LAD Bible
After spending 35 years in jail for a crime she didn’t commit, Cathy Woods, now 68, is finally receiving some level of compensation – and a big one, at that.
Washoe County Commissioners in Nevada have agreed this week to pay Woods $3 million for wrongful imprisonment.
Woods now holds the record for being wrongfully imprisoned the longest in the United States.
In 1980, Cathy Woods was convicted of a crime and sentenced to life in prison. In 1985 a court overruled the trial and called for another. At this second trial, Woods was once again convinced and sentenced again to life.
In 2014, however, her lawyers requested that DNA from the case be tested. A cigarette butt found at the scene still had traces of DNA on it, and after all these years, forensic experts determined it was not Woods DNA at all, but a man named Rodney Halbower.
Despite the fact that Woods technically confessed to this crime, she did not do it. So how does this even happen?
At the time of her confession, Woods was staying at a mental institution in Louisiana. When she was told she wasn’t “dangerous enough” to get her own room, she made a wild claim about committing various crimes in Reno to try and get her own space.
When she was pushed by detectives, she confessed to the crime, despite never having committed it at all.
Her public defender, Elizabeth Wang, classified Woods as “extremely psychotic” during this time in her life, and believe that it was wildly unethical for detectives to interrogate her in that state.
The Washoe County Commission voted 4-0 on Tuesday to pay Woods a total of $3 million for her wrongful incarceration, which works out to be about $85,000 for every year she was behind bars.
This isn’t the last for Woods, though, who now lives with relatives in Washington as she tries to regain her life. Her lawyer filed a lawsuit earlier this month that seeks more, under a new law in Nevada that states those wrongfully convicted and imprisoned could receive up to $3.5 million in civil damages.
According to the National Registry of Exonerations, the average time served for those wrongfully convicted and then exonerated is over 9 years. There have been more than 2,400 individuals exonerated dating back to 1989.
