🔒Stevens helps wrongfully convicted earn their just due

1 of 3

It wasn't until years after she became a lawyer that Tiffany L. Stevens saw the irony of being born in Auburn, N.Y.

The suburban town is home to one of the country's oldest and most notorious prisons — the Auburn Correctional Facility. The expansive maximum-security building is located in the center of town on State Street. In 1890, Auburn was the site of the United States' first execution by electric chair. Many of its prisoners were placed in solitary and made to perform prison duties in silence.

Stevens, special counsel at the McCarter & English law firm in Hartford, is a real estate and corporate attorney. Before graduating from UConn Law School in 2003, she attended Villanova, majoring in political science and English.

“I kind of struggled with the idea of whether to go to law school or whether to get involved in government,'' said Stevens, born in 1975.

She ended up doing both.

As co-founder of the Connecticut Innocence Fund, Stevens is in the business of raising money for wrongly convicted and exonerated state inmates so they can better transition to society. The money is actually a bridge loan, repaid to the fund, after the exonerated inmates are awarded damages from the state. The funds are normally handled by the exonerated person's lawyer, which ensures that the Innocence Fund gets reimbursed.

Founded in 2011, the Innocence Fund is the only one of its kind in the nation. The Connecticut Bar Foundation invests the money, currently about $60,000. Community Partners in Action, a Hartford-based program that serves ex-offenders who re-enter society, distributes the loans. The money is disbursed in small increments — anywhere from $700 to $1,200 — to pay for such things as rent, transportation, food and health care.

So far, about $47,000 has been loaned to four people; about $11,000 has been repaid.

Stevens and her colleagues would like to see the Innocence Fund concept duplicated across the country. She has received inquiries from Innocence Project representatives at several conferences.

Besides the money, Stevens said the key to the program is providing a support system for the exonerated to navigate their new normal. Each person who receives funds is assigned a mentor and there is a team of volunteers to assist with finances, job-training and life skills.

“Our goal has really been to teach these individuals how to manage money before they receive this large grant from the state,” Stevens said. “It's about teaching them how to manage it, invest it, how to save it, how to go through day-to-day life and preserve what they received for this horrible wrong that they endured.”

Stevens has been with McCarter & English since 2007.

In 2005-06, she served as a law clerk with judges Lubbie Harper, a noted defense attorney, and George Stoughton, a former prosecutor. The clerking experience “showed me some different areas of the law and that you could have an impact outside of your actual job.”

While she was (and still is) enamored with corporate and transactional legal work, “I was definitely interested in the criminal justice system and how to make improvements in the big cities and Hartford. In the end, I wanted to do some things that would really help Connecticut cities.”

Around the time she joined McCarter & English, Stevens met James Tillman, a Connecticut man who served 18 years in prison for a rape he did not commit. Tillman was ultimately exonerated via the Connecticut Innocence Project.

McCarter & English housed the Innocence Project, a division of the public defender's office, in its 36th-floor office on Asylum Street in Hartford.

Stevens negotiated the $5 million settlement the state paid Tillman for his wrongful incarceration. She also provided expert testimony for what would become the state's new wrongful conviction compensation act, passed in 2008.

Kenneth Ireland, another wrongfully convicted inmate, this year received $6 million through the law. It requires those who are exonerated to make the case for damages to a review board, which considers such factors as loss of income, educational opportunities, family time and other hardships.

Some states, Steven said, don't consider hardships in assessing damages for an exonerated inmate. Instead, a strict formula is used calculating the number years served multiplied by a pre-determined amount of money.

It's an impersonal and archaic method of compensation, almost as antiquated as a monstrous prison in central New York. 

Stan Simpson is the principal of Stan Simpson Enterprises LLC, a strategic communications consulting firm. He is also host of “The Stan Simpson Show” which airs Saturday, 5:30 a.m., on Fox CT — and online at www.foxct.com/stan.

Read more

Austin’s salon thrives on faith, style, southern cooking

Royal Ice Cream’s cold treats have global appeal