State must pay wrongfully imprisoned man

10/01/02 

Donna J. Robb 
Cleveland Plain Dealer Reporter 

Akron - Throwing his arms up like a referee signaling a touchdown, Jimmy "Spunk" Williams beamed yesterday as a judge said he deserved to be compensated for 10 years of wrongful imprisonment. 
    
Williams will ask the Ohio Court of Claims to award him $737,000 for the years he spent behind bars for a crime he did not commit - a rape that may not even have happened. 

"You have been a victim of injustice. True compensation can't be provided to you for the years you lost. I offer an apology from the community and the court," Summit County Common Pleas Judge Jane Bond said. 

Bond's ruling clears the way for Williams to receive $25,000 for each year he spent in prison, plus $48,700 a year in lost wages, attorney Thomas Watkins said. 

The final award will be set by agreement between the Ohio attorney general's office and Williams. 

If the two sides cannot agree, a Court of Claims judge will decide. 

"He could receive as much as three-quarters of a million dollars," said Watkins, who will take an undisclosed percentage of Williams' award money. 

It could be the most the state has ever paid to a wrongfully imprisoned person. 

The payment to Williams could exceed the $720,645 awarded under previous law in 1984 to William B. Jackson, a Columbus man who also was sentenced on rape charges. Under the current state compensation formula, Randall Ayers of Cincinnati holds the record at $367,700, awarded in the early 1990s after he wrongfully served nine years for rape. Watkins expects that Williams will have the money by January. 

Williams, 31, was released Feb. 14, 2001, soon after the alleged rape victim said he was not the man who raped her in 1990, when she was 12. He was convicted in 1991, when he was 19. 

The girl, now 23, testified before Bond last month that the rapist was skinny and dark-skinned but that she never saw his face. She and her father testified that the mugshots police showed her caused her to select the only skinny, dark-skinned man among them, Jimmy Williams. 

The Ohio attorney general's office opposed Williams' quest for compensation. State prosecutors insisted that a rape had been committed and that Williams had committed it. They declined to comment yesterday after Judge Bond heartily disagreed with them. 

The alleged victim, Bond wrote in her ruling, "was taken to [Akron] Children's Hospital for a physical examination. No evidence of semen or other physical trace evidence such as dirt or debris" was found, though the girl told police that the assault had taken place on the ground and that the rapist had ejaculated. 

Yesterday, Bond told Williams, "This case began with a child's lie to avoid a mother's anger. It evolved to tragic proportions. You were the victim of the lies of children, who have come forward as adults to right a wrong." 
Though the alleged victim never recanted her claim of being raped, she told Bond last month that she told her mother she had been raped only after her mother found sucker marks on her neck that had been made by a 12-year-old girlfriend, who testified last month to having made the sucker marks. 

The case has so far cost taxpayers about $160,000 to incarcerate Williams, nearly $40,000 for Watkins' fees and an undetermined amount for the attorney general's staffers. 

Williams, who has spent the last 19 months unemployed and living in poverty, said he plans to buy himself and his mother a house and to star in a movie about his ordeal. "There's no holding me back now," he said.