A St. Louis County Circuit Court judge ruled last week that a Missouri man must be awarded restitution after he spent decades wrongfully imprisoned.
Johnny Briscoe spent more than two decades in prison for a rape he did not commit. He was convicted in 1983 and released in 2006, but waited 15 years to ask for payback.
Briscoe’s delay in pursuing compensation became a sticking point between the Missouri Attorney General’s Office and the St. Louis County Prosecutor’s Office. The attorney general argued that Briscoe has waited too long, while the prosecutor’s office said the law doesn’t place limits on when he had to request restitution. In a five-page ruling, Judge Michael Burton agreed with the prosecutor’s office.
“The court finds there is no explicit statute of limitation in the statutory cause of action under 650.058 RSMo. within which to file a petition for restitution,” he wrote, according to Fox 2.
The first $36,000 check is to be paid to Briscoe immediately, and Briscoe will receive another in the same amount every year for the next 20 years for a grand total of more than $800,000. Briscoe will be 90 years old when the last check is paid.
“I think the court got it right,” St. Louis County Prosecutor Wesley Bell said. “We talked to you about that just a few weeks ago — this is not only the legally correct ruling, but I think from a common sense standpoint it’s the correct ruling.”
DNA testing on cigarette butts from the crime scene proved that Briscoe didn’t commit the rape for which he was incarcerated.
On October 21, 1982, a man broke into a woman’s home in suburban St. Louis and raped her. The attacker and the victim smoked cigarettes. Before leaving, the man told the woman his name was John Briscoe. When the man left, the victim called police, and while they were in the apartment a man called multiple times, identifying himself as John Briscoe. The call was later traced to a pay phone not far from Briscoe’s apartment. The victim later identified Briscoe in a photo lineup.
The victim also identified Briscoe as her attacker at the trial, where a forensic expert also testified that Briscoe’s hair shared similarities to hair found at the crime scene. At 29 years old, Briscoe was sentenced to 45 years in prison. He maintained his innocence and in 2000 and 2001, Centurion Ministries, a Princeton, N.J.-based nonprofit, sought to help Briscoe, but St. Louis officials claimed evidence in his case could not be found and was presumed destroyed.
In 2004, a laboratory turned up evidence of the cigarette butts and DNA testing was performed in 2004. The testing showed the DNA on the cigarette butts matched the profile of another man serving time in the Missouri prison system. The man knew Briscoe and used his name when committing the crime. Just days after learning the cigarettes had been discovered, Briscoe walked free.
“It’s been a long struggle, hard struggle, but I held strong,” he told Fox 2 at the time.
