By: Erika Strebel, [email protected]//December 15, 2015//
By: Erika Strebel, [email protected]//December 15, 2015//
After a Milwaukee man was wrongfully convicted of murder as a teenager only to be acquitted following five years in prison, his parents are seeking compensation from the state.
Cornelius Reed, now 40, was charged in 1992 as a party to a first-degree intentional homicide in the drive-by shooting of an 18-year-old pregnant woman at the intersection of North and Sherman avenues in Milwaukee. The woman and her fiance were walking when a car approached them and a man fired a sawed-off rifle from the rear passenger window, killing the woman.
Two witnesses identified Cornelius Reed as the shooter, and a jury found him guilty in 1993. He was later sentenced to life in prison.
The case was reopened after Ronnie Watkins, a Wisconsin prison inmate, saw an article about the verdict and wrote to Reed to say that he knew Reed had had nothing do with the drive-by shooting. Watkins pledged to come to court to testify on Reed’s behalf. On the night of the shooting, Watkins said, he had heard his nephew say he had shot the woman. Watkins also said he had helped his nephew hide the gun used in the killing.
The trial court initially declined to reopen the case. An subsequent appeal, though, led to the decision’s being overturned. Reed was later retried and acquitted by a jury.
Reed’s parents – Shirley Reed and Gaylord Smith – appeared before state officials on Tuesday to seek the maximum amount of compensation the state could provide for the wrongful incarceration. The State Claims Board, which is authorized to issue that sort of compensation, is unlikely to rule on the request until next year.
Standing in opposition to Reed’s parents, representatives of the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s office called on state officials to not grant the request for compensation. Prosecutors do not believe Watkins’ information is credible, said Assistant District Attorney Paul Tiffin at Tuesday’s hearing.
Also, he said, Reed’s case is not an example of an innocent conviction because there is no evidence – such as DNA or a victim’s recanting testimony – that absolved Reed of the crime he had been accused of. A jury’s acquittal, Tiffin said, simply means that the prosecutor had not met his burden of persuasion — not that Reed was innocent.
By the time Cornelius was retried and found not guilty, he had spent five years in prison — having been behind bars from the time he was 15 until he was 21.
“When he came home he was rebellious. He didn’t trust the system,” Reed’s mother, Shirley, said on Tuesday. “I’m not saying he was an angel. He always had problems in school, but (when he came home) he was just all messed up.”
Cornelius is now serving time at Waupun Correctional Institution for robbery. He has 18 more months left on his sentence and has been working with young inmates to help make sure they “don’t come out with a chip on their shoulder like he did,” said Reed’s attorney, Mark Tishberg.
The family members and Tishberg asked the state Claims Board to approve the maximum amount of compensation permitted under current law, plus any additional money that would be allowed were the maximum raised in way now being called for by lawmakers.
Wisconsin currently offers the wrongly convicted $5,000 for every year of wrongful incarceration and caps the total that can be paid out at $25,000. A bill now before lawmakers would instead let exonerees collect $50,000 for every year they had spent behind bars. Total payouts would be initially capped at $1 million – an amount that would be adjusted every fives years in accordance with inflation. Exonorees also could participate in the state’s health insurance program for up to a decade at their own expense and would get access to transitional services, such as job training and housing.
A public hearing on the bill is scheduled to take place Wednesday.