John Huffington was pardoned in January for a 1981 double murder he didn’t commit.

And, on Wednesday, Maryland awarded the exoneree nearly $2.9 million for the 32 years he was wrongly imprisoned — 10 of which he’d spent on death row.

His compensation, calculated by an administrative law judge at $91,431 per year, comes under a 2021 law that allows the wrongly convicted to seek a financial remedy. That same year, the Maryland Supreme Court — which was then known as the Maryland Court of Appeals — disbarred the prosecutor who sought Huffington’s conviction, citing egregious missteps in the case, including withholding evidence.

As the Democrats who chair the three-member Board of Public Works panel approved Huffington’s award Wednesday, they celebrated the state’s willingness to address the wrongs in its past.

Comptroller Brooke E. Lierman said she brought her 10-year-old son to watch “because I wanted him to witness and understand that government makes massive failures sometimes, but we have to put people in place to try to correct those.”

“I recognize that no dollar amount can ever make up for what was stolen from you,” she said to Huffington. “But I hope that today’s action brings some solace, some vindication.”

Gov. Wes Moore, who said he has a signed copy Huffington’s book in his office and considers him a friend, praised the exoneree for not leaving prison a decade ago as a bitter man and instead working with community groups and on criminal justice panels.

Huffington was imprisoned at 18 for the May 1981 slayings of Diane Becker and Joseph Hudson in Abingdon, a community in Harford County. A second suspect in the killings, who testified against Huffington, was convicted of first-degree murder and served 27 years.

Huffington was in prison when his mother died in 2008 and was not permitted to attend her funeral, something he said in a 2021 interview was impossible to process. “That’s the one thing that’s so unforgivable,” Huffington said then. He has no pension or retirement, and has worked to help former prisoners with reentry, job training and other programs to reduce recidivism.

“Mr. Huffington, John, was wrongfully incarcerated for 11,575 days,” Moore said. “He was robbed of the time being spent with family and loved ones. Holidays, birthdays, missed milestones and opportunities denied. Injustice, time and time again.”

Moore led the room in a 30-second standing ovation for Huffington, who attended with his girlfriend and some of his attorneys. More than 120 lawyers at the Ropes and Gray law firm worked on Huffington’s case for 40 years.

“Your presence here today, frankly, serves as a reminder that our state has not always gotten it right, but we will always keep searching to make sure we that do,” Moore said. “So, bless you, man, and thank you so much. And on behalf of the entire State of Maryland, we are deeply, deeply sorry.”

Former Harford County state’s attorney Joseph I. Cassilly, who had handled Huffington’s case for 36 years before retiring, was disbarred by the state’s Supreme Court in 2021.

The judges wrote in a 97-page ruling that Cassilly had committed “various instances of intentionally dishonest misconduct” and that he “intentionally failed to disclose exculpatory evidence as a prosecutor for over a decade” in Huffington’s case.

When Cassilly learned of the disbarment from a Baltimore Sun reporter, he told the Sun he had done nothing wrong and his case “fell into the whole anti-criminal justice movement, where the cops are the bad guys and the prosecutors are the bad guys.”

Cassilly wrote in the Aegis, a Harford County newspaper, that he was “unduly disbarred” and that he was still confident that Huffington was a killer.

Huffington’s conviction was built partially on expert testimony that matched hair found at the crime scene to the same type of hair Huffington has, an analysis that was later found scientifically unreliable. (His fingerprints were also one of several sets found on a bottle of vodka allegedly used to hit one of the victims, and a co-suspect testified against him.)

Huffington has always maintained his innocence.

In 1999, the Federal Bureau of Investigation flagged to Cassilly that the hair analysis testimony given by its expert in Huffington’s case was questionable. But Cassilly never turned over the document, which was made public by an advocacy group in 2011. A subsequent DNA test in 2013 determined the crime scene hair did not belong to Huffington.

That year, a judge overturned Huffington’s conviction and a new trial was ordered. He was released from prison in July 2013, awaiting another murder trial.

In 2017, Cassilly offered — and Huffington accepted — an Alford plea, where the defendant acknowledges the state has enough evidence to convict but does not accept guilt. Huffington was sentenced to his 32 years served, and later sought a pardon from Gov. Larry Hogan.

Hogan granted that pardon in January, five days before he left office. The same day, he issued a pardon for Walter Lomax, a fellow exoneree who served 39 years in prison for the murder of a grocery store clerk that he did not commit. In 2019, Lomax, who later became a criminal justice activist, received $3 million in compensation for his wrongful conviction.

Huffington sought financial redress under the 2021 “Walter Lomax Act,” which its namesake worked for years to pass. It sets the amount that exonerees would be paid for each year behind bars, and it allows an administrative law judge to grant other benefits, including a state identification card, housing accommodations for up to five years, health and dental care, educational training and reimbursement for court fees.