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Wrongly Imprisoned NY Man Gets Damages Trial

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Nov 21, 2008 1:32 pm US/Eastern

Wrongly Imprisoned NY Man Gets Damages Trial

SYRACUSE, N.Y. (AP) ―

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A man exonerated of murder after wrongly serving 15 years in prison will get a trial to determine how much the state should pay him in compensation.

State Court of Claims Judge Nicholas Midey Jr. found the state liable for damages in the unjust conviction and imprisonment of Roy Arthur Brown.

Midey set Dec. 8 for a trial in Syracuse to determine the monetary award to Brown.

Brown sued the state in May 2007 seeking $5 million for his wrongful imprisonment.

He was sentenced to 25 years to life in state prison after he was convicted in 1992 of second-degree murder in Sabina Kulakowski's death.

Brown served 15 years before the conviction was overturned in January 2007 after DNA evidence linking another man to the crime.

Barry Bench committed suicide in 2003, but authorities verified it was his DNA on the T-shirt Kulakowski was wearing when she was killed.

"I've been released from prison for almost two years now," Brown told The Post-Standard of Syracuse. "I'm still waiting for justice. I think in this court I'm going to get an honest judge, and he's going to compensate me fairly, whatever he thinks is fair."

However, Brown added that no amount of money could make up for the years he lost in prison.

"Money ain't going to heal anything," he said.

Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office was reviewing the decision and had no immediate comment, said spokesman John Milgrim.

In his decision, Midey said there were four elements required for a person pursuing such a lawsuit against the state: The person has to have been convicted of a crime and served all or part of a sentence; the conviction was vacated and the indictment dismissed; the person did not commit any of the acts charged in the indictment; and the person did not cause his conviction by his own action.

Midey noted the first two elements were uncontested, but the state challenged the last two.

As for whether Brown committed any of the criminal acts charged in the indictment, the state asked Midey to consider a July 1993 affidavit from a woman who claimed she saw Brown in Auburn near the scene of the murder at the time of the crime.

Midey noted that affidavit was made more than two years after the murder and about a year and a half after Brown was convicted. Authorities did nothing to corroborate the information, which was directly contradicted by trial testimony about Brown's whereabouts at the time of the murder, the judge wrote.

As for causing his own conviction, the state asked Midey to consider a confession Brown reportedly made to a jailhouse informant in July 1991.

However, the judge noted that Brown has steadfastly denied making any such confession, adding that it, too, was "uncorroborated and unreliable."

Brown "has established by clear and convincing evidence ... there are no issues of fact which have been raised by the state that would require a trial as to liability," Midey wrote.

When the case does go to trial, Brown's lawyers said they would try to prove the state had many opportunities to correct Brown's wrongful conviction but chose not to.

"We're talking how these errors impacted Roy Brown," said Katy Karlovitz, Brown's lawyer. "He experienced a number of additional years of incarceration after it could have been corrected."