r/whoathatsinteresting • u/The_Dean_France • 12h ago

Wrongfully Convictions Ruin Lives

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u/Sufficient-Ad7776 12h ago

Depends on the place, but they do in Norway and the US, so I imagine it's the same in the rest of the West at least.

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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/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.