An Oklahoma man who was wrongfully imprisoned for the longest time in US history has now been formally pronounced innocent of a murder he has always maintained he did not commit. Judge Amy Palumbo of Oklahoma County District Court decided in favour of Glynn Simmons, 71, amending the dismissal of his murder conviction with a declaration of “actual innocence” on Tuesday. He had been convicted of the murder of Carolyn Sue Rogers in December 1974, who died after being shot during an Edmond liquor shop robbery. According to The National Registry of Exonerations, he was imprisoned for more than 48 years and was a former death row convict.
Palumbo said she had reviewed decades’ worth of transcripts, reports, testimony and other evidence while preparing to make her decision before granting Simmons’ request. “This Court finds by clear and convincing evidence that the offence for which Mr Simmons was convicted, sentenced and imprisoned in the case at hand, including any lesser included offences, was not committed by Mr Simmons,” Palumbo said. He said Palumbo’s ruling Tuesday was a confirmation of something he had known all along for nearly 50 years: that he was an innocent man. “This is the day we’ve been waiting on for a long, long time. It finally came,” Simmons said. “We can say justice was done today, finally, and I’m happy.”
Simmons was released from jail earlier this year
Joe Norwood, one of Simmons’ attorneys, claimed that the state of Oklahoma unfairly took away a portion of his life. “He had 50 years taken from him, the prime of his working life, when he could have gained experience and developed skills.” That was snatched from him by others, through no fault of his own,” he explained. On Tuesday, Kim T. Cole, a human rights attorney based in Texas, backed Simmons and said the state should be held accountable for “robbing” Simmons of five decades of his life. “It’s too late for justice, at this point, but it’s not too late for retribution,” Cole said in a statement. “Retribution is due.”
Simmons was released from jail earlier this year after Oklahoma County District Attorney Vicki Behenna decided that prosecutors violated Simmons’ right to a fair trial by failing to provide a police lineup report to his trial lawyer. While Behenna chose not to seek a retrial and consented to overturn Simmons’ murder conviction, she was hesitant to call Simmons’ case “exonerated.” Her team had argued that the state could not prove Simmons’ guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” and that an eyewitness would not repudiate her identification of Simmons in 1975.
“The state had a failure of proof — that’s the only reason for the requested dismissal,” Behenna wrote in court filings dated Oct. 18. “This simply is not an ‘actual innocence’ case where DNA was used to exonerate a person or a conviction was obtained using ‘forensic’ evidence that was later debunked, or where an eyewitness recanted their identification, or where the actual perpetrator of the crime confessed to the commission of the crime and the details of that confession were later corroborated by independent evidence.”
He is eligible for up to $175,000 in compensation from the state of Oklahoma for the unjust conviction
The lineup report, according to his attorneys, Joe Norwood and John Coyle, was “powerful innocence evidence” since it proved that the eyewitness, who had survived being wounded in the head during the heist, did not genuinely identify Simmons. “Not only would the withheld lineup report have changed the outcome of Simmons trial, but it would also have prevented the State from being able to try Simmons at all,” the attorneys stated in a Nov. 17 letter. They also cited a dozen witnesses who testified that Simmons was in Louisiana at the time of the crime. His attorneys also said that the “actual innocence” claim was a necessary first step in Simmons being able to pursue monetary compensation from the state for the several decades he spent wrongfully imprisoned. But any compensation, Norwood cautioned, was not guaranteed and could be long into the future.
He is eligible for up to $175,000 in compensation from the state of Oklahoma for the unjust conviction, but Norwood believes it will be years before he sees any of it. According to The Associated Press, Norwood stated that Simmons is surviving off of donations, largely from GoFundMe, while enduring cancer treatment. “Whatever compensation he has coming is down the road, but I would just encourage people to donate to Glynn’s GoFundMe because money ain’t showing up in his bank account tomorrow,” Norwood said in a statement. Simmons can potentially pursue a federal lawsuit against Oklahoma City and the law enforcement officials involved in his detention and conviction, according to Norwood.