The Ohio Innocence Project, or OIP, is a nonprofit dedicated to helping wrongfully convicted individuals in Ohio. Founded in 2003 and based at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, the OPI works to identify and exonerate those convicted of crimes they did not commit.
Tara Rosnell, OIP's Board of Advocates chair, spoke with WYSO Community Voices Producer Mary Evans. Excerpts from that conversation are below.
The following transcript is lightly edited for length and clarity.
Tara Rosnell: I am an attorney. I retired from my job at Procter & Gamble, where I worked for 28 years as a corporate attorney. I am a board member of the Ohio Innocence Project and do some pro-bono legal work for them.
Mary Evans: Thank you so much for retiring and still fighting the good fight.
I was unaware of the exoneration process before working on this season of ReEntry Stories.
Rosnell: Yes. So I can explain a little bit of that. The first step in an exoneration, when you believe that a client is innocent, is that there has to be new evidence. So, it has to be something beyond what was presented at trial or even what was available at trial. It can be difficult. Oftentimes, we're working many years after the crime has occurred. So it can be difficult just because of the passage of time. Then, if we prevail, we prevail in overturning the original verdict. So, if you have successfully overturned that verdict, then the state can retry that person. Then, that new evidence comes into play. So if you have found a new witness, or you have DNA evidence now, or you have found evidence of official misconduct, like maybe something was hidden and not turned over, then that new evidence would become part of the new case. They don't always retry the person, but sometimes they do. And again, it's a matter of going through another trial, which is very difficult for our clients to have to endure because they have such mistrust of the judicial system. And then, if they're cleared, then there's a separate step for actually declaring innocence and being able to get compensation. And so compensation is then just kind of the last phase.
"There is no way to compensate somebody for the loss that they have endured."Tara Rosnell
Evans: And the compensation piece is, you know, to me, mind-blowing because if I was wrongfully convicted, I don't think that there is a price for each day that I did spend away from my family, away from success and growth that could have potentially, you know, took my life in a whole different direction. How do they come up with the specific number?
Rosnell: First of all, I should mention that OIP actually does not handle the compensation. Our mission is to free innocent people.
But to answer your question, there's kind of two ways that people are compensated. One is based on the amount of time that they served. And there's kind of a formula that they put together in terms of what that person's earning potential would have been, etc. And then there's a separate process for if there was official misconduct in the case. And that's kind of a whole different process and different formula. So it can be very different. But what you said at the outset is very true. I mean, in fact, there is no way to compensate somebody for the loss that they have endured. One thing that you'll really hear our exonerees talking about is there's no way to replace those years of their lives when they would have been getting started in their careers when they would have been getting married or having children or raising their children if they already have children and in no way actually compensates them for the harm that they had endured.
Support for ReEntry Stories comes from The Montgomery County Office of Reentry and the Eichelberger Center for Community Voices at WYSO.
