Former Rhode Island police officer Scott Hornoff waited in prison for six years, four months and 18 days before he was exonerated.
Convicted of murder in 1996, Hornoff worked for years to prove his innocence. It wasn’t until 2002 that another man confessed to the crime and pleaded guilty.
If Hornoff had been in the Granite State, where incarcerated people can only petition for a new trial up to three years after their conviction, he’d likely still be in prison.
“If I had been in New Hampshire and he came forward six years later, I would’ve been out of luck,” Hornoff said. “I wouldn’t have been able to file a motion for a new trial based on newly discovered evidence because there’s a three-year limit there. There shouldn’t be a limit at all on the truth and on justice.”
Efforts to lift that deadline, particularly for people convicted of felonies and the highest-grade misdemeanors, are underway in New Hampshire, led by a bipartisan group of state lawmakers.
That bill got torpedoed in June by “weird politics,” said Rep. Buzz Scherr, a Democratic state representative, police commissioner and law professor from Portsmouth. Legislators plan to try again next year.
New Hampshire already allows new trials in cases with DNA evidence or an alleged constitutional violation during the first trial, but for cases that don’t have either of those, defendants only have three years to request a new trial based on other types of evidence.
The limit should be lifted, Scherr argued, because new evidence can be discovered even decades after a crime occurs. In the investigation and trial process, people can be coerced to give false confessions, eyewitness testimony can be fickle and even hard science isn’t foolproof.
“Our criminal justice system is profoundly fallible,” Scherr said.
Scherr joined a group of lawmakers and criminal justice advocates gathered in Concord on Thursday, hosted by the New England Innocence Project, to mark New Hampshire’s first-ever acknowledgement of Wrongful Conviction Day.
Hornoff and Kristine Bunch, a woman from Indiana who spent 17 years in prison after being accused of killing her son who died in a house fire, said the process to overturn a conviction moves painfully slowly. She remembers begging lawyers to take her case and working three jobs in prison to pay for representation. Once the pro-bono legal services organization, The Innocence Project, took her case, Bunch waited several years for her new day in court, then for the judge’s decision.
“It’s not an easy process and it’s not fast, so to have a time limit means that somebody needs immediate help,” Bunch said. “They need resources in that moment.”
Nationwide, 4,200 people have been exonerated over the past three-plus decades, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Only three of those have occurred in New Hampshire, said Cynthia Mousseau, an attorney with the New England Innocence Project.
