Putting a dollar value on wrongful jail time

Indeed, the "market value" of lost time in jail varies wildly, at least as determined by a jury rather than state legislatures. In Maryland, three youths wrongfully detained for just 10 minutes by a security guard at a retail store sued. One of the youths, who was forced to remove his shirt, was awarded $850,000 for defamation and false imprisonment.

Of course, those are judgments in civil suits and involve punitive damages. In exoneration cases, where the mistakes often involve well-meaning witnesses rather than police or prosecutorial wrongdoing, it is harder to find someone to sue. States themselves generally enjoy sovereign immunity.

At present, 34 states have no compensation laws at all. More than two-thirds of the dozens of prisoners exonerated in the past decade have received nothing, says Rob Warden, executive director of the Center for Wrongful Conviction at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Those who oppose compensation do so for a variety of reasons. Some argue that such bills suggest a state is at fault, when, in fact, a jury determined the person falsely convicted was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Other legislators look beyond the clear-cut cases that make headlines and fear such laws will be leveraged by prisoners freed merely on a technicality. Sometimes opposition boils down to simple fear of being labeled soft on crime. "We don't have a perfect system," says Oklahoma state legislator William Graves (R), who voted against the compensation bill. "But does that mean the state has to pay money every time a jury finds the wrong person guilty?"

A long and tortuous process

Even in states that offer compensation, those exonerated can't expect to be met by the warden with a check as they walk out the prison gate. When a judge vacates a conviction because of DNA evidence, it is not necessarily the legal equivalent of innocence. In many states, the primary way of achieving "factual innocence" is a gubernatorial pardon.

And earning a pardon can be a tortuous ordeal. Because of his resemblance to a composite drawing, Lesly Jean, a former marine, was arrested for rape in 1982 while visiting a doughnut shop near the victim's home. Convicted that year on the strength of testimony by two witnesses - despite testimony by four others who placed him at a nearby Marine base at the time of the rape - he spent nine years in prison before DNA tests proved his innocence.

In February of this year, North Carolina Gov. Mike Easley finally issued Mr. Jean a full pardon - 11 years after he left prison. Jean hopes the pardon will lead to $150,000 in compensation from the state, the maximum allowed there under current law.

Mistakes in the justice system are going to happen, says Adele Bernhard, a law professor at Pace University in White Plains, N.Y., and an authority on compensation statutes. But, "when we do discover an error, the people who have suffered from it should be compensated. It seems to me, that's only fair."

(c) Copyright 2001. The Christian Science Monitor

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