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Restitution unresolved for wrongly convicted

Alan Crotzer, 45, says he's trying to build a life on $300 a week and it's "just wrong."

By ALEX LEARY
Published May 3, 2006

TALLAHASSEE - The Legislature is deadlocked again over how to compensate people who are convicted of crimes they did not commit.

But that may be good news for Alan Crotzer, the St. Petersburg man who spent 24 years in prison on a rape charge, because proposals in the House and Senate would have blocked him from receiving a dime.

The Senate version passed unanimously Tuesday but the House has not advanced the legislation this year and Speaker Allan Bense is not inclined to ram it through in the final three days of the session.

Crotzer, freed earlier this year on DNA evidence, is not entirely comforted. The bills are likely to be introduced again next year with the same provision excluding anyone with a prior felony from compensation.

"The feeling is if we're spending taxpayers' money, the person should come to us with clean hands," said bill sponsor Rep. John Quinones, R-Kissimmee.

In 1979, Crotzer was convicted of robbery and sent away. He had been out of prison a month before being implicated in the July 1981 robbery and rape of two women, one of them 12, in Tampa. An all-white jury convicted him and he was sentenced to more than 100 years in prison.

In October 2005, Hillsborough prosecutors got a report confirming DNA tests showed he was not the rapist.

"There's no nexus between what he did as a teenager and what he was wrongfully convicted for," said Michael Olenick, Crotzer's pro bono attorney. "For them to deny him compensation is absolutely deplorable."

Crotzer, now 45, works as janitor at St. Anthony's Hospital in St. Petersburg and said he brings home less than $300 a week. "Here I am trying to build a life and I have nothing to build it with," he said. "It's wrong, just wrong."

The move to create a law for compensation grew out of the case of Wilton Dedge, the Brevard County man freed by DNA in 2004 after 22 years in prison for rape. The Legislature tried to create a system to compensate Dedge but failed.

Dedge came back in December 2005 and was awarded $2-million, $3-million less than he requested.

This year, lawmakers tried to come up with a permanent compensation method. But as bills were crafted, conservative lawmakers moved to create restrictions. Sen. Dan Webster, R-Winter Garden, said broader legislation would have doomed any chance for passage. Asked if that was unfair to a man like Crotzer, Webster said that's not his question to answer. "I believe it's unfair not to have a statewide policy and make these people come one at a time and apply for a claims bill. I want to fix that."

Under state law, only lawmakers have authority to pay claims against the state over $200,000, and that is how Dedge was paid. But claims bills are unpopular. There are more than 20 this year and not one has passed.

Crotzer missed the deadline for a claims bill this year, but his attorney will seek one next year. Jenny Greenberg, director of the Florida Innocence Initiative, understands why lawmakers may want to exclude career criminals. "They don't want to pay a serial killer, fine," she said. "But this is a good, good man who has been mightily victimized by the state of Florida and committed a silly act as a young person. We have a moral imperative to pay Alan Crotzer."

[Last modified May 3, 2006, 11:50:13]