NORFOLK, Va. — Standing before state delegates during a General Assembly hearing last month, a tearful Gilbert Merritt III shared the deep emotional toll spending more than 20 years in prison for a crime he did not commit has taken on his life.
“My whole family was ripped apart,” said Merritt during the January committee meeting to hear testimony about a bill that would compensate him for his wrongful incarceration. “This is hard. Oh my God.”
Merritt was in his 20s in 2001 when he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for a murder in Norfolk.
“[I’ve] been through things I [wasn’t] supposed to been through,” Merritt said.
Merritt's exoneration was settled in 2024. According to thebill asking the General Assembly to compensate Merritt, a witness who said Merritt confessed to her in 2001 later told a Norfolk Circuit Court judge in 2022 that she lied under oath due to manipulation and threats from disgraced Norfolk detective Robert Glenn Ford.
Ford is infamously tied to the false confessions of four Norfolk sailors in the 1997 rape and murder of Michelle Moore Bosko. Those men have since gained their freedom.
After retiring from the Norfolk Police Department, Ford was sentenced in 2010 to 12 years in federal prison for taking bribes from drug dealers while on the job.
“Shouldn't we give these people more money because of how they were mistreated by Detective Ford?” said Delegate Rip Sullivan from Fairfax during the same January hearing where Merritt shared his story. “It's hardly a stretch that four times base amount, regardless of what that might be, is proper.”
Del. Sullivan authored a bill this year that would have removed barriers for people who were wrongfully incarcerated due to intentional actions by law enforcement to receive quadruple the base rate outlined in state law. Current state law allows lawmakers to compensate exonerated people roughly $55,000 for each year they spent in prison. The current law also allows people like Merritt, who’ve been incarcerated due to “intentional acts,” to receive up to four times that amount, but only if the city or county that wronged them would contribute to the payout.
The delegate stressed to his fellow delegates during the hearing, “Do we want to hand over this responsibility with which we can enhance someone's claim under the wrongful incarceration statutes, and give localities the ability to block it, either because they don't like the result or can't pony up the money?”
However, Del. Sullivan’s fix fell apart in committee, but his colleagues in the House of Delegates did agree that the state can double the pay for people like Merritt on their own, and still allow the wronged person to go after the city or county where they were wrongfully convicted for more money.
Del. Sullivan’s bill is now in the Virginia Senate’s hands and could face more changes and amendments.
“Do we really want Virginia to be at anything but the front of the pack in terms of how we treat our citizens who’ve been so badly wronged?” said Del. Sullivan in a conversation with me in 2022 about his successful effort to increase the yearly payout for wrongfully incarcerated people.
Regardless of the fate of Del. Sullivan’s bill, the measure to secure compensation for Merritt at the current payout rate is on a path to approval. Yet, there is no amount of money that can make up for what people like Merritt have endured.
“It’s no real answers,” said Merritt. “It’s no real closure.”
Ford has never been criminally charged for his connection to wrongful incarcerations. As I reported in 2023, Norfolk Commonwealth's Attorney Ramin Fatehi is allowing the University of Virginia Innocence Project to review Ford's old cases to learn if there are additional innocent people in prison.
