Kenny Richey - Plea Bargain

Plea Bargain

On December 19, 2007 it was announced that Richey had accepted a plea bargain and would be freed. Richey pleaded 'no contest' to attempted involuntary manslaughter, child endangering and breaking and entering. The arson and murder charges were dropped, and Richey was released after being sentenced to time served. The agreement stipulated that Richey leave the U.S. immediately.

Reaction to Richey's acceptance of the plea bargain was mixed. Richey's counsel, Mr. Ken Parsigian, had from the outset been extremely confident that his client would be exonerated at the retrial, stating that the prosecution had a, "...snowball's chance in hell" of securing a conviction a second time around, and that the prosecution case, "...is 10 times weaker that it was 19 years ago and it wasn't that strong a case then." However, when the plea bargain was announced, he described it as, "...complete victory, and more than Kenny and I could ever wish for...the State wanted him to plead guilty and he would not do that. They have agreed to drop murder, to drop the arson and took the most basic minor face-saving deal of no contest. There was nothing left for them to fight about."

One effect of accepting the plea bargain is that Richey is ineligible for a theoretical $1 million compensation payout for his 20-year incarceration. Under Ohio law, a wrongfully convicted person can receive $40,330 per year of wrongful incarceration (or an amount determined by the state auditor), in addition to lost wages, costs and lawyers' fees, as long as the claimant did not plead guilty. However, according to Richey's defence lawyer, Ken Parsigian, any such compensation would be almost impossible to obtain: "There is a statute that allows a wrongfully convicted person to sue the state and collect, but the standard is very, very high, and the amount you can recover is limited. It is not enough to show that the government's case was wrong we would have to prove that he was innocent, and that the prosecutors knew or should have known that."

Karen Torley, organizer of the 'Kenny Richey Campaign', urged his supporters not to feel let down by the bargain: "What Kenny always said was that he would never plead to starting the fire or trying to kill anyone. And he hasn't. The State has caved in and dropped those claims because it can't prove them. What he is pleading no contest to is failure to baby-sit and stealing a plant. After 21 years in prison for an unconstitutional conviction on charges the State has now dropped, what sense did it make to spend six more months in prison to fight about a failure to baby sit and stealing a plant?."

An editorial in the Ohio newspaper the Toledo Blade lamented that full details of the procedure that led to his conviction would not now come to light: "News that Kenneth Richey plans to cop a no-contest plea to lesser crimes in the 1986 fire death of a 2-year-old Putnam County girl is a keen disappointment to those of us who expected the 43-year-old Scotsman would finally get full and fair disposition of the charges against him. Moreover, the plea bargain in this internationally watched case won't satisfy critics abroad who claim, with ample justification, that Richey was a victim of a rush to justice in a small U.S. town. What the deal does do, however, is remind us that American law does not require that criminal suspects prove themselves innocent. The prosecution must prove guilt, and the case against Richey collapsed under the weight of some very shaky evidence."