This crime happened in 1985. If anyone is at all financially liable it would be anyone still alive who lived in that county in 1985. Certainly not the current residents. What these people are looking for is called reparations. Certainly the current county residents are in no way responsible for what happened nearly 30 years ago
I’m on the hook for the national debt run up before I was even thought of. Sounds odd if ya say it out loud. The problems of the past will always come forward if they aren’t fixed as soon as possible.
Well, Responsibility Never, that is completely dishonest on your part.
These people were exonerated in 1989 and the filthy corrupt municipality has spent all these decades trying to weasel out of paying restitution.
If there are people there who wanted to avoid addressing their group culpability they could have moved. And if they desired to owe a lesser sum it might have behooved them to pay up three decades ago.
Contrary to your completely disingenuous assertion, it is not just the people who were voters back in 1985 who piled on with the false conviction.
I know I know, its supposed to be “justice delayed is justice denied” and both the citizens there and you yourself are trying to force that to be true.
They are responsible for electing the people who fought the settlement for all those years. Maybe paying it off sooner when the wrongly convicted victims were young and could have built a life with the settlement money would have been the right and just thing to do. And, the ones doing the paying would have been the ones responsible.
With 22,000 residents the settlement amounts to about $1300 per head.
I will give you a choice -- you can unfairly pay $1300 to atone for the sins of your fathers or you can unfairly go to prison for 21 years. Neither one is really fair, but if those are the one two choices available I will take the $1300 in a heartbeat.
I'd have to say that doesn't really track. The government that prosecuted (persecuted) these people still exists. It exists as an entity in the same way that a corporate entity does. If a corporation dumps a bunch of dioxin in a hole, and this is discovered 20 years later, the corporation is still on the hook for the costs even though few of the existing shareholders that currently own the corporation may have been shareholders at the time the deed was done. Just because the entity that did it was a government doesn't give them a pass for being held responsible for it.
Personally, I'd rather see those who took part in this travesty get sentenced to the terms they saddled the victims with. That would be justice, and might help prevent things like this from happening again in the future. The problem with that is that the government adheres to the concept of 'sovereign immunity' which would largely protect any of those who are actually responsible. Because of this, you pretty much have to take it out on government itself, and the taxpayers that fund it.