Lawmakers in Richmond will consider hundreds of bills over the next several weeks, including one of special concern to a Mineral, Virginia man who’s been in legal limbo since he was 15. He was wrongly convicted of a crime but is still being punished for it.
Edgar Coker’s nightmare began in 2008, when he agreed to hang out with a young woman he had known since childhood.
“And the mom came home, and Edgar was in the kitchen having a snack, and the mom went upstairs, and her daughter didn’t have a shirt on, was angry and said, “What has happened here? And she immediately said, ‘He raped me. ‘ ”
Deirdre Enright is with the Innocence Project in Charlottesville. She blames Edgar’s lawyer for giving him bad advice:
“The lawyer encouraged him to plead guilty, said that he would be certified as an adult and sent to an adult correctional center almost immediately, and the family pled guilty to a juvenile offense to avoid the possibility of him being in prison.”
Eventually, the alleged victim admitted she was not raped but that she feared getting in trouble with her mom. But Matthew Engel, Legal Director of the Innocence Project, says it was too late.
“Any new evidence of innocence has to be brought to the court’s attention within 21 days of the final judgment. Edgar was adjudicated delinquent in September, and the young woman came forward in November.”
After 17 months, the boy was freed from a juvenile jail, but when he tried to clear his name, the Stafford County Court said it did not have jurisdiction, and the matter was moot since Edgar Coker was no longer behind bars. Matt Engel disagreed:
“He has to register annually with the state police. He has to submit a DNA sample, he has to be photographed every two years. His name, picture, address, a map to his home are all posted on the sex offender registry website. Just a couple of months ago Edgar went back to a football game at his alma mater and the deputy who was present recognized him from the sex offender registry and arrested him, and he spent five hours in jail until his mother was able to bail him out, because he was a sex offender on school grounds.”
He made that case before Virginia’s Supreme Court and is now awaiting a decision. In the mean time, he and others at the Innocence Project are pushing for passage of a bill that would change state law so juveniles who pled guilty to crimes they did not actually commit could later establish their innocence.
-by Sandy Hausman
Virginia Public Radio 