerated last Friday after his sons admitted that, when they were 9 and 13, they made false allegations against their father during a time of divorce.
According to The Salt Lake City Tribune, “Scott Reed, with the attorney general’s office, said these cases are tough to prove — a convicted person must show that there is new evidence that is clearly convincing.
“That is truly rare,” he said, “because our investigators are generally so thorough and so good at what they do. They go out and find everything there is to find.”
The Salt Lake City Tribune article reported just six exonerations in Utah, but the The National Registry of Exonerations details sixteen known exonerations in the state.
Our view: We are grateful that the attorney general’s office did not oppose the judge’s ruling vacating Mr. Wickham’s convictions. However, we hope that the attorney general would also concede that this is an example in which investigators did not “go out and find everything there is to find.” How difficult would it have been to confirm Mr. Wickham’s alibi that he had been admitted into the hospital and therefore could not have committed the crime? We need to increase funding for indigent defense and seek ways to minimize the enormous public expense of appeals by instilling in investigators an awareness of the human tendency of and the risks of rushing to judgment. The public and private resources required in appeals and efforts to fix botched justice could be eliminated by better funding and allocation of human resources up front. Every exoneration underscores the costly lesson that we need to get indictments and verdicts right the first time.”
A Utah man on Tuesday was declared factually innocent of s*xually abusing a 16-year-old girl and will be paid more than $600,000 to make up for the nearly 15 years he spent behind bars for the alleged crime.
