A Columbus man who spent 11 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit would receive compensation, under a measure passed Thursday in the final hours of the 2013 legislative session.
It will take months, however, for him to see the first dime of that money.
House Resolution 73 now goes to Gov. Nathan Deal for his signature. With his approval, Lathan Rydell Word would be awarded $400,000 as compensation from the state for being falsely convicted of armed robbery. But there is one wrinkle:
The money is not included in the next fiscal year’s budget, which begins July 1. Instead, House Appropriations Committee Chairman Terry England, R-Auburn, promised to put the money into the midyear budget legislators will adopt early in 2014.
The state may pay people who are wrongly convicted of crimes if both the House and Senate approve a resolution calling for it, and if the money is put into the state budget. The House was the first to pass HR 73, sponsored by Rep. Carolyn Hugley, D-Columbus.
The Senate on Thursday then added an amendment that would stop payments to Word if he is convicted of another felony.
The amendment put Hugley in the position of having to urge her House colleagues to agree as the clock ran toward midnight and the forced end of the 2013 legislative session. The House agreed to the Senate amendment, and the resolution passed.
That doesn’t mean she was happy about it. She was not informed that the money was struck from the budget.
This is the second year Word has come within minutes or hours of seeing his compensation approved. Last year, the money was put into the budget, but the resolution failed in the final moments.
Word was convicted of the 1999 armed robbery of Jennie & Joe’s Curb Market in Columbus. A single witness, store clerk Contresstis Tolbert, testified that he saw Word enter with a gun and a plastic bag over his head and leave with $300.
Word’s conviction was overturned on appeal in 2011, but prosecutors sought to retry him again. During the new trial, Tolbert, who is serving a life sentence for murder and armed robbery, told prosecutors he was lying when he initially pointed blame at Word and wasn’t going to lie about it anymore.
That same day, Word was a free man.
In a letter to lawmakers, Word, now 31, said he was arrested shortly before he was to report for basic training for the U.S. Marine Corps and he wonders now what his life would be like had he not been wrongly charged.
Sen. Bill Heath, R-Bremen, is the chief opponent to Word’s compensation package, which has bipartisan support. Heath, who is not a lawyer, said the state cannot “prove without reasonable doubt that Mr. Lathan Rydell Word is innocent of committing armed robbery more than a decade ago.”
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