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Part Four Doing Justice When we conceived of this project in 2001, little attention had been given to life after exoneration, and few resources were available to assist exonerees in rebuilding their lives. Only fifteen states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government had established compensation statutes, and those had very limited provisions.1 Award amounts were simply token gestures, not intended to provide substantive relief, and statutes provided no services, such as assistance with housing, employment, or medical care.2 At that time, no nonprofit organizations existed to help exonerees after release, and they were excluded from services provided to parolees.3 By the time of our first interview, with Charles Fain in 2003, little had changed. Sixteen states had compensation statutes and one state had amended their earlier version.4 The first organization dedicated to assisting exonerees with their reintegration was established in 2003 when the Life After Exoneration Program opened in Berkeley, California. The paltry aid available to exonerees is captured in their remarks about their postrelease needs and the inadequate assistance they received. Our eighteen participants were released prior to 2004, and twelve were released in or before 2001, when very little was in place to address their needs. Their experiences reveal a deep and abiding frustration, and even hostility, regarding what they perceive as their invisibility to a system that has so damaged their lives. They are angry over the state’s refusal to help them or recognize that they are in need of help. Ultimately, our participants are angry about the state’s intransigence to acknowledging them as people who have been wronged and refusal to take responsibility for their wrongful convictions. Thus, our participants feel forgotten and abandoned by a government that they believe destroyed their lives, not once but twice: first by wrongly convicting and sentencing them to P death for crimes they did not commit, and second by failing to “own” the injustice or provide appropriate remedies. Since our first interview in 2003, the issue of aftermath has received more attention. To date (2011), twenty-seven states have passed compensation statutes, ten of which include social service assistance.5 Ten organizations in the United States assist exonerees after their release from prison.6 While this certainly is progress, almost half of states still provide no statutory assistance at all, and most states have no organization in place to assist with reintegration. However, we believe that this increased attention has resulted in an interesting shift in public perception. Ten years ago, few were even aware of the struggles faced by exonerees; now most think that all exonerees receive large compensation packages upon release, which is not true.7 Of our eighteen participants, only two received compensation via statutory provisions. The other six received financial relief only after protracted and costly legal battles with the state, and on average they did not receive any financial award for four years after release. Ten received nothing at all (see table 3.1 in chapter 3). Thus, it appears that total inattention has been replaced by the myth of immediate, substantive financial relief. Both misperceptions are problematic : they render invisible the complex, multidimensional needs exonerees face that remain unmet. Chapter 11 begins with an overview of assistance currently available to exonerees and discussion of how this has shifted over time. But the chapter focuses primarily on exonerees’ reflections on what they got from the state upon release as opposed to what they needed from the state to help them rebuild their lives. In it, their frustration over being abandoned is obvious. Chapter 12 provides our vision for what appropriate relief and redress could look like, drawing primarily from exonerees’ views, limited discussions and models provided in the literature , and our own personal experience with exonerees. As Judith Herman (1997, 70) notes about trauma survivors, “Once it is publicly recognized that a person has been harmed, the community must take action to assign responsibility for the harm and to repair the injury. These two responses—recognition and restitution—are necessary to rebuild the survivor’s sense of order and justice.” If these are the two responses essential for recovery and reintegration, we still have a long way to go. D o i n g J u s t i c e 194 ...

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