Alvin Jardine spent more than a third of his life in prison for a rape he did not commit.

After his release, he spent another decade fighting the state for money he was entitled to through Hawaiʻi’s wrongful conviction compensation law.

Legislators are now poised to approve a $600,000 payment in Jardine’s case, but it’s too late for him to receive the money.

The 56-year-old Maui man was found dead Dec. 27 near North Honokala Road in Haʻikū after struggling for years with poverty, substance abuse and the trauma of his 20-year wrongful incarceration.

Jardine had planned to use the money to move to Hilo and buy a house and a truck, his sister said. Instead, the man whose case served as the impetus for Hawaiʻi’s 2016 wrongful conviction compensation law, died with no support from the state, said state Sen. Karl Rhoads, one of the sponsors of the original bill.

“It’s a horrible human tragedy,” he said, “and the state, the criminal justice system, is responsible.”

Toni Schwartz, spokeswoman for the Attorney General’s Office, declined to comment on why it took so long to settle Jardine’s case, saying in an email that the office doesn’t comment on “pending or recently resolved claims.”

“In general, the time required to reach a settlement in civil cases can vary based on the complexity of the case, procedural requirements, and ongoing legal considerations, including court proceedings and related court matters that may affect the timing of resolution,” the statement said.

As of last year, Hawaiʻi had not paid any of the five people who have sought wrongful conviction compensation. Of the 38 states with similar laws on the books, Hawaiʻi is the only one that has never paid a claimant.

Part of the holdup was caused by the law’s wording, which requires petitioners to prove they are “actually innocent” even after being exonerated by a court. Defense attorneys said this standard was impossible to meet.

But a 2024 Hawaiʻi Supreme Court opinion issued in Jardine’s case said the law should be interpreted more broadly. As long as the court order reversing a person’s conviction supports “the conclusion that the petitioner did not commit the crime,” the person’s request for compensation can move forward, the opinion said.

This session, lawmakers are slated to approve payments in two wrongful conviction cases — the $600,000 settlement for Jardine and a $420,000 settlement for Roynes Dural, a man whose 2003 sexual assault conviction was overturned after he spent eight years in prison. Dural filed his claim for compensation in 2021.

The state will still have to pay Jardine’s money even though he is dead, Rhoads said. The sum will go to his 37-year-old daughter, Ashley Jardine, who is his next of kin. But Rhoads said he’s disappointed that the law hasn’t done what it was intended to do — help wrongfully convicted people get back on their feet and reintegrate into society.

People who were wrongfully convicted don’t get the same support upon leaving prison that many other formerly incarcerated people get, such as help obtaining identification documents and assistance with housing and employment, Rhoads said.

It’s a “cruel irony” that he’s hoping the legislature can rectify this year.

“When someone comes out, it should just be more or less automatic. File the paperwork, get the money and try to put your life back together,” he said. “Instead, we strung him along for nine years until he died.”

Life After Wrongful Incarceration

Jardine was tried three times for the 1990 knifepoint rape of a woman in her Haʻikū home. After the first two trials ended in hung juries, he was convicted by the third in 1992 and sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Jardine maintained his innocence throughout his incarceration. He had multiple chances to go before a parole board, accept responsibility for the crime and join a sex offender treatment program to get released, said his sister, Naomi Aloy.

She recalled talking to him on the phone and encouraging him to take the offer so he could come home sooner. But he refused to admit guilt.

“He kept his integrity,” she said. “He knew who he was, he knew his heart, and he knew he didn’t do it.”

Shortly after the Hawaiʻi Innocence Project was founded at the University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa in 2005, one of the founding attorneys, Virginia Hench, visited him at the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Mississippi, where he was being held.

She took his case, and attorneys moved to retest DNA evidence preserved from the scene of the crime. Thanks to advancements in DNA technology, the new analysis excluded Jardine as the source of bodily fluids found at the scene.

In 2011, a Maui judge ordered a new trial, but the prosecutor declined to retry the case.

Jardine was free, but his struggles weren’t over.

He stayed with Aloy in Kahului for a few months, and she noticed how prison had affected his mind. He always asked permission before getting up to do something and sometimes called her “boss.”

“A couple times he would say, ‘Oh boss can I use the bathroom?’ and I’d be like, ‘I’m not your boss,’” she said. “He was pretty much brainwashed into the jail mentality.”

She got him his own apartment in the same building, but he wasn’t able to maintain the rent, she said. He later went to live with a girlfriend in Kula

Before he went to prison, he had been a carpenter, but two decades later, he’d lost those skills and was never given the support to learn skills required for a job in the modern world, Aloy said. Jardine told journalist Matt Levi in 2013 that he had no income other than $300 a month in food stamps.

“I have no house, I have no car, I have no job,” he told Levi.

Over the years, he was arrested multiple times for misdemeanor and felony theft.

In 2017, he was convicted of taking more than $250 of merchandise from Walmart, according to court records. Two years later, he was convicted of felony theft for stealing a generator and a water heater from Home Depot.

Most recently, in 2024, he was charged under the state’s habitual property crime statute for stealing a Honda lawn mower from Home Depot.

His health was also diminishing, and Aloy said he was in and out of the hospital multiple times with heart issues due to ongoing substance abuse.

“The state never gives you the correct tools, you know, tools for success,” she said. “They just pretty much threw him back out on the street. And then of course he’s going to make poor decisions.”

In the last months of his life, he was working odd jobs like cleaning people’s yards and picking ʻopihi to sell by the bag.

On Christmas Eve, the Maui Police Department posted on Facebook that Jardine had been missing since Dec. 10. His body was found on the evening of Dec. 27. The cause of death has not yet been determined, but no foul play is suspected, according to police spokeswoman Alana Pico.

Aloy said she thinks his heart might have given out while picking ʻopihi.

‘Life-Changing Money’

Just before he went missing, Aloy said her brother called her to say he’d signed papers with his attorney and agreed to the $600,000 settlement with the state. To her, it was a measly sum that didn’t come close to making up for the pain the state had put him through.

“I tried to tell him that that was a rip-off,” she said. “He had an opportunity to be somebody, and you guys just ripped that away from him, you ripped his whole life away from him.”

Jardine was eligible for at least $1 million under the law, which allows eligible petitioners to sue the state for $50,000 per year of imprisonment. It’s unclear how the settlement amount was determined. The AG’s office would only say that the settlement was agreed to by both parties and that payments reflect a variety of factors.

Jardine told his sister that he planned to accept the money and use it to move to Hilo and buy a house near relatives on the Big Island. He hoped to go camping and live off the land. Aloy said she wanted to retire there, too.

“He wanted his thing closed,” she said. “He wanted to know that there was a hope for the future.”

Jardine’s former attorney, William Harrison, said that had he received the wrongful conviction compensation money sooner, he would likely be alive today.

“That’s life-changing money,” Harrison said. “It’s at least something to get people back on their feet and take care of their immediate needs while they figure out how to put their lives back together.”

Rhoads agrees. He introduced a bill last year that would have compelled the state to start making $5,000 monthly payments to the wrongfully convicted immediately upon their release.

The bill failed to pass, but Rhoads has introduced a new version of the bill, State Bill 3294, with additional requirements that the state provide those who’ve been wrongfully convicted with medical insurance coverage and case managers to assist them with finding housing, getting a job and obtaining essential documents upon their release.

The bill has been referred to two joint committees and has not yet been scheduled for a hearing. Schwartz, of the AG’s Office, declined to comment on the bill. But the AG’s Office opposed last year’s version, arguing that the idea of giving petitioners $5,000 a month before their claim had gone through the full legal process conflicts with the state constitution, which says “no public money shall be expended except pursuant to appropriations made by law.”

The office also said the bill laid out no process by which the state could recoup the money if the petitioner was later found not to be innocent and therefore ineligible for the funds.

But Rhoads said potentially recouping the $5,000 monthly payments shouldn’t be the main concern when someone has spent time wrongfully incarcerated.

“They’re piddly amounts of money compared to the harm that’s been done,” he said.

Roynes Dural, who is also slated to receive wrongful conviction compensation money from the state this year, knew Jardine because their sentences overlapped. The two men spent time together in the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility and Saguaro Correctional Center in Arizona where the prisoners from Hawaiʻi were held together. The last time he saw Jardine was at an Innocence Project conference in Portland more than a decade ago, and it was clear to him that Jardine was struggling.

“I could see he wasn’t doing too well,” Dural said. “He didn’t even stay around for a lot of the stuff. He was kind of out doing his own thing.”

Dural, who is pursuing a master’s degree in social work from Hawaiʻi Pacific University and conducting his field practicum with a nonprofit helping homeless youth, said his settlement will allow him to focus on his studies and give back to his family, who have supported him since his release.

Getting a settlement could have helped Jardine — who struggled more to reintegrate back into society, in part because of the serious mental health effects he endured from his 20-year sentence — regain some stability, Dural said.

“Having that money, and the state coming forward and saying, ‘Alvin, we’re sorry that this happened to you. Allow us to try to help you in any way we can.’ That would have changed his life,” he said. “But they didn’t. They didn’t do that. So that’s on them, you know, his death is on them.”

___

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by a grant from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.

___

This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.