The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission (“Commission” or “ICC”), a first in the nation entity focused on examination of credible claims of wrongful conviction, would be eliminated under the N.C. Senate’s proposed 2025-2027 budget. That move would be a mistake. The annual budget for the Innocence Inquiry Commission is fairly modest – just $1.6 million. That is a small price to pay, considering the tremendous good that has come about through the Innocence Inquiry Commission’s work since its creation in 2006.
To date, sixteen men who were wrongfully convicted have been exonerated through the work of the Innocence Inquiry Commission. Those sixteen men lost a combined 300 years in prison because of their wrongful convictions. Based upon the results achieved, the Innocence Inquiry Commission should be held up as a model for other states to follow – not eliminated.
The mission of the Innocence Inquiry Commission is to identify those who may have been wrongfully convicted in North Carolina and to examine their claims of actual innocence. The Commission is an independent state agency with authority to subpoena evidence and witnesses and to conduct searches for and testing of evidence. Those powers are ones that non-profits and law school innocence groups do not have. For that reason, the Commission can efficiently determine the merits of an individual’s claim of wrongful conviction. Quite simply, the Innocence Inquiry Commission can get answers and access where others may be stonewalled.
Benjamin Rachlin, author of Ghost of the Innocent Man: A True Story of Trial and Redemption, recently wrote an opinion piece titled “Freeing the innocent is worth the small price NC pays for wrongful conviction agency,” which was published in The Charlotte Observer and Raleigh’s News & Observer. Rachlin’s book focused on the Innocence Inquiry Commission’s work in securing the exoneration of Willie Grimes, a man who lost 24 years of his life to a wrongful conviction. Rachlin succinctly summarized the long odds that the wrongfully convicted face in attempting to overturn their convictions, as well as the critical importance of the Commission in righting those wrongs:
As soon as Willie was convicted in 1988, at 41 years old, he filed appeals. He wrote to every local nonprofit. He applied to Prisoner Legal Services. (“While I personally believe you are innocent, that does not mean that I can get you a trial,” staff replied.) He finally filled out an IIC questionnaire in October 2010. In 2011, investigators found fingerprints from the original crime scene. In 2012, three independent judges agreed Willie was innocent by “clear and convincing evidence.” The IIC had taken two years to solve a crime no one else had solved for a quarter century.
Not only did the Commission save Willie Grimes from additional years, and likely death, behind prison walls, but it also identified the actual perpetrator of the crime for which Mr. Grimes had been wrongfully convicted. The case of Willie Grimes is but one of the sixteen exoneration stories credited to the Commission. Its work is vitally important. Wrongful convictions do happen. Innocent men and women are sent to prison. Independent state agencies like the Innocence Inquiry Commission are a necessary backstop to help correct mistakes that inevitably do, and will continue to, occur in the criminal justice system. North Carolina legislators should rethink this misguided effort to eliminate the Innocence Inquiry Commission.
