You forgot the rest of the headline:
Cops and prosecutors responsible for locking up the innocent men are still at large.
Also
Americans who claim to distrust the government still support tough-on-crime measures, harsh sentencing guidelines, limited accountability for law enforcement, death penalty
Another litmus test for would be prosecutors, a question to be asked of them before they are accepted.
Anyone who declares that a âfair trialâ serves justice, even if it convicts an innocent man, is summarily dismissed, and forever barred from further consideration.
Also at large: the actual murderer.
Likely but not necessarily. In cases like this it often turns out that the real killers have since been apprehended for a different crime and are already serving long prison sentences of their own. Though in this case itâs also possible he just died of old age.
Iâd love to see legislation that gave the wrongly convicted some serious sums of tax free money with the proviso that if thereâs any wrong-doing from prosecutors and police, with much of that sum coming out of their pensions. You could do that â with, say, a one year window of immunity from the civil fines for self-reported bad behavior by prosecutors and police.
(Not that this should prevent criminal proceedings against prosecutors, but thatâs an even taller order).
True, at large may be too strong. Serving time for this crime, however, they certainly arenât.
isnât he entitled to $40,330 per year of incarceration + legal fees and lost wages under Ohio state law? http://www.innocenceproject.org/news/LawViewstate1.php?state=oh
Iâm glad the men are free.
I wonder if there is a way to take back the 39 years of freedom Bill Cosby has had of it is ever proven that he really is the decades long serial rapist that he increasingly is accused of being? Just a random thoughtâŚ
Meanwhile, the serious flaws and institutional racism in our justice system are one of the main reasons I oppose the dreary pranalty in the US. We canât give this guy back his years, but at least there is some justice rather than the no justice there would be if he had been executed.
On the upside, at least he hasnât been executed.
Unfortunately, given the pervasive brutality found in, and accepted by the US citizenry as ânormalâ, in US prisons thatâs a mixed blessing.
As long as he isnât charged 25% of that for âsaved living expensesâ, plus extra deductions for âpast criminalityâ:
Lord Brown said it was not hard to understand why the deduction for âsaved living expensesâ had aroused strong feelings among men âincarcerated in prison for many years for crimes they never committedâ.
But he said that to award them their loss of earnings without taking these expenses into account would be to over-compensate them.
He said that with a straight face? /headpalm
Some states do have wrongful conviction compensation laws, but youâre right, that does not include any punishment for the prosecution and police typically.
$1, 170, 000 will replace 39 years of lost earning potential at $30,000 per year. I do not even know how to begin to make up for his lost quality time, however.
Not to mention having to live in the correctional system, with all its faults (whether inmate, guard/administration, or system at large) for so longâI canât imagine how that would fail to screw someone up, especially so if you were innocent of the crime in the first place. I wish Mr. Jackson and his compatriots the best of luck.
Man, 39 years lost while innocent, only to reenter a culture wholly different from the one he was initially snatched from. Truly horrible.
A mixed blessing? No, it isnât. It really isnât.
Regardless of how shit-awful the last 39 years were for him, he still has the rest of his life. If heâd been executed he wouldnât. There is nothing âmixedâ about that.
Should he have been in prison? No.
Were his last 39 years full of jolly japes and laughter? No.
Is he better off alive than dead? Yes.
