Scott Cannon drove to work Wednesday morning and took notice of the Salem Police Department vehicle following him.

When he turned, so did the police — it was a feeling he knew well.

“Your blood pressure goes up and your heart’s thumping because you don’t know,” Cannon said.

“I’m sure I get a little more worked up than most people do just at the thought of getting pulled over for something. It’s a hard feeling to shake.”

The Salem police officer eventually turned off, and Cannon arrived at work without an issue. Still, it doesn’t take a lot for Cannon to notice the “dark cloud” he says that follows him.

A jury convicted the 58-year-old of a triple murder in 2000 — a conviction that was later overturned due to questionable and lost evidence in the case, according to The Oregonian/OregonLive.

Cannon had been hopeful that Oregon lawmakers would use this legislative session to finally correct the public perception on his wrongful conviction.

They did not deliver.

Oregon Senate Bill 1007 would have made it easier for wrongfully convicted people in the state to seek compensation for their years incarcerated, but was among the bills that floundered in the legislative session even though it had nearly universal bipartisan support.

Much of that floundering was due to an uncertain budget picture that left even top priorities for supermajority Democrats, such as a massive transportation package, without a path forward.

SB 1007 was co-sponsored by Sen. Kim Thatcher, R-Keizer, and Sen. Floyd Prozanski, D-Eugene, and sought to clarify a 2022 bill around compensating people convicted of crimes they didn’t commit.

That bill allowed people to seek claims of $65,000 for each year they spent in prison if their convictions were later overturned due to likely innocence, as well as money for years spent on probation.

The 2022 bill did not operate as lawmakers intended, however, as the Oregon Department of Justice under former Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum routinely opposed the vast majority of claims for compensation.

State opposition to those claims often came because the DOJ legally interpreted the law as requiring a petitioner to prove their innocence beyond the reasons that their conviction was cleared.

The bill this legislative session aimed to make restitution easier for exonerees by putting in place stricter limits on when the state Department of Justice can challenge payouts. It also would have required the agency to acknowledge new evidence of innocence rather than simply reviewing the original prosecution.

SB 1007’s failure to move forward came as a disappointment for its advocates.

“These individuals were innocent and yet spent years, sometimes decades, behind bars. Now they are spending years fighting for compensation. Oregon exonerees deserve better,” said Janis Puracal, a lawyer and executive director of the Forensic Justice Project.

Puracal also represents Cannon. She had hoped this year’s bill was going to resolve more cases.

The Oregon Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously backed the bill in March and sent it to the Joint Ways and Means Committee for more financial analysis after initial review left its total costs undetermined. The bill stalled there as spending priorities became a bigger concern in the session.

Beyond the financial compensation owed by the state of Oregon, Puracal said the bill could have moved the Oregon Department of Justice to begin issuing “certificates of innocence” intended for people with wrongful convictions.

“The certificate matters,” Puracal said. “That acknowledgement of innocence that says, ‘No. They were innocent the whole time and they don’t have to be scared everytime they see a police car.’”

She said no exoneree in Oregon has received one of those certificates to date.

The Oregon Department of Justice said it had received 76 claims for compensation under the 2022 law as of this week, but only nine of those have led to compensation. Twenty cases had either been dismissed by courts or had not been followed up on since filing. Another 47 claims remain open.

Oregon did resolve at least one major case of innocence during the beleaguered lawmaking session.

In March, the state agreed to pay Frank Gable nearly $2 million for the nearly three decades he spent behind bars for the murder of Oregon prisons director Michael Francke. Appeals later showed the evidence against Gable was fabricated.

The demise of SB 1007 will likely result in at least one more major claim for compensation in Oregon.

Reached Wednesday, attorney David Owens with the law firm Loevy & Loevy said he had been watching the bill before deciding how to proceed with a compensation claim for Jesse Johnson.

Johnson was the subject of the first season of OPB’s podcast, Hush, which revealed new evidence pointing to Johnson’s innocence after he was convicted of a 1998 murder and spent 17 years on Oregon’s death row.

Johnson was released in 2023 following an Oregon Court of Appeals decision that found he had ineffective lawyers at his original trial.

“The proposed amendments to Oregon’s compensation statute provided a necessary step in the right direction,” Owens wrote. “We are disappointed they were not enacted, but will press on in seeking justice for Jesse through all available legal avenues.”

Oregon prosecutors drop murder case against Jesse Johnson, ending 25-year legal saga

DOJ spokesperson Jenny Hansson said in a statement that fixing Oregon’s “broken system” for compensation is a priority for Attorney General Dan Rayfield.

“While legislative reforms would have helped us go further, we’re not waiting,” she wrote on behalf of the DOJ. “We will keep making progress with the tools we have.”

Though SB 1007’s failure was not the outcome Cannon and Puracal had hoped for, both said they were optimistic that Oregon lawmakers would return in 2026 to pass a similar measure.

Thatcher said in a statement that she will be taking up that bill again next year.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/07/02/oregon-exonerees-broken-system-compensation/