Delegate Rip Sullivan wants to make it easier for wrongfully incarcerated people who were imprisoned due intentional acts by law enforcement to get the maximum payout outlined in state law.
NORFOLK, Va. — Standing before state delegates during a General Assembly hearing last month, a tearful Gilbert Merritt III shared the deep emotional toll spending more than 20 years in prison for a crime he did not commit has taken on his life.
“My whole family was ripped apart,” said Merritt during the January committee meeting to hear testimony about a bill that would compensate him for his wrongful incarceration. “This is hard. Oh my God.”
Merritt was in his 20s in 2001 when he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for a murder in Norfolk.
“[I’ve] been through things I [wasn’t] supposed to been through,” Merritt said.
Merritt’s exoneration was settled in 2024. According to thebill asking the General Assembly to compensate Merritt, a witness who said Merritt confessed to her in 2001 later told a Norfolk Circuit Court judge in 2022 that she lied under oath due to manipulation and threats from disgraced Norfolk detective Robert Glenn Ford.
Ford is infamously tied to the false confessions of four Norfolk sailors in the 1997 rape and murder of Michelle Moore Bosko. Those men have since gained their freedom.
After retiring from the Norfolk Police Department, Ford was sentenced in 2010 to 12 years in federal prison for taking bribes from drug dealers while on the job.
Read the full article: https://www.wtkr.com/investigations/lawmaker-wants-to-make-it-easier-for-some-exonerated-people-to-get-more-money
