Legislators again seek to reimburse wrongly convicted man

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After last year’s failed attempt, a new Senate bill again seeks to take money from the state’s general fund to pay a Milwaukee man who spent 23 years behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit.

The Senate bill, sponsored by Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, proposes that $90,000 be paid to Robert Stinson, 48, who was convicted of first-degree intentional homicide in 1984 after 63-year-old Ione Cychosz was found beaten to death in an alley near her home. Her body was covered in human bite marks.

During Stinson’s trial in 1984, the testimony ignored the fact that Stinson was missing a tooth where the bite marks indicated a tooth should be, and he had an intact one where the perpetrator didn’t.

His conviction was vacated in January 2009, due in large part to work by the University of Wisconsin’s Law School’s Wisconsin Innocence Project, and the charge was dropped about six months later.

Stinson asked the state claims board for $129,000, or $5,000 for each of the 23 years he was in prison and an additional $14,000 to reimburse the Wisconsin Innocence Project.

Wisconsin law allows for a maximum of $5,000 per year up to $25,000, although the board can choose to ask the Legislature for more. The board awarded him $25,000 in December 2010, and recommended that state lawmakers give him an additional $90,000.

This is the second time a bill has been proposed to do so. Sen. Lena Taylor, D-Milwaukee, sponsored a bill last year, but it died in the Legislature’s budget committee.

According to the new bill, the payment would release “this state and its state officers, employees, and agents from any further liability” in Stinson’s case.

Another man, Moses Price, confessed to Cychosz’s death in 2009 and later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.

The Associated Press also contributed to this report.