A Wisconsin man’s name was cleared this summer, 14 years after he was convicted and put in Utah prison for crimes that evidence showed he could not have committed.
Third District Judge Su Chon found Michael W. Thompson factually innocent on Aug. 30. She also ordered that Thompson receive $300,000, as required by Utah law, to account for the seven years he spent incarcerated. The Utah Attorney General’s Office has since appealed this finding and asked the judge to hold off on handing out that money until the appeal is resolved.
Thompson is the latest defendant to be exonerated through the work of attorneys at the Rocky Mountain Innocence Center, executive director Kristy Columbia said. The Salt Lake City-based group began investigating Thompson’s innocence claim in 2015, according to a news release from the University of Utah’s S. J. Quinney College of Law, where Thompson’s attorney Jensie Anderson is a faculty member.
Police began investigating Thompson, then a long-haul trucker, after a 16-year-old girl reported that he made her participate in oral sex on Aug. 25, 2002. Thompson and a friend had stayed at the girl’s house in Salt Lake City between stops on their route to and from California.
Thompson, who was 32 at the time, maintained that the sexual abuse never happened, and that it couldn’t have, because he was already on his way back home when she said it happened. He said his driving logs proved it, court records show.
Driving logs initially questioned
But prosecutors cast doubt on those logs during the 2008 trial. They brought in a specialist with the Utah Highway Patrol, who told jurors that despite the logs indicating that Thompson took about 10 hours to drive between Salt Lake City and Rapid City, North Dakota, during a leg of the trip — days before the alleged crime — that reported trip length was “not physically possible.”
According to court records, the UHP specialist relied on a report from PC Miler, a software that estimated travel times, which determined that the trip would have taken more than 14 hours and concluded Thompson had “cooked the books” to cover up how long he was driving. A jury convicted him of two counts of forcible sodomy.
He later appealed the conviction, arguing that his lawyers didn’t properly represent him. In 2014, the Utah Court of Appeals agreed.
Thompson’s attorneys never questioned the PC Miler report, the court found, and it was later determined that the software that generated the 14-hour estimate was years-old, and that it had apparently simulated someone driving 55 mph on the interstate, instead of 75 mph.
Defense attorneys also didn’t object to “numerous instances of prosecutorial misconduct” during the trial, state appellate Judge Carolyn McHugh wrote in her opinion. She pointed to an attorney who drew the jury’s attention to Thompson’s hand position and how he would “shut his eyes and shake his head ‘no’” during questioning. According to McHugh, the prosecutor said, “To me that’s a classic sign of dishonesty. He couldn’t look me in the eyes and tell me the answer to the question.”
McHugh said the prosecutor’s statement was clearly improper. For that and other reasons, she decided in January 2014 that attorneys should try the case again. Appellate judges Gregory Orme and James Davis concurred. The charges were ultimately dismissed in April 2014.
The attorney general’s office is challenging the finding of actual innocence. In documents filed in 3rd District Court in October, attorneys for the state argued there is a “reasonably likely probability that the judgment in this case may be reversed on appeal” because the evidence used to make the determinations was not “newly discovered.” The state argued that “when viewed with all the other evidence, (it) does not establish” Thompson’s factual innocence.
An ‘amazing feeling’
Soon after, the innocence center began reviewing the case. Attorneys filed a petition to affirm Thompson’s innocence in 2017. Chon granted it in August and denied prosecutors’ motion alleging Thompson and his wife had destroyed evidence in the case.
“This is an amazing feeling,” Thompson’s family said in a written statement, according to the U. news release. “After 20 years, our family is finally free from this nightmare.”
“They say the wheels of justice are slow, and that is the truth, but thank the Lord above,” the statement continued. “We had some amazing people in our corner to help us fight this injustice to the end.”
Thompson is the eighth person the Rocky Mountain Innocence Center has gotten exonerated, Columbia said. Studies estimate about 5% of incarcerated people in the U.S. are actually innocent, she noted.
Most of those people are found innocent after a court discovers some kind of “official misconduct,” such as fabricating evidence or hiding evidence that could prove someone’s innocence, according a 2020 report from the National Registry of Exonerations.
Columbia said many people don’t understand how often innocent defendants go prison, since they are “easy to forget once they’re incarcerated.” While wrongful convictions have become more of a “hot topic” recently, because of the rising popularity of true crime and celebrities getting involved in spreading awareness, Columbia said awareness itself can’t fix the problem.
It should start at the local level, she said, with law changes that help incarcerated people petition for reviews of their cases — and prevent wrongful convictions from happening in the first place.
The group has successfully lobbied for such laws in Utah, including a law passed last year that requires biological evidence in a case be retained throughout an incarcerated person’s prison term, or the length of their offense’s statute of limitations. They previously helped pass a law that created a process for inmates to request post-conviction DNA testing.
Clarification • Oct. 19, 3 p.m.: This story has been updated to note that the Utah Attorney General’s Office filed an appeal to Michael Thompson’s factual innocence determination on Oct. 11, four weeks after 3rd District Judge Su Chon issued her finding.