After 43 years in prison on a wrongful conviction, Kevin Strickland is getting no restitution. He's not alone.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — At 5-foot-5 and 135 pounds, Kevin Strickland walked into prison in 1979 at 19 frightened but with the hope he would one day be cleared of killing three people.
That hope was realized 43 years later. Now 62 and exonerated, Strickland rolled out of Western Missouri Correctional Center two days before Thanksgiving in a wheelchair, stricken with nerve problems and regret over years he lost.
Missouri law entitles Strickland, of Kansas City, to nothing in recognition of his wrongful imprisonment. No money, job training, health or other benefits, exposing wide gaps across the country in state restitution laws that don't fit neatly along political divisions.
Missouri law allows only those who prove their innocence "solely" by DNA testing to be compensated, at about $36,000 per year. It is the only law in the country with such a narrow, DNA-based reading of what constitutes innocence.
Since Strickland was freed based on the recantation of witness statements, he left prison in Cameron, Missouri, with zero from the state.
"It's not fair," Strickland said in a December interview. "It's not just me. Society knows that. I'm just one in a million that knows the law needs to be changed."
Donations from a GoFundMe mean Strickland won't be left penniless, but his attorneys say the government should be obliged to compensate an individual for the wrong it committed.
More: Missouri man exonerated in 1979 killings, releasing him from prison after 4 decades
Strickland is among about 2,900 now-exonerated men and women who were sent to prison, often for decades, by miscarriages of justice, whether due to simple mistakes or corruption by police or prosecutors, according to a registry dating to 1989.
In total, they lost 26,500 years of their lives to wrongful imprisonment, costing the government — local, state and federal — some $3 billion, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
More than half of them got nothing at all in compensation from the government, according to the registry.
Laws in these 13 states require no recompense for the wrongly imprisoned: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming.
The 37 other states, the federal government and Washington, D.C., do have laws enabling restitution upon release as well as other social or medical services in some states.
Though there is a federal compensation law, some 95% of wrongful convictions happen in state court.
Strickland's release required new law, capped long battle with state AG
At 18, Kevin Strickland was dreaming of going into the military for four or five years, continuing his education and doing some traveling.
"I wasn't doing anything to be in prison," he said.
But on April 25, 1978, three people were slain at a Kansas City house. Strickland was picked up, and a woman injured in the shooting identified him as one of the assailants. Years later, the woman would write to the Midwest Innocence Project, saying she was mistaken in her identification.
Additionally, two other men confessed to the crime and said that Strickland was not involved.
Despite scant evidence, he was convicted by an all-white jury the next year. The Midwest Innocence Project took up his case in 2018, and the Jackson County prosecutor, Democrat Jean Peters Baker, found in early 2021 that there was no justification for Strickland's conviction.
That began a long, multi-court battle with the Missouri Attorney General’s Office over whether state law allowed Baker to seek to overturn Strickland's conviction.
A Missouri law signed this year gave Strickland, Baker and his attorneys a new route.
The law allowed for claims of innocence to be brought back to circuit court, where Strickland was exonerated in late November.
Exonerated millionaires: 'They're the real outliers'
Thinking on the nearly 43 years he spent behind bars, Strickland said "it never crossed my mind" that he would be detained so long.
His immediate hopes are humble: see a therapist, and maybe visit states beyond Missouri. He's visited only one other state — Kansas — a few miles across State Line Road from where he lived at the time of the 1978 killings.
He will have significant funding for that. In the days since his release by a circuit court judge Nov. 23, more than $1.7 million has been raised for Strickland through a GoFundMe.
"This is a government responsibility, and it's heartbreaking that the public feels the need to step in," Rebecca Brown, policy director of the Innocence Project, said. "But that is just a reflection of the fact that there is no law that would provide for Mr. Strickland."
Strickland's attorney, Tricia Rojo Bushnell, head of the Midwest Innocence Project, said there's no price tag that can be placed on losing decades of freedom.
“You could never compensate someone for missing 43 years of their life,” she said. “What is the value of being there for your child as they grow up? Having a career, having a relationship and getting married and being there when your mother dies? There's nothing that will ever compensate him for that … $1.7 million is just nothing compared to what he has lost.”
Some of the wrongfully convicted do get government payouts.
Two North Carolina half-brothers, Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, were cleared in 2014 of the 1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. The brothers had spent 31 years behind bars and won a $75 million civil settlement — the largest combined settlement in U.S. history, as each got $1 million for every year incarcerated, plus some.
Their case won headlines, but high-dollar payments are not the norm, said Rob Warden, co-founder of the exoneration registry. He's a law professor emeritus at Northwestern University, where he helped found the Center on Wrongful Convictions. "People see those headlines and they think that 'Hey, everybody is getting those.' But really, almost nobody is. They're the real outliers."
Texas 'really did it right'
At the federal level, people who are exonerated get up to $50,000 a year for every year they were unjustly imprisoned. U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, a Democrat from California, introduced a bill in June that would account for inflation and increase the amount by 40% to a baseline of $70,000 per year — the first hike in nearly 20 years.
In the states, Texas provides for a lump sum of $80,000 times the number of years served — plus an annual annuity of $80,000 for the rest of an exonerated person's life, Brown said.
Additionally, those wrongly convicted in Texas receive educational aid, child support arrears and other needed social services.
"They really did it right," Brown said. "Texas has a phenomenal model."
Washington, D.C., provides $200,000 a year, while Vermont provides 10 years in the state's medical plan, although exonerated individuals there must file a claim within three years of being cleared in court to receive compensation between $30,000 and $60,000 for every year served.
Iowa and Wisconsin have some of the lowest payouts, with Iowa giving $18,250 per year and Wisconsin providing just $5,000 per year, with a cap at $25,000.
The worst state with an existing law, according to Brown? Missouri, followed closely by New Jersey.
"It’s barely a law," she said of Missouri's restitution allowance. In New Jersey, those who plead guilty — which make up the majority of this country's cases that result in jail or prison time — do not qualify for any compensation. Yet those who give false confessions do.
"Confessors are not barred, but people who plead are — so that's an example of another law that needs revisiting," Brown said.
'Over the border, in Kansas, he would be eligible for $65,000 per year'
Next door to Missouri, Kansas has a robust restitution law.
“There are certainly models to look to from around the country, including from very conservative states,” Brown said. "If Mr. Strickland had been convicted over the border, in Kansas, he would be eligible for $65,000 per year.”
According to the Innocence Project, Kansas also provides for $25,000 for each year a person wrongfully served on parole, probation or the sex offender registry.
Kansas law additionally provides for housing and tuition assistance, as well as counseling, covers people under the state’s health care program and offers financial literacy training.
"There are all sorts of creative ways for exonerated folks to receive a range of services," Brown said. "But to be clear, none of those services should ever supplant monetary compensation. That really is what people need to get started again, not just to survive, but to set people up to thrive."
Many of the exonerations have come with the advent of DNA technology and testing in the 1990s, the start of innocence projects and the creation of conviction integrity units by states and local prosecutor's offices.
"Nobody ever collected under the statutes until DNA came along in the 1990s, and then the statutes were so out of date that they would give like $2,500 a year for every year that was spent" behind bars, Warden said. "Nobody really bothered to ever apply. But then people figured out that they could file an action under the Civil Rights Act, and those things became very lucrative for the few people who could meet the criteria."
'Errors happen in the system,' but system stands in way of large payouts
Strickland could find recourse through civil courts, but that is an often multiyear process. Strickland would have show that misconduct by police, prosecutors or the courts resulted in his conviction and amounted to a civil rights violation.
"To sustain an action under (the Civil Rights Act), you've got to basically establish that there was no probable cause for the police" to arrest a person in the first place, Warden said.
And in the vast majority of cases, "there was probable cause," Warden said. "They had a witness or somebody told them" what happened. Mistakes by witnesses, police and prosecutors as well as the sway weak evidence can have on a jury all make it difficult to prove there was no cause for law enforcement to pursue the case.
"When you think about wrongful convictions, you're thinking of the cattle prods, the third degree and all this," misconduct or brutality, Brown said. "Sometimes police are doing their jobs and they think they have the right guy but they just are making a mistake somewhere along the line. … Errors happen in the system."
Which is the exact point of restitution laws, she said. "The purpose of having a compensation law is that the harm is made right regardless of whether there was fault."
While some states, like Missouri, offer restitution for people cleared through DNA testing, such testing accounts for 15% or less of wrongful convictions being overturned, according to the Innocence Project.
Missouri Rep. Mark A. Sharp, a Kansas City Democrat, is working to change his state's law to broaden who qualifies for restitution.
"Since 1991, Missouri has had 51 people exonerated, and only 15 people have been exonerated through a DNA test," he said. "So we want to try and make this a little more fair and more equal."
Similar bills including retroactivity and trying to increase the amount paid out to those cleared through DNA testing have previously failed in the Republican-led Missouri General Assembly.
Whatever he may end up getting, Strickland said he will never get back his lost years.
"I can never recapture those 43 years," Strickland said, while shuffling with his attorney between interviews with media outlets. "I thought my life was over."
Eric Ferkenhoff is the Midwest criminal justice reporter for USA Today Network.