Glynn Simmons holds a dubious and painful distinction. He served a longer amount of time in prison before being exonerated than anyone else in American history.
The state of Oklahoma kept him behind bars for 48 years, one month, and 18 days before he walked out of prison in July 2023. Six months later, Oklahoma District Judge Amy Palumbo made it official when she found that “the offense for which Mr. Simmons was convicted, sentenced and imprisoned … was not committed by Mr. Simmons.”
Simmons was initially sentenced to die. But a 1977 U.S. Supreme Court ruling caused his sentence to be changed to life in prison.
The latest chapter in the saga of Simmons’ false conviction and ultimate exoneration occurred last week, when the Edmond City Council agreed to pay him $7.15 million. In return, Simmons agreed to drop a lawsuit he had filed against the city and the estate of former Edmond detective Anthony David Garrett, who led the investigation that sent him to prison.
The city settled without admitting liability.
Last year, Simmons received $175,000 from Oklahoma after he sued the state as well. That is the maximum amount allowed under Oklahoma law. That law does not allow payment of punitive damages, no matter how egregious the conduct was that sent an innocent person to jail.
At the time, Simmons called the amount he received from the state “bullshit.” He pointed out, “They paid private prisons more to keep me in the cell than they agreed to give me on this $175,000.”
“It’s a mockery,” Simmons explained. “I’m not ungrateful for it, and I sure need it. But when you do the math—and mathematics is the only language that’s pure—you can change everything up, but if one and one ain’t two, it ain’t right.”
As the journalist Michael McNutt reported:
For the last 22 years of his incarceration, Simmons said the Oklahoma Department of Corrections paid about $48 a day per inmate to the GEO Group to house him at the Lawton Correctional Center, a private prison. … By comparison, the $175,000 settlement amounts to paying Simmons less than one-fourth of the $48 per diem rate Oklahoma pays to the private prison.
And the state of Oklahoma, like most states, does not make it easy for exonerees to get any compensation at all.
To be eligible, they must either be “pardoned on basis of actual innocence with written statement by the governor” or, as in the Simmons case, have their “conviction vacated and charges dismissed on the basis of actual innocence.”
An exoneree who initially pleaded guilty or was also serving a concurrent sentence for another offense is not eligible for any compensation even if they are later determined to be innocent of the original crime.
That is why only 13 of Oklahoma’s 42 exonerees (33 percent) have received compensation from the state. And for those 13 people, the average compensation award was $158,846.
So Simmons seems lucky to have received what he has. Add the amount he got from the state to what the city of Edmond agreed to pay, and the total amount of $7,325,000 appears a considerable sum.
That is, until you think about what life must have been like for Glynn Simmons during his 17,568 days of incarceration. Looked at that way, what he has been paid amounts to almost $417 a day.
Another mockery.
That total doesn’t seem like anywhere near enough, especially when you learn that Simmons, who went to jail when he was 22 years old, is now 71 and has cancer. As his lawsuit against the city explained, Simmons “must now attempt to make a life for himself outside of prison without the benefit of the decades of life experiences which ordinarily equip adults for that task. …The emotional pain and suffering caused by losing 49 years of life to prison has been enormous.”
The sum of $417 a day is hardly adequate to make up for the life Simmons has lost and the constant horror and agony of being in prison for a crime you know you did not commit.
Indeed, one of the reasons that America suffers from an epidemic of miscarriages of justice is that the consequences for those responsible are inadequate to deter them. And they do not give the rest of us sufficient incentive to reform the criminal justice system in ways that will help prevent the conviction of the innocent.
To anyone who has followed the ongoing story of that epidemic, what happened to Simmons has a familiar ring.
As the Washington Post describes the story:
Simmons and another Black man were convicted of capital murder in the 1974 killing of Carolyn Sue Rogers, a 30-year-old White woman, at an Edmond liquor store. That conviction came despite no physical evidence linking Simmons to the crime scene and multiple witnesses insisting Simmons was in Louisiana on the night of the shooting. …
Police relied on the testimony of an 18-year-old eyewitness, who identified both men in a lineup despite telling police she did not remember much and only saw the gunmen for a split second. Months later, that witness identified two different people in additional lineups.
To make matters worse, police “covered up the witness’s identification of other individuals and a report showing evidence of Simmons’s alibi.”
None of this came to light until Simmons hired a private investigator, who requested the case file from the city of Edmond.
That file “contained a police lineup report that was not turned over to Simmons at the time of the jury trial. That lineup report showed definitely that the eyewitness that testified she identified Simmons in a lineup never did identify Simmons, she identified two other people.”
As Simmons’ lawsuit against the city explained, “These exculpatory police reports were knowingly and deliberately suppressed by the defendants in order to frame plaintiff for a crime he did not commit.”
It said that Edmond failed to equip police officers with “the specific tools—including policies, training and supervision—to handle the recurring situations of how to handle, preserve and disclose exculpatory evidence; how to conduct proper identification procedures, including lineups; and how to write police reports and notes of witness statements.”
Across the country, such failures are common. Mistaken or intentional misidentifications of the kind seen in the Simmons case have occurred in 56 percent of the instances in which someone has been exonerated.
And according to a September 2020 report by the National Registry of Exonerations, “Official misconduct contributed to the wrongful convictions of 54% of defendants who were later exonerated, and police officers committed misconduct (like concealing evidence) in 35% of exoneration cases since 1989.”
While compensation for the wrongfully convicted can never make up for the injury done to them, we can at least ensure that exonerees get redress quickly and easily. Compensation must be generous, inclusive, and complete.
But, as the Simmons case shows, right now it is none of those things.
Money talks. And $417 a day says we don’t yet care enough to prevent what happened to Simmons from continuing to happen in every state in the union.
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