Odom v. Dist. of Columbia, Case No. 2013 CA 3239
| Decision Date | 27 February 2015 |
| Docket Number | Case No. 2013 CA 3239 |
| Court | D.C. Superior Court |
| Parties | KIRK L. ODOM, Plaintiff v. DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, Defendant |
On September 9, 1981, a Superior Court jury found Kirk L. Odom guilty, after trial, of multiple felony offenses arising from an armed rape and burglary Mr. Odom did not commit. Only nineteen years old at the time of trial, Mr. Odom testified that he knew nothing of the crime and was at home asleep when it occurred. The jury rejected Mr. Odom's testimony, however, and the judge presiding over the trial ordered Mr. Odom taken into custody immediately after the jury returned its guilty verdict. The judge later sentenced Mr. Odom to a total of twenty to sixty-six years in prison, and the Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment in an unpublished opinion.
Mr. Odom served more than twenty-two years in prison and an additional eight years on parole and as a registered sex offender for his convictions. Finally exonerated by DNA testing in 2012 at the age of fifty, Mr. Odom brought suit against the District of Columbia in 2013 under the District of Columbia Unjust Imprisonment Act, D.C. Code § 2-421 et seq. (2012 Repl.), a local statute that obligates the District to compensate, with money damages, certain qualifying people who have been convicted of and imprisoned for criminal offenses under the District of Columbia Code and have subsequently had their convictions overturned due to judicial or other authorized findings of actual innocence. Mr. Odom sought damages for his loss of liberty and his past and future emotional distress and lost income.
Mr. Odom's Unjust Imprisonment Act claim went to trial before this court, sitting without a jury, on November 3-12, 2014. The parties filed post-trial briefs on November 14, 2014 and presented closing arguments to the court on November 20, 2014. The parties then submitted supplemental post-trial briefs on November 26, 2014, and Mr. Odom filed a notice of supplemental authority on February 19, 2015.
The court has carefully considered the evidence presented at the trial and the many legal and factual arguments of the parties. The court now makes its findings of fact and conclusions of law in accordance with Rule 52(a) of the Superior Court Rules of Civil Procedure. Many of the court's findings of fact are based on stipulations reached by the parties and offered at trial. To the extent the court's findings of fact extend beyond the parties' stipulations, they are made by a preponderance of the evidence and are premised on the court's consideration of the credibility of the witnesses and the reliability and persuasiveness of all of the evidence.
Mr. Odom was born in the District of Columbia on July 13, 1962, the tenth of eleven children in a close-knit family living on Bay Street, S.E., near Robert F. Kennedy Stadium and the old District of Columbia General Hospital. Mr. Odom's father worked as a local freight truck driver when Mr. Odom was a small child, and Mr. Odom's mother was employed by the General Services Administration. Mr. Odom had loving, supportive relationships with both of his parents, and he was very attached to his three brothers, with whom he shared a bedroom at home and formed an inseparable group referred to within the family as the "four musketeers."
Mr. Odom's early childhood was mostly unremarkable. Mr. Odom attended the local public elementary school and, by all accounts, was a happy, healthy, and productive boy despite a diagnosed learning disability that often made schoolwork difficult for him. When Mr. Odomwas approximately eleven years old, however, his father died suddenly, and the unexpected loss devastated the entire family, both emotionally and financially. Mr. Odom was particularly affected by his father's death. He became withdrawn, and on a few occasions he destroyed some of his own belongings as a way of dealing with his anger over his loss. For a time, he attended the Area C mental health center in lieu of middle school.
Things gradually improved for Mr. Odom and his family following the initial shock of his father's death. Mr. Odom's mother remarried, and the family's financial situation stabilized. Mr. Odom transferred back to the public schools to obtain vocational training and then spent several months in the Job Corps program in Texas before returning at age sixteen to the District, where, instead of completing high school, he found work at Hechinger Mall and on an ice cream truck. Mr. Odom began dating a young woman named Teresa Parker after his return from the Job Corps program. The relationship grew in seriousness over time, and in late 1980 Ms. Parker became pregnant with Mr. Odom's child. As Ms. Parker's pregnancy advanced, Mr. Odom became increasingly excited about the prospect of becoming a father for the first time.
In February 1981, however, a violent armed rape was committed a few blocks from Mr. Odom's home - a crime that would dramatically and permanently alter the trajectory of Mr. Odom's life. In the early morning hours of February 24, 1981, a woman named S.Y. awoke in her bed to find an unknown man standing in her bedroom and holding a gun to her head. The man gagged, blindfolded, and bound S.Y. before ransacking her living room and stealing her money. The man then returned to the bedroom and raped and sodomized S.Y.
S.Y. provided the police with a physical description of her assailant and worked with a police sketch artist to create a composite drawing. S.Y. also looked at several hundred slides and photographs of possible suspects shown to her by the police but made no positive identification.
Approximately a month after the rape, a police officer familiar with the description provided by S.Y. saw Mr. Odom walking on the street near Eastern Market and thought Mr. Odom resembled the description. The officer stopped Mr. Odom and obtained his name and other identifying information. The officer did not arrest Mr. Odom, but the police used the identifying information to obtain a photograph of Mr. Odom taken two years earlier. The police placed the photograph of Mr. Odom in a photo array and showed the array to S.Y. on April 13, 1981. S.Y. made a tentative identification of Mr. Odom's photograph, stating that she believed the person shown was her attacker but that she could not be certain without seeing the person up close. The police then obtained a Superior Court warrant for Mr. Odom's arrest based on S.Y.'s tentative identification from the photo array. They arrested Mr. Odom on the warrant in early May 1981 and placed him in a police lineup on May 19, 1981. S.Y. attended the lineup and made a positive identification of Mr. Odom as the man who raped her inside her home on February 24, 1981.
The case proceeded to trial in this court in September 1981 on a grand jury indictment charging Mr. Odom with two counts of first-degree burglary while armed and single counts of rape while armed, sodomy, and armed robbery. S.Y. testified for the government and made an in-court identification of Mr. Odom as her assailant. S.Y.'s in-court identification was corroborated by her earlier out-of-court identifications and by an FBI expert in microscopic hair analysis who testified that a hair found on S.Y.'s nightgown matched a known hair sample from Mr. Odom's head. Mr. Odom took the stand in his own defense and denied any involvement, testifying that he was at home asleep at the time of the incident. Mr. Odom's mother testified as well, stating that to the best of her knowledge her son was at home in bed in the early morning hours of February 24, 1981.
The jury returned a verdict of guilty on all counts on September 9, 1981. Mr. Odom had been on pretrial release in the community leading up to the trial, but in the wake of the jury's verdict the judge revoked his release status and ordered him held without bond pending sentencing. Mr. Odom was immediately taken into custody, shackled, and transferred to the District of Columbia Jail. Four months later, on January 6, 1982, the judge sentenced Mr. Odom to a total of twenty to sixty-six years in prison.
Thus began for Mr. Odom an odyssey through as many as thirty different prison settings over a period of more than two decades leading up to his release on parole in 2003. Corrections officials returned Mr. Odom to the District of Columbia Jail in custody following his sentencing hearing, and from there they sent him to the Lorton Reformatory, the prison complex in Lorton, Virginia operated at the time by the District of Columbia. Mr. Odom served more than half of the next twenty-one years in various Lorton facilities - Youth Center, Maximum Security, Medium Security, and Modular Facility - and the rest in federal and state prisons in New York, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Kansas, Indiana, Minnesota, West Virginia, Tennessee, Virginia, and Maryland.
Mr. Odom's time behind bars was brutally difficult. Mr. Odom lost his personal freedom and any ability to control his own activities. He was forcibly separated from his family, Ms. Parker, and his daughter, who was born to Ms. Parker a few weeks before the criminal trial. He was unable to work and support himself and his family. He lost all of his personal privacy and comforts and was forced to share cramped, filthy, and often rodent- and insect-infected cells with convicted murderers and other inmates not of his choosing. He was cut off from his friends in the community. And he had no stability in his placements, awakened repeatedly very early in themorning, without any advance notice, and told he had only a few minutes to gather his belongings and prepare to be transferred to another prison in an unidentified location.
Particularly painful for Mr. Odom was the inability to play any role in the rearing of his daughter. Mr. Odom's mother and Ms. Parker occasionally brought his daughter along on visits to the...
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