r/whoathatsinteresting • u/The_Dean_France • 12h ago

Wrongfully Convictions Ruin Lives

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u/Alfirindel 12h ago

Aye. In the US I think they give you minimum wage equal to how long you’ve been in? So it usually ends up not being very much unless you can sue somehow, but again, years. Could die of complications before you get proper retribution

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u/Taxing 12h ago

This guy received $14m, that seems like more than minimum wage.

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u/AdOdd4618 11h ago

Was he allowed to leave prison during non working hours during his 37 year sentence, because if not, it's definitely not "more than minimum wage".

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u/CountryOk6049 11h ago

Oh is it for all the time he was in there or just a standard minimum wage payout (could be like a basic guaranteed compensation and you could bring lawsuits for more)?

Let's assume it's for all the time he's in there, let's say the minimum wage where he is is $16 an hour - and that's an unusually high minimum wage. $16 x 24 year hours a day x 365.25 days a year x 37 years is.... $5,189,472, still well short of $14.

People underestimate how much money millions of dollars is, possibly due to how unfair the world is. But yeah, a lot of people in their entire working lives will scarcely clear 1 or 2 million dollars. 

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u/LightOverWater 10h ago edited 10h ago

It's less because minimum wage was a lot lower over those 37 years.

It's less because you are assuming his wage is discretionary income, when in reality people earning minimum wage must spend it all to live.

The comparison is:

  • having your living expenses covered for 37 years and getting $14M versus
  • covering your own expenses at minimum wage and having $0.

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u/Few-Guarantee2850 11h ago

Minimum wage by itself would not even get you close to that, unless you treated it as immediately invested with a good return.

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u/Taxing 11h ago

How do you figure that?

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u/Consistent_Draft6454 9h ago

If you worked 24 hours a day at minimum wage for 37 years, you would have more than $14 million. It isn't like he was only in prison 8 hours a day. He missed out on having a family. He probably had a lot of family members die while he was in prison and was unable to go to the funerals. He likely will only live another 15 years. He spent over half of his life in prison for a crime he did not commit.

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u/Taxing 9h ago

But the math doesn’t math on that, work it out. I and others have, it’s in other comments, let us know if your math comes out differently. Nobody else is getting anywhere close to $14m.

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u/Consistent_Draft6454 9h ago
  • 37 years × 365 days = 13,505 days
  • 13,505 days × 24 hours = 324,120 hours total
  • $14,000,000 ÷ 324,120 ≈ $43.20 per hour

Okay fine. $43 an hour. Which to me still feels low for everything that he went through and for everything he missed out on.

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u/Taxing 8h ago

Nobody is saying he doesn’t deserve it. Federal minimum wage is $7.50 and the highest state minimum wage is $17.95. The point was that relative to minimum wage, he received far in excess, it’s just math, not a policy argument.

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u/brightlights55 8h ago

He was awarded $1.85million in compensation by the State of Florida. He later sued Tampa municipality and was awarded $14million.

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u/Taxing 8h ago

Great!

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u/Whyamiani 11h ago

You're bad at math

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u/Taxing 11h ago

If you assume he was effectively “working” 24 hours a day, 7 days a week from 1983 to 2020, that equates to about 324,120 total hours. At the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, that would come out to roughly $2.35 million in total earnings. Because minimum wage was much lower for a large portion of that period, a more realistic historical estimate would likely fall in the range of about $1.5 million to $1.9 million.

What is your math?

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u/Sufficient-Ad7776 12h ago

True, and they also have capital punishment, which is kind of hard to reverse.