In 2002, Kimberly Mawson of Rhode Island headed out to fetch diapers, baby wipes and milk for 19-month-old Jade. She got a ride with the father of her then-boyfriend, Daniel Fusco, leaving Fusco alone with the baby Jade in his attic apartment. Mawson heard her name paged on a store intercom: Fusco told her Jade had fallen down and wouldn't wake up. She told him to call 911, dropped her groceries and ran more than a mile to the apartment, arriving just after the rescue crews. Jade was unconscious wearing only a diaper. Two days later, Jade died of a traumatic brain injury, her body marked with bruises and a tear to the baby’s hymen. Mawson, 52, is seeking compensation for almost three years she wrongfully served after being convicted in 2007 of second-degree murder in the death of Jade, reports the Providence Journal.
State lawmakers last year allowed payments of up to $50,000 out of the state treasury for each year spent in prison by someone wrongfully convicted. Mawson is seeking $133,527, saying, “I feel that I deserve a lot more, honestly. The attorney general’s office shouldn’t be immune,” she said of her wrongful prosecution and conviction. She called the sum a “pittance.” In 2007, Judge Edwin Gale sentenced Mawson to 60 years, calling her “a cold-hearted murderer, a dangerous person, who refuses to come to grips with the fact that she killed the baby to whom she initially gave life." Fusco's lawyer later said Fusco had told him he was responsible for Jade's death. Fusco’s father, Michael Fusco, told Warwick police in 2010 that his son told him, days after the baby's death, that he grabbed and shook the infant, but Michael said he never believed him and thought he was protecting Mawson.