Greg Bright spent 27.5 years in prison before being exonerated in 2003. After proving his factual innocence, he began receiving wrongful conviction compensation from the state of Louisiana.
Bright received a $190,000 lump-sum compensation payment in 2011, followed by annual payments as Louisiana’s wrongful-conviction compensation law changed over the years. Because his award was made under earlier versions of the law, his compensation followed a different schedule than the current system.
He is now nearing the state’s $400,000 lifetime compensation cap; his payments are scheduled to end in September.
“I bought a house and everything,” said Bright, whose prime wage-earning years were largely spent in prison: he was 22 years old when he was given a life sentence in 1976 and almost 50 when he walked out of the Louisiana State Penitentiary.
His story illustrates the paradox created by the state of Louisiana, which incarcerates more people per capita than anywhere in the nation, too many of them wrongfully — and then debates how much to pay exonerated people.
New Orleans, where Bright was raised, has the highest per capita rates of wrongful convictions in the nation, at a rate that is nearly 10 times the national average, according to data from Innocence & Justice Louisiana.
When compared with other states, Louisiana has the second highest rate of known wrongful convictions in the nation, according to Innocence & Justice, which describes the state as “a hotbed of wrongful conviction.” It also takes longer to uncover bad convictions here. Of the exonerees in Louisiana, 30% have spent more than 25 years in prison, compared to a national average of 8%.
What is just?
So, what is fair compensation for all those years lost?
During this year’s legislative session, officials asked that very question, after Sen. Gerald Boudreaux (D-Lafayette) introduced Senate Bill 125.
Boudreaux’s legislation, which raised the lifetime wrongful-conviction compensation cap from $400,000 to $600,000 and extended payouts from 10 to 15 years, sailed through both houses, receiving unanimous support. Ultimately, it was about fairness, Boudreaux said. “It addressed a simple principle: when innocent people lose decades of their lives due to wrongful convictions, our state has a responsibility to do what it can to make things right.”
Presenting the bill in the House, Rep. Jerome Zeringue (R-Houma) outlined the process people must go through before receiving compensation. “You have to go before a judge, present all the evidence to a new judge, who decides if you really didn’t do the crime,” Zeringue said. “Only a few dozen people in Louisiana have ever been able to prove this.”
His House colleague, Rep. Charles Owen (R-Rosepine) also urged lawmakers to remember people who spent decades in prison before being exonerated. “These are not parole situations. These are not pardons. These are people who have been found factually innocent,” Owen said. “When the government makes a mistake, it is incumbent upon itself to correct the mistake.”
But Gov. Jeff Landry rejected the bill. “Before increasing payouts again, the State should first ensure that the process is fair, accountable, and protected against abuse,” Landry wrote in his veto message. His opposition to exoneree payments dates back to his days as attorney general, when he objected to compensation in a high proportion of cases – though he ultimately lost many of those cases.
Critics say that the governor seems to lack a basic understanding of the process. Compensation is available only to people who can meet a high bar of proof: that they are factually innocent, according to Meredith Angelson, an attorney with Innocence & Justice Louisiana. “It’s not just a showing of an unfair trial, but a demonstration of actual innocence,” she said.
Angelson and her colleagues at Innocence & Justice Louisiana view their clients as victims of the state’s criminal-justice system. “We strongly believe in their right to receive compensation for the time that was taken from them,” she said.
As it stands now, Louisiana law only accounts for about half of the time that Louisiana exonerees have served wrongly in prison, she noted. Senate Bill 125 would have been “a moderate increase” in the number of years that would have been covered, to make the law more fair.
To Bright, earning exoneree status was meaningful in itself. “I think I was more excited about the recognition. Someone had recognized these travesties that happened,” he said.
The money was an added plus, of course. And now the governor’s veto leaves Greg Bright and other exonerees wondering about their futures.
Bright: free for 23 years after 27 years spent in prison
Bright sometimes tells people that he spent more time in Angola than he has in the free world.
He was arrested in 1975 for murder. A 15-year-old, Eliot Porter, had been killed in the Calliope housing development, shot twice in the head. Bright, then 20, was arrested along with Earl Truvia, whom he’d never met before. They were convicted of second-degree murder and convicted the following year. Prosecutors presented no physical evidence linking him or his co-defendant to the crime. The case rested on the testimony of a single witness, who said she had seen Bright and Truvia go around the corner with Porter and return without him.
More than two decades later, a judge found that prosecutors had withheld evidence of other suspects, that lawyers hadn’t investigated Bright’s and Truvia’s alibis, and that the witness was a paid informant who had used multiple aliases, given different dates of birth and had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, which caused hallucinations that she addressed by self-medicating with heroin. Bright’s attorneys from the Innocence Project New Orleans (now Innocence & Justice Louisiana) also showed that the witness could not have seen the three men from the window as she’d testified.
The Louisiana Supreme Court upheld the judge’s ruling and in 2003, the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office dismissed the charges. That left Bright free of the penitentiary. Though he had taught himself to read and write while inside Angola – the Innocence Project built its case on his legal pleadings – he lacked a trade or a consistent way to make a living.
For years, Bright worked odd jobs. After his release, Bright moved to Mississippi, where he worked as a cook at a restaurant. When he returned to New Orleans, he found work grooming horses at the City Park stables. He spent about four years doing demolition work on French Quarter hotels before landing a speaking part in the movie 12 Years a Slave. He also worked with writer Lara Naughton to create Never Fight a Shark in the Water, a one-man play about his life that he performed himself.
“In prison, I worked, and I worked hard,” he said, recalling his labors, in a segment of his one-man play: “I was in a work crew called Line 5. We mostly dug ditches. We tilled the land, pulled the trees down, threw that diesel on it, and burned off both sides of the ditch clear down to the dirt. We were out there in blistering heat or bitter cold and rain. Didn’t matter; we had to work.”
Now at age 70, Bright fixes bicycles and sells paintings that he creates, in his home, which is like a mini art studio. “I cherish my house. And it’s something I can say is actually mine,” he said.
He is extremely frugal; he doesn’t spend much money. But he doesn’t make enough to support daily living expenses. “So I’m on the verge of selling it,” he said. “It’s very very difficult for me.”
He is perplexed by Louisiana politics.
He saw the compensation bill move easily through the legislature, with overwhelming votes in favor. “They agreed,” he said. “The majority favored it. To veto it doesn’t make sense to me.”
To help 10 of its exonerees, including Greg Bright, who will lose compensation almost immediately because of the governor’s veto, Innocence & Justice Louisiana launched this GoFundMe.
