Skip to footer

Man freed from death row can sue Ohio for wrongful imprisonment, judge says

Dale Johnston was convicted of double murder in 1984 and sentenced to death. He was freed from jail in 1990, but it wasn't until this year that he was granted the right to seek compensation. 

|
Andrew Welsh-Huggins/AP/File
Dale Johnston in Grove City, Ohio, March 9. The Ohio Supreme Court has ruled that Johnston, a former death row inmate can sue for wrongful imprisonment over a 3-decade-old double slaying he didn’t commit.

An innocent man who spent years on death row is allowed to continue his lawsuit against the state for wrongful imprisonment, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday.

More than 30 years ago, Dale Johnston was convicted of killing his stepdaughter and her boyfriend. In 1984, a three-judge panel “convicted Johnston of two aggravated murders and sentenced him to death, based in part on testimony from a hypnotized witness. Prosecutors said Johnston had been having an affair with his stepdaughter and killed both in a jealous rage, something Johnston always denied,” reported the Associated Press.

Mr. Johnston was released from prison in 1990, but still sought a declaration of innocence order to win compensation for wrongful conviction. Twenty-two years later, Johnston was finally granted a declaration of innocence. But this was overturned by the Ohio Court of Appeals. It wasn't until this year that the Ohio Supreme Court reversed the appeals court ruling to allow Johnston to seek compensation. 

Johnston initially filed a wrongful imprisonment lawsuit in 1993 which was overthrown because Johnston was unable to prove his innocence. In 2008, the real killer confessed to the crime; and in 2012, a county judge found Johnston innocent. The judge ruled that Johnston could seek compensation from the state, but the ruling was soon reversed by an appeals court.

The appeals court argued Johnston was ineligible to prove wrongful imprisonment a second time. However, Wednesday’s ruling upheld that a 2003 law allows wrongful imprisonment to be applied retroactively, therefore Johnston can continue his 2011 compensation lawsuit.

The state “is confident it will prevail when the case returns to a lower court,” Dan Tierney, a spokesman for the Ohio attorney general's office, told the Associated Press. However, Johnston’s attorney, Todd Long, maintained that Wednesday's decision "is a good step."

State attorneys "have tried to raise every procedural roadblock that they can," Mr. Long said. "I hope that they change their attitude."

"If I am able to get everything that the state says I'm allowed to have, that's still an insult when you figure what I lost," Johnston said earlier this year in an interview.

Johnston is not the first wrongfully convicted death row inmate. According to a study done in April of last year, “at least four percent of death sentences in the US send an innocent person to death row,” reported The Christian Science Monitor.

“The reasons that innocent people go to prison are as varied as the crimes of which they’re convicted, and advocates have proposed numerous reforms for limiting the likelihood of convicting the wrong person,” wrote The Monitor. “Those reforms include overhauling eyewitness identification protocols, mandating that police videotape interrogations, upping the stakes for prosecutors who behave unethically, and improving the public defender system.”

This report contains material from the Associated Press.

[Editor's note: This article and headline have been updated to clarify when Mr. Johnson was first released from prison.]

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Man freed from death row can sue Ohio for wrongful imprisonment, judge says
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2015/1028/Man-freed-from-death-row-can-sue-Ohio-for-wrongful-imprisonment-judge-says
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe