Robert DuBoise, sentenced over a 1983 rape and murder he did not commit, says he hopes others in his position now ‘get justice’
A Tampa, Florida, man who has been authorized to receive $14m for spending nearly four decades in prison over a rape and murder which he did not commit says he hopes his case makes it easier for the unjustly convicted to achieve justice before it’s too late for them.
“I’m just grateful,” Robert DuBoise told the New York Times of the compensation that Tampa’s city council voted to pay him to settle a lawsuit over his wrongful conviction. He said he hoped others in his position now “get justice and can move on without having to spend the rest of their life fighting the system that has already wronged them”.
DuBoise was 18 at the time that 19-year-old Barbara Grams was raped and beaten to death as she walked home from her Tampa restaurant job in August 1983. A medical examiner determined that someone had bitten Grams on one of her cheeks, prompting investigators to take bite samples from multiple men, including DuBoise.
The short answer to your question is that it’s complicated - in the systems where restorative justice has the most potential to change things, it’s still quite a radical approach and there’s a lot to be figured out.
One way of addressing the problem you raise is that sometimes “surrogate victims” are used - people who have been victims of the same or similar crime. Apparently this has been quite effective in some instances, but ideally usage of this should be limited - one of the ongoing challenges is ensuring that the rehabilitation of offenders doesn’t take precedence over the kind of two way healing that restorative justice is meant for