NCJ Number
230919
Date Published
2010
Length
17 pages
Annotation
This chapter portrays persons whom the state has wrongly convicted as victims of state harm.
Abstract
Kauzlarich et al. (2001: 176) defines state crime victims as "individuals or groups of individuals who have experienced economic, cultural, or physical harm, pain, exclusion, or exploitation because of tacit or explicit state actions or policies which violate the law or generally defined human rights." This chapter concludes that this definition applies to innocent persons convicted of crimes. Using Kauzlarich et al.'s victimology framework in examining the experiences of death row exonerees, this chapter examines the role the state has in producing and, in some instances, exacerbating the harms exonerees face. State agents evade responsibility for these harms while engaging in activities that maintain and enhance the harms they have created. Since 2003, the chapter's authors have completed 18 life-story interviews with death row exonerees. The harms revealed in these interviews are discussed in this chapter. They include confronting the possibility of death by court order; problems of daily living upon release (housing, finding employment, etc.); feelings of grief and loss; and coping with stigma and reintegration into the community. In these cases, the state engaged in actions from arrest to prosecution to incarceration and ultimately to post-exoneration that inflicted injury, trauma, and irreversible damage on the exonerees. This circumstance warrants changes in state acknowledgment and policy that will more effectively address the needs and challenges faced by innocent people when they are released from prison. 1 note