Ohio will soon compensate a man who spent 13 years in prison on a murder conviction that was overturned in 2023.
The Ohio Controlling Board will meet Monday to approve an Ohio Court of Claims order for payment of $506,717.03 to Marcus Sapp.
Once the court ruled Sapp was wrongfully imprisoned, he automatically became eligible for about $68,000 for each year he served in prison. The payment the state is poised to approve Monday is the first portion of that.
Under state law, Sapp must receive that initial payment within 60 days of the wrongful imprisonment finding.
Attorney Michele Berry Godsey helped Sapp win that determination. She says he is also involved in a continuing court case for lost wages. He'll get the rest of the automatic settlement when that case is finished.
Sapp has indicated he'd like to start a business in Cincinnati. Berry Godsey says compensation can't return lost years for exonerees, but it can provide some stability, and a foundation on which a person can rebuild a life.
"When errors do occur and someone's life is stolen like that, they deserve some kind of compensation for that, even though the money is never going to do them justice," Berry Godsey told WVXU.
The Hamilton County man was convicted in 2010 for the 2008 murder of Andrew Cunningham during a home invasion in Oakley. He was initially sentenced to 27 years to life before he was later exonerated.
Sapp was accused of two other murders at the time, but a jury found him not guilty in those cases. Sapp was convicted in Cunningham's killing and the assault of another man, mostly on the testimony of Cunningham's roommate, Tyler Irvine, and a jailhouse informant named Quincy Jones, whose testimony played into at least a dozen cases in Hamilton County.
In 2021, the Ohio Innocence Project turned up documents showing Irvine initially identified another man as the killer based on photographs Cincinnati Police detectives showed him.
Prosecutors did not disclose this to Sapp's defense attorneys, and other pieces of evidence — including crime scene photos and fragments of latex gloves believed to be worn by the suspects — were missing. Later DNA tests conducted on evidence found at the scene did not turn up Sapp's DNA.
Hamilton County Judge Jody Luebbers granted a motion to throw out Sapp's conviction in 2023 on grounds of Brady violations — a kind of prosecutorial misconduct. But that alone wasn't enough to secure compensation for wrongful conviction.
"Now and then you'll hear of people's convictions getting overturned," Berry Godsey says. "And that's not enough to meet the standard. Basically, the prosecutor comes to a point where they've stated they're not going to further prosecute the case due to lack of evidence or whatever their circumstances are."
Hamilton County prosecutors initially refiled the charges against Sapp but ceased pursuing the case a year later, in part because Jones, the key witness, died in a 2012 murder.
“Due to the lengthy passage of time, memories of specific events have faded or been lost and important evidence is no longer available,” prosecutors wrote in a motion explaining their inability to further pursue the case.
Sapp also filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Cincinnati and Cincinnati Police earlier this year claiming police hid evidence and faked testimony to secure his conviction.
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