Posted on 09/04/2009 1:26:31 PM PDT by BJClinton
Exonerees will get $80,000 for each year they spent behind bars. The compensation also includes lifetime annuity payments that for most of the wrongly convicted are worth between $40,000 and $50,000 a year — making it by far the nation's most generous package.
Dallas County alone has 21 cases in which a judge overturned guilty verdicts based on DNA evidence, though prosecutors plan to retry one of those.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
“Has nothing to do with what they might have earned, it's about loss of freedom. How much do you think 26 years of your life behind bars would be worth - for something you didn't do. “
Yes, it has everything to do with it!
No amount of money will compensate them.
Others wrongly convicted and freed weren't compensated.
What they rejoiced in was their FREEDOM and personal VINDICATION. This is how it has always been. Their record was expunged and they lived out their life. Family and friends helped them heal. Money, won't do that. Or do you think money buys happiness too? I can easily see this abused ... .
You're kidding, right?
How does that interview go?
Q. "So, let's take a look at your resume here. Hmmm. Well, I see you don't list any job history for the last 20 years. What have you been up to?"
A. "I was in prison for rape. No no, it's cool: I was wrongfully convicted. . . . So, when do I start?"
I have a hard time believing that story. I used to think that women wouldn't lie about rape or sexual assault. I don't think that anymore.
Part of the big deal in these cases is the mistake wasn't an innocent one.
thats quite a leap. And now that I think about it, it was a show about the DA's office in Dallas that was going back and looking at these cases.
I couldn't agree more. I would take it a step further and demand that prisoners with an HIV-positive status be segregated from the rest of the population. There's no reason we can't have HIV-positive cell-blocks, wings or even prisons.
I doubt we want to know how many men have been infected with HIV, to say nothing of other less-lethal STD's, because they were a victim of a sexual assault in prison.
Imagine sitting in a 4x8 room 23 hours a day for 10 years.
The wrongfully incarcerated do deserve the $$$.
I agree that most don’t. The biggest problem is being shown someone who looks somewhat like the guy who really did it. I’d love to see that show.
All of society was damaged because these innocent people were locked away; all of society should have to pay the price.
As in insurance cases settled in court, shouldn’t the person jailed incorrectly have to pay his room and board like hospitalized accident patients have to pay with insurance settlements?
Not true. The convicted man is always a convicted man in the mind of the public, no matter the crime. "He's that school janitor who raped and killed that little girl" is the kind of memory that can't be expunged by a judge's gavel and a "Sorry, we made a mistake. Give us two or three days ore in prison while we get the paperwork together, and then you can just mosey on outta here."
Freedom, like life itself, is God-given, and therefore has no earthly price --- but, as is proper, we can, and do, try to approximate.
So what do you think it’s worth to be locked in a small bathroom for 20 years because of something you did NOT do?? HMMMM???? It is so easy to be indignant about someone’s fortunate when you think they don’t deserve it — until you think outside your little small world to the reality of being wrongfully convicted and locked up for a huge chunk of your life. That stigma upon release goes with these guys forever, regardless of being exonerated.
What is YOUR personal freedom worth? It’s impossible to put a price tag on it. We are not “worth” the sum total of our earning potential. We are human beings, with rights under God. How can you possibly say that one million dollars per ANYTHING is too much to pay to these men?
I personally know someone serving a life sentence for crimes he 100% did not commit. We’re working hard on his release through The Innocence Project. He has lost 20 years of his life, and yet remains hopeful and joyful as a human being in the face of injustice beyond what most of us can even fathom. He deserves every penny he can get when he’s released.
You probably heard some feminist make that claim.
Probably fifty years ago, my father was working in a psychiatric ward. Two policeman dragged in a handcuffed young man who was in a rage. The cops dumped him on the floor and prepared to leave.
My Dad told them to remove the handcuffs, which they refused to do. My Dad told them if they didn't remove the handcuffs then they would have to take him away. There wasn't any way to deal with him if he was bound.
After the cops uncuffed the guy, my Dad worked to calm him down and offered him a cigarette. After calming down, the guy told his story.
The guy had been sitting in a car with his girlfriend. She wanted him to marry her and he refused. At that point, a police car was driving by. She started yelling, "Rape!" and there was no convincing the cops that he was innocent. The girl later confessed to the false charges.
Amen.
What do you figure is the going rate to rent perhaps half of an eight-by-eight room with no windows, a free-standing toilet, and a door that is more-or-less permanently locked? Shall we add in the free health care that consists of conjugal visits by an HIV-positive cell-mate?
I think any imputed value one might attach to the circumstances of the imprisonment would be vanishingly small and could be ignored without substantially changing the award.
The name of the show is Dallas DNA, and it airs on the Investigation Discovery Channel.
I watch it, when I can catch it. The innocent men, especially the ones who have been in jail for a decade or more, are lost once they are exonerated. Their families, thinking them sex offenders, have disowned them; wives divorced them, grown children shunning the men even after they are released.
How much, do you think, should we pay a man whose wife died believing him to be a rapist? His children are grown and gone; the last time he was free, the first IBM PC hadn't been sold. The DA's office had to explain cell phones to him. How does he live? He went into prison at thirty, and he's sixty now; what job does he apply for? He was a mechanic, back in 1979; what garage can he work at now?
It's so very easy for us to sit out here in our freedom and our arrogance and say, "You're not guilty now ... Next case!" It's easy to look down our noses at the unjustly accused and flick them away like so much inconvenient lint, but we are, all of us, responsible for the miscarriage of justice that robbed them of their lives.
“When their record is expunged, there is no stigma.”
Experienced people can spot an ex-con at fifty paces.
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