{"id":2212,"date":"2016-06-21T15:55:38","date_gmt":"2016-06-21T15:55:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/?p=2212"},"modified":"2016-06-21T15:55:38","modified_gmt":"2016-06-21T15:55:38","slug":"what-is-appropriate-indemnity-for-wrongful-prosecution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/?p=2212","title":{"rendered":"What is \u2018appropriate indemnity\u2019 for wrongful prosecution?"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_2213\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2213\" style=\"width: 200px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-2213\" src=\"http:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/160621Borchard200.jpg\" alt=\"Edwin Borchard\" width=\"200\" height=\"200\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/160621Borchard200.jpg 200w, https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/160621Borchard200-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-2213\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Edwin Borchard<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\">June 21, 2016<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOne of the earliest arguments for financial compensation for the wrongly incarcerated came in 1932, from the Yale law professor Edwin Borchard. In an influential book called \u2018Convicting the Innocent: Sixty-five Actual Errors of Criminal Justice,\u2019 Borchard wrote, \u2018When it is discovered after conviction that the wrong man was condemned, the least the State can do to right this essentially irreparable injury is to reimburse the innocent victim, by an appropriate indemnity for the loss and damage suffered.\u2019 He noted, \u2018European countries have long recognized that such indemnity is a public obligation.\u2019 But it would be many years before the United States began puzzling through what constituted an \u2018appropriate indemnity.\u2019 It wasn\u2019t until the first DNA exoneration, in 1989, that most states began to seriously consider compensation.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere is still no consensus about the value of lost time. Missouri gives exonerees $50 a day for time served, California twice that much. Massachusetts caps total compensation at $500,000. In Maine, the limit is $300,000; in Florida, it\u2019s $2 million. The variation is largely arbitrary. \u2018If there\u2019s a logic to it, I haven\u2019t seen it,\u2019 Robert J. Norris, a researcher at SUNY Albany who has studied compensation statutes, told me&#8230;. Twenty states have no compensation statutes at all.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><em>\u2013 From \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/2015\/04\/13\/the-price-of-a-life\" target=\"_blank\">The Price of a Life: What\u2019s the right way to compensate someone for decades of lost freedom<\/a>?\u201d\u00a0by Ariel Levy in the New Yorker (April 13, 2015)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>North Carolina exonerees <a href=\"http:\/\/nccriminallaw.sog.unc.edu\/compensation-for-the-wrongly-convicted\/\" target=\"_blank\">are entitled<\/a>\u00a0to $50,000 for each year spent in prison, plus job training and college tuition, up to a maximum of $750,000. However, those statutes apply only to persons \u201cgranted a pardon of innocence by the Governor upon the grounds that the crime with which the person was charged either was not committed at all or was not committed by that person.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As excruciatingly demonstrated in the case of Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/?p=1442\">not every governor is in a hurry<\/a>\u00a0to enable that compensation.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-1707\" src=\"http:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/LRDCC20.jpg\" alt=\"LRDCC20\" width=\"132\" height=\"20\" \/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>June 21, 2016 \u201cOne of the earliest arguments for financial compensation for the wrongly incarcerated came in 1932, from the Yale law professor Edwin Borchard. In an influential book called \u2018Convicting the Innocent: Sixty-five Actual Errors of Criminal Justice,\u2019 Borchard wrote, \u2018When it is discovered after conviction that the wrong man was condemned, the least [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2212"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2216,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2212\/revisions\/2216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}