Preaching to the choir

Life after exoneration isn't easy. The side effect that most states don't really deal with after releasing those wrongfully convicted of hideous crimes is that the lives of those individuals can't ever be restored to what they should have been. Everyone in Colorado ought to know that Tim Masters is not a murderer, but a year after finally being released, he still can't get a job.

As Mr. Masters talks about in the interview, he does not have the life he feels he should have by this stage. He's a 37 year-old man with no wife, no kids, and no employment. The charges may have been dismissed, but anyone running a background check on him is still going to see the murder charge existed once upon a time. I would hope that the word has gotten around that state that the conviction and resulting 10 years in prison were undeserved and that Mr. Masters did nothing more than draw some scary sketches when he was 15. But employers in Colorado still aren't quite willing to take him on. Of course, there's also the minor detail of those 10 lost years when he wasn't able to build any work skills or blaze any career paths.

Sadly, the state that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to convict and incarcerate Tim Masters doesn't appear to be spending any money to help him recover some semblance of a life after that wrongful incarceration. He's doing better than a lot of exonerees. He may be struggling, but he has been able to make an income for himself. Many others have fewer options than Mr. Masters has.

States need to be doing much, much more to help the Tim Masters of the world integrate back into the real world. There has to be more Colorado can do than put an asterisk next to that murder charge in their conviction database. Give him a little cash, get him some job skills, and pound the pavement with him to convince every potential employer that Tim Masters is no murderer and would pose no threat to any of that employer's other employees. The state stole the best years of his life (perhaps not maliciously, but that hardly matters now), so the least it can do is provide him a path to a good life now.