Robert DuBoise spent 37 years behind bars, including three years on Death Row, before his exoneration in 2020 in the rape and murder of a Tampa woman.
DuBoise was 18 when he was arrested and was 55 when he was released from prison after the Hillsborough County State Attorney’s Office concluded his conviction for the 1983 crimes should be vacated.
The Florida Legislature in 2008 passed a law, championed by the late attorney and Florida State University President Sandy D’Alemberte, that said the state should compensate people who were wrongly convicted of crimes — so long as they hadn’t previously committed felonies. Under the law, exonerees found innocent by the court that convicted them are eligible for $50,000 for each year they served in prison. The compensation is capped at $2 million.
DuBoise, who maintained his innocence throughout his decades-long ordeal, wasn’t eligible for compensation because, as a 17-year-old, he had been convicted of three unrelated felonies. He and his pro bono attorneys and lobbyists spent three years trying to convince Florida lawmakers to approve a special type of legislation known as a “claim” bill to provide $1.85 million to DuBoise. Lawmakers signed off on it in 2023.
Florida is the only state with a wrongful incarceration compensation program that excludes people with prior felonies, a restriction that makes the vast majority of exonerees in the state ineligible for payments. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, 91 people in Florida have been exonerated since 1989. Five of those exonerees have received compensation.
Rep. Traci Koster, R-Tampa, is among legislators who’ve sought to change the law to do away with what is known as the “clean hands” provision.
Koster, who is sponsoring such a bill for the legislative session that will begin Tuesday, pointed to DuBoise’s predicament as the impetus for her interest in making the change.
“One of the first meetings I took as an elected official was with one of these wrongly incarcerated folks. And I was blown away by the level of grace that this gentleman had for our state,” Koster, a lawyer who was initially elected in 2020, said before the House Criminal Justice Subcommittee unanimously approved the proposal (HB 59) last week.
Koster told the House panel that changing the law would help 18 exonerees “who’ve been denied compensation due to our overly restrictive barriers.”
“This totals approximately 300 years of wrongful incarceration. Six of these exonerees have waited over a decade to get justice,” she said, adding that the total cost of compensation for all of the men would be roughly $15 million. “And as I’ve said for the last four years that I’ve filed this bill, when we as a state get it wrong and incarcerate somebody, take away their liberty, then we as a state need to make it right.”
The bill also would extend from 90 days to two years a deadline for exonerees to seek compensation from the state and set up a process for people who receive compensation to repay the state if they receive a civil settlement.
DuBoise, 60, is advocating for the change.
The current law “is basically putting a target on anybody that’s been convicted of anything in their life,” he told The News Service of Florida in an interview.
An exoneree’s history “should be irrelevant if they know they convicted the wrong person,” DuBoise said.
People who are exonerated, like other ex-inmates, face myriad challenges after being released from prison. DuBoise, who was released amid the coronavirus pandemic, said it was a challenge for him to open a bank account because he lacked identification.
“I didn’t know how to use a phone or anything,” he said.
Innocence Project of Florida Executive Director Seth Miller, whose organization was instrumental in helping get Duboise’s conviction overturned and who championed the 2008 law, told the News Service that the state payments can help ease exonerees’ transition into communities.
“Our collective goal with all these men and women is to try to get them to a place of stability in all aspects of their lives. Everyone knows how financial stability is the key to everything else,” he said.
Sen. Jennifer Bradley, a Fleming Island Republican sponsoring the Senate version of the bill (SB 130), said it “standardizes” compensation for exonerees and saves them from having to pursue a claim bill from the Legislature. Special magistrates conduct thorough investigations of claim bills, which then have to get through the legislative process.
“These people are obviously behind the eight ball. They have no money. They have no savings. They’ve lost the ability to save for retirement, have housing and build a life support. So, they’re already starting at a pretty big disadvantage,” Bradley, an attorney, told the News Service.
DuBoise’s claim bill took three years to pass. He said lawmakers approving it “was very special to me.”
“I met all of them one time or another, and we kind of got to know each other. All of them were horrified by what happened to me. Their apology mattered,” DuBoise recalled. “They were thinking this could have happened to my child. It seemed real.”
DuBoise said the money allowed him to help his sister, who has autistic children, and his mother — things he always planned on doing but took much longer to accomplish.
“I just kind of help a lot of people, but I work every day, too, right?” said DuBoise, who is a maintenance manager for a country club in Oldsmar. “I’ve been gone since I was 18 years old. I never learned how to have fun. So all these things people want to do every day, I’m just OK working and doing my thing.”
Koster acknowledged that her proposal has not garnered enough support in the past but remained hopeful the Legislature will sign off this year.
“All I’m doing is opening a door that is barely cracked for these folks and I’m just trying to open it a little wider. And since getting elected, it has been my mission to get this over the finish line,” she said.
–Dara Kam, News Service of Florida
Southpaw says
Wow! How many ways can you demonize a person? Slavery was Legal. Colonialism was Legal. Jim Crow was Legal. Apartheid was Legal. Legal is a matter of Power, Not justice.
R.S. says
As long as we’re mired in a get-even mentality, it won’t happen that we pay every released person a good starting sum or a suitable employment to get back to living decently. A person released at retirement age won’t have any options but to fall back to the same kind of deeds that landed them in prison in the first place if no help is offered. Seems that it all depends on what we want: beat a person up for a mistake for forever after to still our need for revenge or improve our society to benefit all.
Ray W, says
As I have repeatedly commented over the years, social historians point to the 2,500-year-old Oresteia, or the three plays of Agamemnon, as the earliest record of a society attempting to shift away from a system of law based on honor (retribution, or the debt of blood vengeance) to a system of law based on respect.
Yes, the Oresteia is a Greek tragedy, but its importance has been established by the simple fact that the plays were preserved by generation after generation for 2,500 years. The ancient Greeks preserved them. The Romans preserved them. The Arabs preserved them. During the Third Crusade, 1700 years after they were written, priests found them in a library in Damascus and brought them to England, where they have been preserved for over 800 more years.
An honor-based system of laws of the debt of blood vengeance can be described as: Honor demanding Vengeance.
A respect-based system of laws can be described as: Respect commanding justice.
There can be little doubt that what Southpaw decries is the existence of a legal system based on vengeance or retribution within our courts. What I have repeatedly defended is a legal system based on respect or justice. That system, too, exists within our courts, side-by-side with the system of vengeance.
Throughout my decades of practicing criminal law, I ran across many vengeful judges masquerading as neutral and detached magistrates. Vengeance, by definition, can never be neutral or detached. Thankfully, many of the most vengeful judges I watched over the decades sat in other circuits, but the Seventh was not immune to vengeful judges.
Flagler County residents enjoyed years and years of excellent judges. For about 20 years, we had a core of people who set the tone for everyone else who participated in the courts. Judge Hammond, the two Wadsworth sisters, ASA Steve Nelson (not that he couldn’t go off the rails every once in a while), and APD Irwin Connally set a standard of respect-based justice in Flagler County for decades.
But the existence of a group of respectful court system participants doesn’t mean all of them are respectful. There are many vengeful people among us.
For several years one of our Daytona-based judges had a vengeful bailiff hiding in plain sight. I talked with him and saw him interact with people day after day. But he started visiting the country’s pre-trial release officers in their courthouse offices during breaks. After he described to some of them his fantasy of watching a bullet from his pistol entering a female public defender’s forehead, they took the step of reporting his ever more violent fantasies to their superiors. He was removed from his position of trust, but he was not fired.
There will always be tension between those who seek vengeance and those who seek justice. The vengeful will claim that they are just, but they are just lying to themselves. I will always oppose the vengeful among us.
When a Flagler elected Republican official took to the radio to ask just when “we” can start beheading Democrats, I opposed him. His was not a system of justice; it was a system of vengeance.
When our governor announced on the presidential campaign trail that, if elected, he would start slitting throats on day 1, I opposed him. His was not a system of justice; it was a system of vengeance.
When our President announced that he was his follower’s retribution, his was not a system of justice; it was a system of vengeance.
When the North Carolina Republican candidate for governor said that “some people need killing”, his was not a system of justice; it was a system of vengeance.
The list of vengeful Republican candidates goes on and on. The list of vengeful FlaglerLive commenters is quite long, too.
I miss Judge Hammond and the Wadsworth sisters, and Steve Nelson and Irwin Connally. Not that they were perfect, but because they were not vengeful. Flagler County residents should miss them, too.
Atwp says
Will it happen? Time will tell.
Richard Fay says
I do understand your point. It is true the exonerated will be released lacking skills as prison is not designed to prepare prisoners for release; it is erroneous to state “to fall back to the same kind of deeds that landed them in prison in the first place”; the individual was wrongfully imprisoned.