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A bill that clarifies what evidence a judge can consider during a post-conviction factual innocence hearing passed favorably from a Senate Judiciary, Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice committee on Tuesday.
HB307 amends the factual-innocence statute by spelling out that a judge must look at new evidence but also can consider other evidence, including that which was never presented at trial, to determine if someone is factually innocent.
The bill is not a response to the recent exoneration of Debra Brown, who spent 17 years in prison on a murder conviction, Assistant Utah Attorney General Scott Reed told the committee.
"As a matter of fact there are other cases that are also pending, one which is on appeal, and there are issues raised in that case that have been addressed by the bill," Reed said.
The Attorney General's Office recently appealed Brown's May exoneration to the Utah Supreme Court. The appeal claims that some evidence that led to Brown being freed was not "new" because it was available at the time of her 1995 trial, even though it was never presented to a jury.
The factual innocence statute — first enacted in 2008, then amended in 2010 — allows a person who has been convicted of a crime to petition a judge to try to prove his or her innocence, even when there is no DNA available.
Sen. Todd Weiler,R-Woods Cross, sponsor of HB307, told members of the committee Tuesday that in the process of litigatinginnocence petitions during the past four years, the potential has arisen for them"to become just another way to appeal a proper conviction and sentence."
"This bill augments the previously established procedures with additional safeguards which better assures that truly innocent persons may state their claims and seek a court determination of factual innocence, while suspect or frivolous petitions are denied," Weiler said.
Other amendments to the statute included in the bill would allow a petition for factual innocence to continue even after a petitioner dies. Payments, however, would not be made.
Jensie Anderson, legal director with Rocky Mountain Innocence Center, said that in working with theAttorney General's Office on the bill, they had come to a consensus but some concerns remain. Anderson complained that a similar bill comes before the Legislature every two years "to change and make more strict the policy that supports the statute and the intent of the original drafters ..."
She added: "Our hope would be that we continue to recognize the intent of the statute and that we not continue to make it stricter and stricter so that it actually becomes unusable."