What's Owed a Wrongfully Convicted Person?
St. Louis Post-Disptach
Steven Toney is a private fellow, but I heard through a mutual friend that he was having some financial troubles. Mainly, he was late with his rent. So I stopped by to see him, and he said that yes, he was having some financial troubles, but he didn't want any details in the newspaper. No details then. But in general terms, Toney's problems have nothing to do with his lifestyle. He lives simply in a small apartment. It's a nice place, though. His apartment is in the back of the building, and when you open the door, you don't see the street. Instead, you see trees. He appreciates that very much. He has a job with a rental car company at the airport. He works about 25 hours a week. The airport-rental car business has never really recovered from 9-11, and there's not much chance that Toney's job will go full time any time soon. It's a nice job, though. Sometimes the company sends him places to pick up cars. He likes that. He does not want to be cooped up in an office. He was cooped up for a long time. In 1982, he was given a life sentence for a rape conviction. He had been picked up on a bad check charge -- he was quickly cleared of that -- but he was put in a lineup on a rape case. The victim identified him as her attacker. He professed his innocence from the very beginning. "How much time would you be willing to accept?" his public defender asked him. "Not a single day," he said. He went to trial, and the rape victim -- a woman Toney had never seen -- testified that he was the rapist. Thirteen years and 10 months later, he was released after DNA testing excluded him as the rapist. Was not him. Could not have been him. First thing he did when he got out was to get a strawberry milkshake. Later, he met with reporters and said he did not intend to dwell on the negative. He has been out of prison for five years. He's 55 years old. In March, he went to Jefferson City to testify on behalf of a bill that would establish some kind of remuneration for people who have been wrongly convicted and imprisoned. It went nowhere. "One of the legislators asked me where they were supposed to get the money," Toney told me. "Like I should know?" Actually, this is an issue that the Legislature has to address. Fairness demands it. New technology is making it possible for some wrongly convicted people to prove their innocence. On the national level, more than 100 people have been freed in the past decade, thanks to DNA testing. Here in St. Louis, Larry Johnson was recently freed after spending 18 years in prison for a rape he did not commit. The good news -- good on several levels -- is that there is not going to be an endless stream of these cases. After all, we're talking about people who were convicted before DNA testing was readily available. In the meantime, though, what do we owe somebody like Steven Toney? He's a high school graduate. He served in the Army, and did a hitch in Vietnam. He received an honorable discharge. He later got in trouble, which is not unusual in these cases. Most people who get caught up in the system have been in it before. In Toney's case, he did two and a half years on a robbery charge. Of course, that was years and years ago. Now he lives quietly. He doesn't
even own a car. He takes the bus to work. He has an occasional beer, and
now and then, he'll go out to dinner, but nothing fancy.
Still, it's hard to be positive when you're having trouble with the rent. Toney said he wasn't sure what he was going to do. He said he could move in with somebody, but he was hoping it wouldn't come to that. I like the solitary life, he said. He deserves some solitude. It's something you can't get in prison.
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