COMPENSATION FOR DEDGE STILL POSSIBLE

This case was noted previously here on May 11th.

Wilton Dedge returned to the same courthouse Friday where two separate juries convicted him of a 1981 rape he didn't commit. This time, he asked that a third jury decide just how much those 22 lost years are worth. In a lawsuit filed in Brevard Circuit Court against the state of Florida and its Department of Corrections, attorneys said Dedge and his parents should be fairly compensated for the time he spent behind bars. "When a person offends against the laws of the state, he must 'pay his debt to society' because he was taken from society by misconduct," the suit states. "Conversely, when a person is entirely innocent of wrongdoing and is imprisoned, it is society that owes the debt."


The 22-page lawsuit does not specify a dollar amount. "Let a jury decide," said attorney Sandy D'Alemberte, a former president of Florida State University who took on Dedge's case for free. "Let them understand what he experienced and how it wiped out his parents' entire retirement account."


Dedge, 43, was finally freed last year when DNA evidence proved his innocence. State prosecutors immediately released him from custody, later apologized and said he deserved to be compensated. Dozens of state legislators agreed. But when the legislative session ended May 6, Dedge walked away with nothing because the Senate and the House failed to agree on an amount. "This is an American tragedy what happened to the Dedge family," Sen. Mike Haridopolos, R-Melbourne, said Friday. "Since we failed to do the right work in the Legislature, I support this [lawsuit]." Haridopolos, who pushed for a bill that the Senate passed and would have allowed Dedge and others like him to seek up to $5 million, vowed to introduce another bill next year.


According to the suit, Dedge's constitutional rights to liberty, to pursue happiness and to find a job were taken away from him by the wrongful conviction. "He was not permitted to start a family, acquire property, build a retirement fund, visit with friends or relatives, exercise his political and social rights," the suit says. "For more than 22 years, he was exposed to the severe psychological stress of imprisonment." At times, he was threatened and forced to live in isolation for his own protection, his attorney said.


Praised by officials as a model inmate, Dedge worked for the state for all those years without payment. His parents, Gary and Mary Dedge, spent their retirement and borrowed money to pay for his defense. While in prison, Dedge lost his grandparents and a couple of close friends. "You can't put a price on friendship, on family, on people I'll never see again," Dedge said Friday.


His confinement was "all the more cruel," D'Alemberte said, because the state refused to allow Dedge to demonstrate his innocence through DNA testing. If the state had agreed when it was first sought in 1988, the suit says, it would have saved Dedge from "16 additional years in prison, saved the state from the expense of imprisoning an innocent man and the expense of extensive litigation the state undertook to prevent the testing."


Report here


(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today)