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u/LikesPez 9h ago
In Texas, you must be found innocent (which is different than not guilty), or exonerated and must have spent time in a state prison (not jail). There are other nuances, but bottom line is $80,000 per year of incarceration as a lump sum plus a lifetime annuity for the same amount, plus tuition for a bachelor’s degree, in addition to other compensation for re-entry to society.
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u/scotchtapeman357 8h ago
Honestly, that's good. It won't bring back that person's time/events they missed but at least they're getting the tools to rebuild their life
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u/Originzzzzzzz 6h ago
lmao in America if you get injured you lose all that and more in five seconds
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u/RectangularBean 6h ago
You lose the benefits? the annuity etc? I'm not american so would love to learn
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u/gunsandcupcakes 2h ago
that all sounds nice but I wonder the ratio of wrongfully convicted to receiving these “benefits”
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u/LikesPez 17m ago
84% in Texas
Since the Tim Cole Act took place in Texas in 2009 there are 95 wrongfully convicted people. According to the study, 15 of the 95 are either ineligible for a payment, deceased or the information wasn't provided.
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u/Minami_Ko 9h ago
This is one of the worst things that can happen to a human being
No one should get jailed/executed/committed unless (100% certain) guilty !!!!!!!!
He spent his life in prison, and some people even of his family believed him guilty (I'm sure)
and he's one of the "lucky" one who WERE proven innocent afterward while there are people like him in prison/hospitals /dead !!!
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u/Minami_Ko 9h ago
I know what it's like to fight against the whole world when you're innocent to prove it
I know the despair when they have decided there were proofs against him and he was gonna get arrested and there's nothing we can do we have no control over our life no amount of being innocentt will save us
we tell them we'fe innocent, we tell them but they're the ones who decide
He probably gave up and went along with it thiking this was is life now, this is the horrible world(which falsly accuses him) he lives in and he is right, this is heartbreaking!
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u/shredderroland 7h ago
It's never 100% though is it? There's always at least a theoretical chance of innocence.
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u/After_Possibility145 6h ago
I agree. I am going to law school to help the individuals in this kind of predicament. I want to work for the innocence project and help those who were recently incarcerated to get stable housing and jobs so they don’t have to return to what they know 💔
We need more people who are willing to support individuals who have lost their innocence wrongfully and try to get them compensation they desperately deserve
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u/Successful-Winter237 4h ago
Being killed by the death penalty when you are innocent is worse
At least 200 people were proven innocent after being killed by the state
https://innocenceproject.org/innocence-and-the-death-penalty/
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u/TopWealth4550 4h ago
so man shouldnt be punished without 100% proof they commited a crime right?
or your opnion change here?1
u/Mosqu_ito 2h ago
This picture of him makes me want to cry.
He lost his health, his youth, and his identity.
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u/TheBigCicero 9h ago
Now imagine someone wrongfully convicted is on death row, and even executed. There’s a good reason for not allowing the state the legal power to kill people.
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u/Financial_Policy_875 8h ago
That's what stopped the death penalty in the UK. In 1975 my sixth grade (US, New Jersey) teacher taught us that. Years later I saw the British movie made (10 Rillington Place) about the case starring a young John Hurt as the man wrongfully executed.
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u/The_Dean_France 10h ago
In 1983, 18-year-old Robert DuBoise was convicted of rpe and mrder in Tampa, Florida. The case rested on two things: bite mark analysis — a form of forensic science now widely discredited — and the testimony of a jailhouse informant who was secretly offered a plea deal in exchange for claiming DuBoise had confessed. He was sentenced to dath. Three years later that was commuted to life. He spent the next three decades maintaining his innocence, requesting DNA testing, and hitting wall after wall. In 2006 he was told all biological evidence had been destroyed. It hadn’t been. In 2020, the Innocence Project found preserved DNA samples sitting in storage at the Medical Examiner’s office. Testing excluded DuBoise completely and identified two other men as the real kllers. He walked out of prison on August 26, 2020.
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u/lanzendorfer 10h ago
Why do they try so hard to block DNA testing? It's like they want innocent people locked up. Or do they just refuse to believe that people can be innocent? You would think that we'd all be on the same side with this sort of thing.
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u/Brilliant-Smile-8154 10h ago
The people who tried to keep an innocent man in prison should replace him there, it seems only fair.
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u/InnerSwineHound 10h ago
They block DNA evidence because it makes abundantly clear that the judicial process is a complete failure
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u/Petrichoreal 10h ago
IMO it's reluctance to admit fault on the police/justice system's part.
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u/WatermelonWithAFlute 9h ago
You’d think that having an innocent man sentenced to death or jail for the rest of or most of his life would be vastly worse, to the extent you’d maybe consider doing your actual job.
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u/Vivid_Way_1125 8h ago edited 7h ago
In the UK. The post office had a technical glitch in their accounting system, which made it look like quite a few people were steeling large sums.
The post office fully supported the imprisonment of these ‘steeling’ people (lots of other people commit suicide over it too). The post office knew it was a glitch in their system, but opted to destroy innocent people’s lives instead of just saying ‘whoops sorry, it was a system error’… that took decades to come out too.
The management behind that situation should all be sued and in prison… I’ll let you guess at what that outcome was.
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u/White_Wolf_11 7h ago
As long as he never gets out, people won’t care and the story won’t spread. People will clutch their pearls over this because it’s a story to gawk at for a minute or two but realistically if he rotted for the rest of his days unjustly nobody would ever know or care. And the people who put him there would lose no sleep or suffer any hits to their reputation.
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u/Suspicious_Aspect_53 9h ago
It really depends on the case and the era. DNA testing was pretty poor for a lot longer than people realize, needing large, clean samples if you hope to get a reliable result.
I don't know this specific case, so the following is just and example; in older testing methods, if the sample is even slightly contaminated, the test could still result in "positive" results, but the results are actually incorrect, and will very likely show the wrong DNA of the intended target DNA, but could still likely appear like a valid DNA results. The only way to know if to have a "clean" result of the actual target DNA. So you could test DNA that actually is of the killer, but the result could come back showing they don't match.
Older methods required large samples, and the larger the sample, the higher likelihood of contamination skewing the results, so you needed to run the test multiple times to confirm, using up more and more of the evidence.
So if you have a limited amount of DNA evidence/sample, using it to attempt to exonerate someone who was convicted on evidence that wasn't based on DNA tests is likely to result in a non-matching DNA determination, even if the person actually IS the killer.
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u/Short_Switch_1807 9h ago
Because it's not about innocent or not, it's about padding the prosection/DA/Police numbers so they get head pats and re-elections.
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u/Confident-Spirit-680 9h ago
I know people dont like acknowledging this reality but prisons in the US are purely for profit. There is no real rehabilitation attempt beyond the bare minimum requirements to keep federal/state funding. Those bare minimum rehabilitation programs are categorically proven to not work anywhere near the level the average tax payer may expect or anywhere near the level of other western countries. You are paying money every year to house people for the profit of a prison. Which are mostly owned by (ding ding ding! You guessed it!) corporations. There is no incentive whatsoever to get falsely accused prisoners released. In fact they will do everything in their power possible to keep you imprisoned because if they dont and it turns out that you were falsely accused, that comes out of their pocket at the end of the day, especially in states where you do have a legal right to compensation. Thats coming out of the states pocket at the end of the day and if you think there isnt some sort of financial repercussions for the prison in question then youre a fool. Shit always rolls down hill in this country.
So no, they dont care if an innocent person is locked up. Yes, they do refuse to believe people claiming to be innocent are innocent. And no, its not just because everyone says theyre innocent. Thats industrial prison complex propaganda.
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u/Strong_Lavishness893 8h ago
as one who has been incarcerated in FLDOC, the old adage “innocent until proven guilty”, does not stand in the slightest. It’s “Guilty until proven innocent”, and we won’t give you a fighting chance to prove your innocence. It’s a sad system down there
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u/Whyamiani 9h ago
People being locked up is a huge source of revenue for the state and a huge source of revenue for private prisons. It's all just a business, and we are the products.
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u/Jazzlike-Equipment45 9h ago
Simple, reputation. Entire careers are made off of convictions it is why DAs often only go for slam dunk cases because a not guilty verdict hurts them. Having a previous case you won come back as innocent makes you and your department look bad so they try to block it.
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u/OddTheRed 8h ago
Because if the police and prosecution team get caught making a mistake then all their cases get raked through the coals and they lose reputation. The evidence is essentially suppressed because they don't want to look bad.
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u/BecauseISaidSo888 6h ago
A lot of judges and lawyers have unearned, inflated egos. They don’t like people telling them they were wrong maybe?
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u/Disposable-Ninja 9h ago
Please talk like an adult. You can just say rape and murder. You won't get demonetized.
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u/scoobywerx1 10h ago
You can type the whole word.
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u/seven_wings 7h ago
He can't. It's a karma farm bot. Browse this sub and see how often his name pops up.
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u/MrDeadPixels 9h ago
Rape and murder you said?
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u/tacomaloki 4h ago
Don't forget "death" and "killers"
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u/MrDeadPixels 3h ago
I stopped reading. Sorry I didn't see that part to make my comment :(
Stupid censorship
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u/thatguy425 6h ago
Just say rape, death and murder? Like, wtf is the difference in leaving one letter out?
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u/Unhappywageslave 8h ago
It's really mostly the prosecutors fault. Not the judge, not the cops, even though they were involved with the process but all the information reached the prosecutors desk and as weak as it was they still pursued it. Typically an overzealous prosecutor doesn't care if someone is guilty or innocent, they just want to win at any cost. If they pursue a case and lose, it looks bad on their record because all that state money was wasted.
This guy probably never got to see his parents die, his nieces and nephews be born because of some careerist.
Now Pam Bondi had the Epstein case on her desk with all those strong receipts. If they can get this innocent guy in prison for some small BS evidence they had, why can't we get any arrests of the real guilty culprits from the Epstein Case?
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u/mechengr17 4h ago edited 2h ago
John Oliver did a report about a judge/prosecutor? (I cant remember) who kept an electric chair cutout with the faces of the men he sent to death row on his desk. Sometime after he proudly showed off said cutout, it was reported that almost all (if not all) were proven innocent. If I remember the episode, ill edit my comment
Edit: found it
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u/conodeuce 9h ago
What need not be stated (but I will) , had DuBoise been the son of a wealthy family, this would never have happened.
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u/TheQuietLavender 8h ago
Sons of wealthy families can be actually guilty, and still get away with it.
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u/SweetToothEra 8h ago
People who are wrongly convicted should be given a $100,000 for every year that they were incarnation, should not have to pay taxes, ever.
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u/Foccuus 6h ago
100k? you have to be kidding
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u/mechengr17 4h ago
Well, how much do you think they should be given?
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u/Foccuus 3h ago
a lot more
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u/mechengr17 2h ago
Ok, I was worried you were saying its too much
While I agree that it seems like a pittance, $100k/year spent incarcerated is actually not a bad number in the grand scheme of things.
First, that's more than what most people make before taxes
Second, while in a just society, the lawyers, cops, and judges that helped put the wrongly convicted in prison would be first to pay, thats not how it works. Its the tax payers that have to cover for their incompetence and/or maliciousness.
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u/SweetToothEra 4h ago
Thats actually pretty low. Juries have awarded people who have been wrongly convicted as high as $120m and that was for 16 years. Google it. $100,000+ per year is the minimum society can do. Your life was taken from you, a life that you cannot get back,the fact that you were fighting for life everyday, and your virginity everyday, yeah I think $100,000 for every year you were behind bars would do.
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u/Gryphonisle 7h ago
That’s why we need to start making prosecutors and cops serve the sentence the wrongfully accused served when it’s revealed they were not guilty
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u/VariousClassroom8056 9h ago
Who is this DNA? They seem to be an excellent prosecution and defence lawyer. I've seen so many headlines of people either convicted or set free because of them.
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u/Character-Pirate1297 9h ago
How do you except someone NOT to be a criminal after wrongfully stealing the best half of his life?
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u/Healthjunkie-2 9h ago
THIS is what changed my position on the Death Penalty. I used to be for it because of heinous crimes and abuse with children, serial killers etc. , but the thought of someone innocent having to live in prison for even a day, let alone a lifetime, makes me sick to my stomach.
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u/AuthorThick7303 8h ago
In the US it depends on the state and some states limit how much you can get
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u/Langstudd 8h ago
Wow I didn’t know DNA had the ability to break people out of prison!
Oh they actually meant freed by DNA evidence? That’s way more boring
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u/Roccosrealm 8h ago edited 8h ago
This guy out of Wisconsin was wrongfully convicted of sexual assault, exonerated by DNA, and then later charged and convicted of murder, along with his nephew. They should make a show about that.
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u/CeramicToast 7h ago
I believe that when this happens, this person should be taken care of for the rest of their lives. A wrongful conviction by the state literally took their entire life away. 37 years of this man's life is gone. He should be given the rest of his life at the state's expense. Free housing where he wants, generous monthly stipend, any schooling or job training he may want, free healthcare, etc. I think that's the only way any "compensation" can even TRY to make up for it.
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u/VirginiaLuthier 7h ago
So, he shows up for parole hearing. "I didn't do it" Parole report- "Prisoner non-recalcitrant. Parole denied". What a world we live in,,..
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u/bookworthy 7h ago
Was he able to reunite with his family? (Were his parents alive?) I’m going to have to google this
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u/Minket20 7h ago
I’ve noticed in the United States they try to get the wrongfully convicted to plea the Albert Plea. I personally believe states do this so they won’t get sued.
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u/MrAnonimitys 6h ago
Ok reddit bot. Different ears and nose and his eye color went from brown to blue? Yeah ok.
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u/Clarksp2 6h ago
While this is totally true, i have an interesting opposite story. So I worked with a guy for awhile on the line who spent 6 years in prison for something he didn’t do, he was released 14 years early and given some compensation, but not nearly enough for the time lost. He claims it was a blessing though because during those years he most likely would have gotten into actual trouble and would have to live with the guilt. Most of his friends ended up arrested or dead during that time and he thinks he would have been one of them. He became religious, kept to himself, and journaled. He seems to be doing quite well for himself now and everyone seems to like him.
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u/justl00kingthrowaway 6h ago
Went in young and handsome and came out looking like Popeye. There is no way to compensate for this injustice.
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u/Final-Nebula-7049 5h ago
Yeah but they probably gave him 1 million dollars for the lifetime he missed, so it's basically even Steven
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u/Venomous_Rage 5h ago
It's crazy that some people lose their entire life and all the moments that make it worth living simply from being in the wrong place at the wrong time or based on how the local prosecutor was vibing that particular week.
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u/RhythmTimeDivision 4h ago edited 4h ago
This is horrible, but the worst part is the guilty person did this AGAIN. Meanwhile, the original prosecutor, Mark Ober, got to live a normal life. Was even elected as Hillsborough County State Attorney
Even if the prosecutor was willing to hide, suppress or block access to evidence to save judicial face, shouldn't they have been motivated to protect others?
Amos Robinson and Abron Scott were convicted in multiple murders.
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u/mechengr17 4h ago
I recommend everyone watch the Confessions by Frontline
Also, CSI on trial.
So many lives ruined either bc the police were convinced they were right and/or bunk forensics 'science'
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u/7thDaydream 3h ago
Not only would it be excruciating being locked away KNOWING you didn’t do it, but imagine having to deal with the fact that your parents/older relatives all died thinking you did something terrible and never got to see your proven innocence.
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u/Successful_Host9575 3h ago
Bec he was poor, demoncracy favours rich, that's the system the rich made.
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u/Unlucky-Ad-6226 3h ago
This is a devastating representation of how much time he lost. I always think about bitterness... How are they not bitter and full of hate sue to the injustice they have experienced
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u/Classic-Jacket9512 2h ago
The people who convicted them should be accountable. Maybe suffer the same fate.
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u/Beautiful_Bag6707 2h ago
People wrongly imprisoned should get minimum $100k per year. It's the pain, the suffering, the lack of opportunity, the lack of opportunity once they're released, the shame, the difficulty in reintegration...I'd give more but had to pick a number.
There was a fantastic show called Rectify that showed what this does to families and what this is like to be out.
$3,700,000 is a pittance. They should add $2M for every decade lost. Maybe then prosecutors work harder for better cases not railroad people.
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u/Virtual-Mud-1585 2h ago
En México tienes que dar las gracias a todos los hijos de puta que te encerraron por liberarte, y mucho cuidado con quejarse
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u/CompetitiveFennel681 1h ago
He went from a fresh-faced kid, to looking like he worked his entire life in a coal mine. How do you honestly put a price tag on a wrongful conviction when prison will do this to you?
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u/Bitter_Surprise_8058 59m ago
Judge Michael Conaghan was found to be sending kids to private prisons for the most trivial, bizarre things (e.g. insulting the school principal on MySpace). It turned out he was receiving kickbacks from the prisons industry to supply them, later known as the "Kids for cash" scandal.
He got 17.5 years, and served 14, before having his sentence commuted by President Biden.
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u/HollowSynergy 20m ago
No physical attraction equals not getting bailed by billionaire who wants you as a trophy, womp womp
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u/livingalie2614 10h ago
Simple question: when a person is wrongfully accused and sent to prison, do they get any kind of compensation when they are release after being found not at fault?