By S.P. Sullivan
nj.com
TRENTON, N.J. - Taron Hill walked out of prison a year ago an innocent man.
Last week, he stood outside the Statehouse annex in Trenton with a megaphone, wearing a T-shirt that said “I am a rare one.”
Hill is a rare one.
“it took them two years to exonerate me,” Hill said in an interview. “I later learned that was quick.”
In 2019, New Jersey set up an ambitious, first-of-its kind statewide conviction review unit. But three years later, Hill is the only prisoner freed under the new system. Th unit, in its first major case, said the evidence of Hill’s guilt collapsed under scrutiny. Hill had been convicted of killing two people in Camden in 2004 and was sentenced to 60 years,
Court records and data from the state shows New Jersey is likely undercounting its population of wrongly convicted inmates.
The Conviction Review Unit, run by former prosecutor and judge Carolyn Murray, found that a flawed eyewitness identification and two lying jailhouse informants led to Hill spending 16 years behind bars.
They released him last year.
Advocates say there are many other innocent people languishing behind bars.
More than 60 people gathered in Trenton last week to call attention to the issue in the Garden State and demand New Jersey step up its investigations into inmates who say they are wrongly convicted. They argue the state needs to do more.
The state Attorney General’s Office, which oversees wrongful conviction claims, says such cases are complicated and can take years to sort out.
Advocates for the wrongly convicted say it’s not entirely the attorney general’s fault. There has been a global pandemic and a critical shortage of judges in New Jersey, both of which nearly ground court proceedings to a halt. Also, it can take years to run through the maze of appeals in the court system that New Jersey prisoners face.
But the costs of letting wrongly convicted people languish behind bars are significant.
“It’s not just us going through the hardship and the pain and suffering,” Hill said. “It’s our families. We got kids.”
When innocent people are released from prison, studies show, they can encounter difficulty readjusting to society and need additional help not provided for by laws meant to help other released prisoners adjust to society.
Many wrongly convicted prisoners in New Jersey have things in common. The vast majority of those who are appealing their convictions are Black or Hispanic and may not be able to afford private lawyers to mount a robust legal defense, advocates note.
Additionally, some past practices that may have been used to get convictions such as unrecorded, forced confessions; the use of jailhouse informants; or lone eyewitness identification have since been banned or restricted in New Jersey.
A spokesman for acting state Attorney General Matthew Platkin said in a statement that the office is “committed to ensuring that our criminal justice system operates fairly and justly for all individuals, and the unit is committed to resolving and remedying any wrongful criminal conviction.”
The most conservative estimates say just 1 percent of New Jersey jail and prison inmates may have been wrongly accused, a figure that would suggest New Jersey could have more than 200 innocent inmates languishing behind bars. Other estimates say as many as one out of 10 prisoners may be wrongly convicted. The government does not reliably track such data.
“It’s not just one percent of innocent people in prison” said Justin Bonus, Hilll’s attorney, who represents other prisoners who claim they were wrongly convicted, citing an estimate from New Jersey’s conviction review unit.
“That’s fictional.”
Data requested by NJ Advance Media from the state Attorney General’s Office shows that since the Conviction Review Unit was created in 2019, it has received 543 submissions seeking help, according to the the first public accounting of the Conviction Review Unit’s work.
Among those cases, 94 were deemed not relevant and 449 were moved to the screening process, the data shows. Among those cases, 306 “are at various stages of being screened,” authorities said.
Meanwhile, the state closed 119 cases for lack of jurisdiction, authorities said.
Out of those cases, Taron Hill’s led to an exoneration. Another 23 are being actively investigated, authorities said.
Here’s how the conviction review process works: The office is made up of four part-time screening attorneys, who screen cases. Another five full-time attorneys and a supervisor work on cases, though they have unspecified other duties at the AG’s office. Four detectives also work for the office and do other outside work, as well as two detective supervisors, one victim advocate and one head attorney, officials said.
Attorneys and family members who spoke with NJ Advance Media say the conviction review process in New Jersey is opaque and prone to political decisions. They note that the unit has produced very little publicly during its three years of existence and accuse the Murphy administration of slow-walking releases that are politically problematic.
Among the protesters in Trenton last week were family members of what they’ve dubbed the “Salem County 3″ — Ahmar Butler, Antwoine Parsley and Jonathan P. Thomas — who were convicted of a 2008 murder in Salem City. Prosecutors charged the trio in 2011 with shooting a man to death in his home when he answered the door. Family members contend prosecutors relied on faulty evidence to convict them and say the CRU has stonewalled them.
“All my family and I ever wanted was for my brother to have a fair trial,” said Malcolm Butler, one of the defendants’ brothers who said his family was waiting on a response from the conviction review unit.
He called on state investigators to re-examine the case.
Nautica Dennis, an organizer of the rally, said her own father was also wrongly convicted.
She declined to discuss the case of her father, Dewan Dennis, an alleged leader of a Trenton street gang, citing his pending appeal.
But she said she wanted to draw attention to New Jersey’s system for re-examining possible wrongful convictions. The conviction review unit, she noted, only takes on cases after a prisoner has exhausted every legal avenue, a process that can take more than a decade given the legal requirements after a person is convicted of a crime.
“Someone has to wait 10 to 15 years to prove their innocence?” she said.
“You and I both know this is insane.”