This article originally appeared in WUNC North Carolina Public Radio
The N.C. Senate’s budget proposal, which passed its final vote Thursday, would eliminate the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission. Its executive director is lobbying state lawmakers to keep funding it.
For nearly 20 years, North Carolina’s Innocence Inquiry Commission has investigated claims of wrongful convictions. It’s the only commission of its kind in the country.
Since the legislature created the commission in 2007, it has had a hand in exonerating 16 people who altogether spent more than 300 years in prison for crimes they did not commit.
The state Senate’s budget proposal, which passed its final vote Thursday, would eliminate the commission.
WUNC’s Will Michaels spoke with Laura Pierro, executive director of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, about lobbying lawmakers to keep funding it.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Why did you leave your career as a judge to lead the Innocence Inquiry Commission?
Imagine standing in the room with an individual who spent years of their life as an innocent person, wrongfully convicted and incarcerated, and seeing them set free. There’s just no greater joy.
What the role also entails, however, is as important to me as a former prosecutor, and that is our duality. For example, if an individual applies to us and they’re truly guilty — and of course, that does happen — we will look for that evidence that confirms guilt as thoroughly as we will look for evidence that would exonerate someone. We only look for the truth.
This week, we learned that a three-judge panel unanimously ruled to exonerate Clarence Roberts, a man who has spent eight years in prison for a murder he did not commit. But how do you answer some lawmakers who say that this isn’t a very efficient process and that there are other avenues for people to overturn their wrongful convictions?
Oftentimes, we can only be as efficient as when the claimant brings this to our attention. In other words, respectfully, there might be an individual out there who might be churning through the regular appeals process, which can often take a long period of time, and a lot of times they’ll wait until they’ve exhausted everything all the way up to the United States Supreme Court before they come to us. That might help explain the efficiency aspect of it.
What has happened often is we will get referrals from Innocence Projects because ultimately they reach a dead end. We are empowered to go to that police department when they say, ‘I’m sorry, we can’t find (a piece of evidence),’ and we help them look. And we have 29 examples in which we found the evidence that supposedly did not exist, Many of those leading to exonerations.
The State House still has to pass its own budget, and then the Senate and House have to reconcile the two, so there are several steps before the Innocence Inquiry Commission would be eliminated. But in the meantime, what have your conversations been like with state lawmakers? Do you think that you’re changing their minds?
I hope so. I’m hopeful that all of the other people that have come out to say, ‘We’ve been through your process,’ all of the Innocence Projects who have stepped up to say, ‘We need you,’ will continue to have their own voices heard by both the Senate and the House so that they can reconsider this very unfortunate decision.