State legislators are circulating a bipartisan bill to award $90,000 to a man who served two decades in state prison for a murder he did not commit.
Sen. Glenn Grothman, R-West Bend, and Sen. Lena Taylor, D-Milwaukee, introduced the legislation to further compensate Robert Lee Stinson on top of the $25,000 he has already received from the state.
Stinson was imprisoned for 23 years for the murder of his 63-year-old neighbor, Ione Cychosz, whose body was found near her home in Milwaukee on November 3, 1984.
Taylor said she believes it is incumbent on the state to provide Stinson with the funds.
“It is surely my hope that we would realize that when we take someone’s freedom, we should help to put them back on their feet,” Taylor said. “Essentially under this law, we only give them $1,000 a year for the time we took from them.”
The state should be held responsible when it has not done the right thing for its people, Taylor added.
Grothman said the bill has received widespread support and the amount of compensation came from bipartisan collaboration.
“The amount was consensual from discussion with [Sen.] Taylor and sponsors,” Grothman said. “I’d be very disappointed if this bill didn’t pass.”
Cychosz had been raped, stabbed and beaten to death, according to an Innocence Project online report. A rape kit failed to produce sufficient biological evidence to identify a perpetrator. However, her body contained eight bite marks that were inflicted prior to her death.
According to the Innocence Network, an international organization working to exonerate wrongfully committed individuals, these bite marks were examined by dental scientist, who concluded the marks must have come from someone who was missing an upper front tooth. While questioning Stinson, police investigators told him a joke and noted missing and crooked teeth when he laughed. They arrested him based on these observations.
Despite the fact that further examination showed a dental impression where Stinson was missing a tooth, the dental assessment and court testimony led to a first-degree murder conviction and sentencing to life in prison.
Reanalysis of the case evidence in 2009 using DNA testing linked the crime to another man, Moses Price, who has since been sentenced to life in prison. Stinson was released and award $25,000 by the Wisconsin Claims Board.
Stinson’s exoneration is largely a result of the work of the Wisconsin Innocence Project. The organization accepted the case in 2005 and utilized modern methods of DNA analysis of blood and saliva samples to establish Stinson’s teeth could not have inflicted the observed bite marks.
According to the Innocence Project report, bite mark identification has been involved in numerous other cases of wrongful conviction throughout the country.
The report also said improper forensic scientific analysis has been a contributing factor in wrongful conviction for more than 50 percent of exonerations with DNA testing.
The bill is scheduled for a public hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
Calls to Keith Findley, director of the Wisconsin Innocence Project and president of the Innocence Network, were not returned.
