By Linda P. Campbell
lcampbell@star-telegram.com
For 14 years, Michael Blair's was the face of a monster on Texas' Death Row.
Today, he presents a legal dilemma for the state of Texas -- and a moral one.
But it's not for reasons you might think.
A jury in Collin County convicted Blair in 1994 of strangling 7-year-old Ashley Estell after stealing her from a Plano park where her older brother was playing soccer.
It was a horrifying crime that unnerved parents and led to tougher penalties for sex offenders.
Except the wrong man was sentenced to death for killing Ashley.
Physical crime scene evidence, subjected to DNA testing starting in 2002, ruled out a connection to Blair. In 2008, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals vacated his conviction and sentence.
Not long after that, he started asking the state to compensate him for those years he shouldn't have spent incarcerated.
Texas pays inmates who've been wrongly convicted $80,000 per year in prison, plus a lifetime annuity and a higher-education supplement.
The Legislature beefed up the compensation in the 2009 Tim Cole Act, named for a Fort Worth man who died while serving time for a sexual assault he didn't commit.
But Texas Comptroller Susan Combs keeps telling Blair he doesn't qualify for the $900,000 to which he says he's entitled.
Why? Doesn't the state owe him for those lost years?
Here's where it starts to get complicated.
Blair won't ever return to society. While in prison for Ashley's murder, he admitted to molesting children in the late 1980s; in 2004 he received four life sentences for those crimes.
The Comptroller's Office, which administers wrongful conviction payments, insists that it's "absurd" and "ludicrous" for Blair to suggest the law should benefit "a self-confessed, repeat child molester."
Finding Blair eligible for the money would be pointless, because the Legislature intended it to help people "rebuild their lives after their release from imprisonment," the state argued in a legal brief.
"It is fundamental that a court should never ascribe to the Legislature the desire to do a useless and futile thing," the state says.
But Blair's lawyers say that the comptroller is misinterpreting the law and that if lawmakers wanted to exclude people like him, they could have made that explicit.
Blair's team argues that the law doesn't allow compensation for someone convicted of a new crime
after being exonerated. Under their rationale, Blair remains eligible because his other crimes were committed
before his wrongful imprisonment.
Of course, that doesn't track with their argument that he's only claiming compensation from 1994 until 2004, the year he started serving the life sentences -- and not up to 2008, the year he was exonerated.
The comptroller's argument is flawed, too, however. The Tim Cole Act isn't just designed to get wrongly incarcerated individuals back on their feet; it's an attempt to make them whole for the years of freedom the state took away.
The Texas Supreme Court, which heard arguments in the case Wednesday, must sort out the legal eligibility dilemma.
The moral dilemma's more disconcerting.
There's no question that the state wronged Blair and compounded the injustice by not punishing Ashley Estell's real killer. But if Blair's an admitted child molester, should he really have been free? Was it only because he wrote to a court from Death Row that he got found out? And even though he was wrongly behind bars, did that unwittingly make society safer?
Keep in mind that the law sometimes creates absurd results -- until it gets amended.
Linda P. Campbell is a Star-Telegram editorial writer.817-390-7867Twitter: @LindaPCampbell
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