Former Warwick cop who was wrongfully imprisoned attends signing of compensation bill

PROVIDENCE — The six years, four months and 18 days that former Warwick Detective Jeffrey Scott Hornoff spent in prison for a murder he did not commit has all the makings of a movie script.

Except it really happened.

On Thursday, Hornoff and his family were at the Rhode Island State House for the ceremonial signing by Gov. Dan McKee of a new law to allow payments of up to $50,000 out of the state treasury for each year spent in prison by someone wrongfully convicted.

Hornoff, now 59, described the State Room ceremony as an important moment to him, "18 years in the making," from the day another man confessed to the murder for which he had been convicted.

He credited state Rep. Patricia Serpa, D-West Warwick, for picking up his cause three years ago, "when I mailed her a manila envelope" containing information about compensation statutes in other states.

"As you may know, Representative Serpa is the champion of the elderly, the environment, animals, the underdog, the downtrodden," Hornoff said. "And I fall into at least one of those categories."

Hornoff spent more than six years in prison for the 1989 murder of Victoria Cushman.

Cushman was 29 and living alone in a one-bedroom apartment above the Alpine Ski/Sports complex in Warwick, where she worked. In July she met Hornoff, a married man, on the deck of the Coast Guard House, in Narragansett, and the two began a relationship.

When Cushman failed to arrive at work on the morning of Aug. 11, another employee of Alpine went to her apartment and found her body lying in the living room near an open window. Investigators later determined she had been bludgeoned with a fire extinguisher and a jewelry box, and likely strangled.

Police found in Cushman’s apartment a letter she had written but not sent to Hornoff, expressing her desire to continue the relationship. Police believed it provided Hornoff a motive for her killing.

Though Hornoff told a superior officer he knew Cushman, he initially lied about having had a relationship with her. 

Hornoff had attended a fellow officer’s house party the night Cushman was killed. But despite Hornoff’s having a solid alibi, and without any kind of physical evidence linking him to the crime scene,  police pursued him as the only suspect. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder in 1996.

Six years later another man, Todd Barry, confessed to killing Cushman, and Hornoff was released from prison. 

At a 2019 hearing on an earlier version of the compensation bill,  Hornoff told lawmakers: “You might try to imagine a cop in prison. ... I was double-bunked with some of the most disgusting men you could imagine.”

If not for Barry’s confession, “I’d be there tonight,” Hornoff told the lawmakers.

Hornoff sued the city of Warwick and the state in federal court, alleging that the police violated his civil rights through errors in the murder investigation and by not preserving or considering evidence that would have cleared his name.

He subsequently withdrew his lawsuit against the state police. But the city agreed, as part of the settlement of two lawsuits, to pay Hornoff $600,000 and give him a work-related disability pension, which at that time was worth $47,000 a year, tax-free.

It remains unclear whether the pension benefit might impact his ability to collect compensation under the new law. He said he has not yet applied, but is working with a lawyer and expects to file a petition within two to four weeks. 

It is unclear how many others might qualify.

On its website, the advocacy group known as the Innocence Project names six individuals exonerated since 1989 – after serving a total of 27.6 years in prison – who may be eligible in Rhode Island. 

Among them: Kimberly Mawson, who was convicted by a jury in 2007 of second-degree murder in the 2002 death of her 19-month-old daughter Jade.

Then-Judge Edwin J. Gale sentenced her to 60 years in prison, but her case was reopened in 2010 after lawyer Richard Corley told the state disciplinary counsel that his former client, Daniel R. Fusco, Mawson’s once-boyfriend and a key witness against her at trial, told him in 2002 that he was responsible for the child’s death.

Mawson was cleared in 2012 but Fusco was never charged. 

The attorney general’s explanation: ”[T]he account attributed to Fusco cannot be reconciled with the evidence presented at trial concerning the manner of Jade’s death."