Mary Jo Pitzl, Arizona Republic
Originally published August 25, 2025
A new Arizona law that will compensate people who have been wrongly imprisoned traces back to one lawmaker’s own prison experience.
For more than a decade, first–term Rep. Khyl Powell has been involved with prison ministry work, including three years as a regular at the Eyman prison complex in Florence.
“Having been intimately involved with those who have experienced incarceration, sooner or later you’re going to come across those who have been abused by the system,” he said in an interview with The Arizona Republic.
“Anyone who says people are not unjustly incarcerated would be naive or ignorant or just choosing to ignore the facts.”
Powell, a Gilbert Republican, championed the legislation, something that had not been attempted since 2021, when a Democrat made a similar proposal that went nowhere.
Making up for lost opportunity
Beginning January 1, Arizona will join 40 other states that have policies permitting financial compensation for those who can prove they were wrongly imprisoned.
Arizona’s program will pay the equivalent of 200% of the median household income in Arizona based on the date the individual was incarcerated, and adjusted for inflation, for each year of the individual’s prison term. In addition, payments are also allowed for behavioral-health counseling, educational costs and financial literacy instruction, as well as attorney fees, if the individual requests them.
It’s not automatic: An individual will have to submit a claim to the state and it must be vetted by a court.
Legislative budget officials estimate it could cost the state $934,000 per wrongfully incarcerated person, based on data that showed 0.69% of convictions in Arizona get overturned or vacated.
The National Registry of Exonerations shows there have been 25 such cases in Arizona since 2019, with an average of 5.8 years spent behind bars.
The program expires on July 1, 2027 unless lawmakers can find a sustainable source of funding.
For now, the compensation will come from the state’s general fund. Local governments are responsible for some of the payment if the wrongful conviction was based on errors or omissions in their prosecution of a case.
Bipartisan support propels bill
Applause rippled across the floor of the House of Representative in June when Senate Bill 1500 cleared its final hurdle. It had been a bumpy path through the legislative process. By Powell’s count, the bill had nearly died four times, largely due to concerns on how to pay for the program.
But Powell argued passionately for the legislation, casting it as a way to hold government accountable.
“Nobody is free from bearing the burden of accountability,” Powell said as the bill came up for a final vote. “Nobody is above the law, including institutions. When people are erroneously found convicted and they’re sentenced to a life in prison and their life is completely destroyed, and they lose everything they had….isn’t it right to compensate them, isn’t it right to somehow pay the restitution they are deserving?”
Aided by some procedural maneuvers, the bill passed with bipartisan support on the final day of the legislative session. Gov. Katie Hobbs signed it later that day.
"Nobody is above the law, including institutions."
An outgrowth of the innocence movement
The Arizona Justice Project plowed the groundwork for the bill. Unlike past years, the legislation won strong support in the House of Representatives, with only one of the 60 lawmakers dissenting. The Senate passed it on a narrow 16-13 vote.
“We had an energized freshman sponsor,” Hope DeLap, the strategic litigation counsel for the Arizona Justice Project, said of the factor that played into the bill’s success.
In the soft–spoken Powell, they found their advocate.
The Arizona Justice Project was one of the early programs to launch as the “innocence movement” picked up steam in the late 1990s, due to the use of DNA evidence in exposing wrongful convictions.
For a project established in 1998, it was gratifying to see Arizona finally join 40 other states with compensation programs, DeLap said.
An outgrowth of the innocence movement
We’re still waiting for a response on what those remaining issues are, but Mitchell gave us the same reasoning as Kavanagh did when we asked her about the bill in March: it “would allow people convicted of a horrendous crime to sue if their conviction is overturned for legal (not factual) reasons,” she said.
But that’s not what the bill says, according to DeLap.
While people can file the compensation claims if their “judgment of conviction was reversed or vacated,” there’s another key requirement in the bill language: They must prove that a preponderance of evidence shows “the claimant did not commit the crime or crimes for which the claimant was convicted.”
The Arizona Attorney General’s Office is also a huge stakeholder. But even though the office is responsible for representing the state in wrongful conviction proceedings, it didn’t formally weigh in.
Accountability through compensation
While DeLap credits Powell for the bill’s passage, Powell said it was the testimony of two men who had their prison sentences reversed that moved votes.
One of them was Drayton Witt, who in 2002 was found guilty of second–degree murder for the death of his infant son. Ten years later, aided by the Justice Project, the case against him was dismissed with prejudice. A judge found the baby’s death was not due to “shaken–baby syndrome” but to seizures compounded by a complicated medical history.
Witt, who was incarcerated at age 18, told a House panel in February that he was stabbed 73 times while serving time at the state prison in Winslow and nearly died of his injuries.
Despite the court ruling that freed him, Witt said it hasn’t been easy. Many job opportunities are lost, he said, because a simple Google search turns up his conviction and ends a conversation before it can start.
“If I was wealthy and had friends and a large family, my story probably wouldn’t have been that way,” he said. But he said he was a penniless 18–year–old with no resources to fight the charges.
Compensation would be welcome, he said, but he told lawmakers the bill has a larger purpose. “Starting the conversation so we can hold people accountable, with integrity, that’s a start,” Witt told lawmakers.
In this case, accountability translates into the government righting its wrong by compensating the wrongfully convicted, Powell said.
“What could they have earned in 20 years of incarceration?” he asked. “How are you going to redeem somebody for what you took away from them?”
Powell said it’s essential that the institutions that take away a person’s liberty be held accountable if a conviction is proved to have been erroneously made. Accountability builds trust, he said.
“Society as a whole would collapse if we have no element of trust,” Powell told The Republic.
Applicants expected in January
The legislation is likely to be amended in the coming years. Powell said lawmakers need to nail down a permanent funding source.
And there are concerns about some of the bill’s technical aspects, such as what defines an erroneous conviction.
County attorneys argued the bill should stick to factual arguments for overturning or dismissing criminal charges. They questioned how the bill’s reference to a “harmful error” would be interpreted as a factor in reversing a conviction.
But for now, Powell expects the new policy to get immediate attention once it becomes law on Jan. 1. He said he knows of three or four people who intend to file a compensation claim with the state.
