A pardon of innocence, like the one that then-Governor Roy Cooper issued in November 2024 to Mark Crotts, is a required first step for someone who intends to seek restitution for a wrongful conviction (see related story, this edition).
Individuals who are wrongfully convicted of a felony and imprisoned can receive a maximum of up to $750,000 if they file an application with the North Carolina Industrial Commission (NCIC) within five years of receiving a pardon, under a state law that governs the process.
A pardon of actual innocence is, like the name suggests, issued when an individual is found to be innocent of the charges for which he was originally convicted and also represents an official acknowledgement of a wrongful conviction, according to an analysis published earlier this year by the School of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (A pardon of forgiveness means that a conviction is set aside with conditions, according to the School of Government.) The Governor’s Executive Clemency Office reviews cases that may be eligible for a pardon of innocence.
An application for compensation through the NCIC must include a full statement of the facts, verified in the same manner required for verifying civil complaints; it may also include affidavits to substantiate the claim. A hearing to review the application for compensation is scheduled within two months, according to the commission, and if compensation is approved, the funds are disbursed by the Office of State Budget and Management, according to the commission.
While state awards for wrongful convictions are capped at a maximum of $750,000, there is no cap on federal awards for wrongful convictions involving civil rights violations under the U.S. Constitution.
According to the nonprofit National Exoneration Registry, 43 individuals in North Carolina who have been exonerated subsequently filed federal civil rights lawsuits for wrongful convictions, and 30 of those individuals (70 percent) had received an average award of $6.4 million each as of the end of 2025. (The database doesn’t give the overall time frame during which those cases were decided.)
Some of the high-profile federal cases involving North Carolinians who have been exonerated and later received federal awards for wrongful convictions include Darryl Howard, convicted of a 1991 double-murder in Durham and exonerated in 2016, who received approximately $6 million from a federal jury in 2021, according to the Innocence Project.
Most notably, half-brothers Henry McCollum and Leon Brown received $75 million, reportedly the largest federal award for wrongful convictions in U.S. history, from a federal jury in 2021 due to investigative misconduct in Robeson County that sent them to death row for three decades until they were exonerated in 2014, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
