Wicomico could be first county to pay part of wrongfully convicted man’s compensation

by Danielle J. Brown, Maryland Matters
August 6, 2025

The Wicomico County Circuit Court determined last year that Tavon Tull had been erroneously charged with sexually abusing a 21-month-old child in 2019 and spent more than 2,100 days in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.

To make up for the mistake, state officials are expected to vote Wednesday to pay Tull more than $570,000 as compensation for the nearly six years he spent behind bars. But the state won’t be picking up the tab alone.

For for the first time, a county will have to pay half of the cost of the compensation for a man it wrongfully convicted. If the Board of Public Works agrees to pay Tull $573,412.35, as expected, Wicomico County will be on the hook for $286,706 of that.

The requirement that a county government pick up part of the tab was one of several “cost sharing” measures approved by lawmakers this year to help the state close a $3 billion budget shortfall. County officials are not thrilled with the new requirement.

“This was a really weird item for county governments to try and bake into their county budget,” said Michael Sanderson, executive director of the Maryland Association of Counties.

The payments follow funding formulas established in the Walter Lomax Act, a 2021 law named for a man who was wrongfully convicted of murder and spent nearly four decades in prison. Under the law, compensation for proven or pardoned wrongful incarceration is determined by the length of time served and the state’s median income.

State officials have already paid out three other wrongful conviction cases since the start of 2025 totaling more than $6.5 million so far, according to Board of Public Works staff.

While local officials and state’s attorneys agree it’s important to correct the mistakes when a court system wrongfully charges an individual, there are worries that some counties will struggle with their new share of those costs.

“This is a kind of an interesting test case, because this won’t sink any jurisdiction,” Sanderson said of the Tull payment. “But what if it were a million?

“Occasionally there are these big settlements for people who have been incarcerated for multiple years. If this were a million dollars to a jurisdiction like Wicomico – that would put that county immediately into a fiscal crisis,” he said. “They have less ability than other jurisdictions to just pop a big check out of thin air.”

At a Board of Public Works meeting last month, state officials unanimously approved the payment of nearly $3 million to James Langhorne. He was exonerated in February in the 1996 death of Lawrence Jones in Baltimore City, after serving 27 years for the crime he did not commit.

But Langhorne’s case was settled before the new requirement for counties to pick up part of the compensation costs for wrongful convictions. The language was included in the Budget Reconciliation and Financing Act of 2025. Baltimore City did not have to contribute to his compensation.

In 2019, Tull was sentenced to serve 20 years for the second-degree rape of a child less than 2 years old.

Exoneree gets nearly $3 million, a public apology for 27 years wrongfully spent behind bars

Later evidence and discussion with medical experts “strongly” suggested Tull’s innocence and that the child may have had a medical condition that was mistaken for signs of sexual abuse in the initial case.

After an additional investigation, Wicomico County State’s Attorney Jamie Dykes filed for a motion to vacate Tull’s conviction in 2024.

“It’s important to know that we’re committed to getting it right,” Dykes said Tuesday. “It’s unfortunate that we did not get it right the first time around … It’s our job to protect the innocent, that’s what prosecutors do.”

Sanderson admits that Tull’s compensation won’t break the bank, but it’s difficult for local governments to account for those costs when creating their annual budgets.

“This is a weird circumstance where someday this might blow up your budget but we probably won’t know when or how much or where it lands,” he said.

“Most time, when the state wants to shift costs onto counties, they do it in a definite way — We don’t like that, but there is at least some certainty to it. You can budget that dollar amount,” Sanderson said. “Here it’s the reverse — for most years in most counties, this is going to be zero. It would be irresponsible for Wicomico to say, ‘Let’s hold a million dollars in the back of our budget in case this happens.’”

MACo legislative director Kevin Kinnally said in a commentary Tuesday that the BRFA language puts an “unfair and unsustainable burden” on counties.

“In Maryland, county governments do not prosecute, convict, or exonerate anyone,” Kinnally wrote. “They play no role in determining wrongful incarceration settlements. Yet a new law forces them to pay the bill anyway.”

He said the Board of Public Works approved $4.4 million in compensation in fiscal 2024, and noted that if the new cost-sharing formula “had applied, counties would have absorbed $2.2 million of that cost.”

“The State sets the rules, makes the decisions, and controls the process,” Kinnally wrote. “Counties just get the invoice.”

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