Cleveland, OH: A state board agreed to give $1.1 million to a man from New York who was wrongly jailed for more than 35 years for a murder in Cleveland in 1987. The decision came on Monday.
58-year-old Dwayne Brooks was released from prison last year after a Cuyahoga County judge ruled that police and prosecutors had withheld police reports and witness statements from Brooks’ lawyers that supported their client’s claim that he wasn’t involved in the August 1987 ambush killing of 35-year-old Clinton Arnold at Luke Easter Park.
Hempstead, New York, homeowner Brooks said he wasn’t even in Ohio when Arnold was killed. Brooks was found guilty and given a life sentence, mostly because of the statements of two other defendants who decided to help the prosecution prove Brooks was Arnold’s killer in exchange for pleading guilty to lesser charges.
On Monday, the Ohio Controlling Board allowed Brooks to get a preliminary judgment payment of $1,103,475.92 without any discussion or comment. That’s about half of the money he’s owed by state law. People who were wrongly imprisoned get $64,186.92 dollars for every year they were locked up.
The preliminary judgment amount, which was accepted by the Ohio Court of Claims at the end of last month, is about $88 for every day that Brooks was jailed without a good reason. This money will come from the state’s main fund for collecting taxes.
Along with those damages, Brooks could also get paid for his lawyers’ fees and the wages he would have made if he wasn’t in jail. The court or a legal settlement will decide exactly how much money he gets.
Prior to Monday’s vote, the Controlling Board approved a $131,000 payment to Canton resident Aaron Culbertson. Culbertson had been wrongly jailed for more than four years for a 2018 robbery that new evidence showed he wasn’t involved in.
