I was watching a soap opera and basically the storyline was that a woman was insulted by a bunch of men she worked with.
So to get even she put a bit of rat poison in their food, as she was the cook. She thought she put just enough to make them sick but not to kill them. Of course the men die and she’s put in prison for life. She said she thought she didn’t put enough to kill them but she must’ve made an error.
Turns out someone saw her put the bit of the rat poison in and when she wasn’t looking HE put MORE rat poison in it, enough to kill the men. And after 20 years in prison this fact comes to light and they release her.
They offer her $40,000 compensation for “wrongful imprisonment.”
Now that got me to thinking, she wasn’t really wrongfully imprisoned but was given more time than she should have.
How does this work in real life? I mean, it one thing if someone deliberately hides evidence and such, but if a prosecutor genuinely believes the person guilty and the jury agrees, how is that wrongful?
So what happens in real life when a person serves a time in prison and later is found to be innocent. Do they just offer the person money out of fairness or something like that
How could you prove which person put in which proportion of the rat poison and how much poison was in each victim’s food?
So I doubt this would be real life. But I believe in real life, the state offers a wrongly imprisoned person enough money to keep them from wanting to start a longer civil action.
Look at it this way. A guy robs a 7-11. Things go bad and the cops show up and there’s a shootout. One of the cops accidentally shoots an innocent bystander and the bystander dies. In this case, the robber is guilty of homicide because his crime led to the guy getting killed.
The rat poison lady is similar. If she hadn’t committed her crime, those guys would not have died of poisoning.
Alan Crotzer served 24 and a half years in prison, for robbery/kidnap/rape before DNA exonerated him. Others convicted also stated Crotzer was not involved. He’s asking for 1.25 million in compensation.
He is? By that reasoning? My robbing a 7-11 might agitate the 7-11 worker into pulling out a shotgun and blowing my buddy’s head off, but I can’t imagine I would be held guilty of homicide, as such, because of that.
There wouldn’t have been any chance for this particular crime to happen unless the guy walked in, but, yeah, so what? I don’t believe such a principle is generally applicable to determining criminal guilt. (I’m not a lawyer, so one can set me straight, but I find such a principle unlikely. Certainly, if formulated naively, it can be extrapolated to ridiculous levels: There wouldn’t have been any chance for the crime to happen unless the 7-11 worker had been hired. Does that mean the man who employed him also shares some of the guilt? “But the employer committed no direct crime”, you say? Fine. If I punch you in the face setting into effect a chain of actions which result in you murdering my family, does my initial assault cause me to assume blame for the entire slaughter? “But you had no way of foreseeing such a consequence”? Perhaps I knew you had violent tendencies. It just seems a silly way of assigning guilt. Perhaps something like it gets used, but it would have to be a bit more sophisticated than just “If crime X wouldn’t have occurred without Y, then performing Y is equivalent to personally performing the crime X”)
Anyway, this is all a sidetrack from the OP, though. The OP seems to just be purely about people who are convicted and later determined innocent (with no necessary mention of complicating nuances to that “innocence”; that just happens to be how it went down in the soap opera inspiring the question).
Thanks, I guess I will have to read up on that. Wikipedia seems to indicate that it has the sorts of nuances in its interpretation that I felt necessary (“To ‘qualify’ for the felony murder rule, the felony must present a foreseeable danger to life, and the link between the underlying felony and the death must not be too remote.”), but you appear to be correct that it would probably apply to the shoot-out example.
There was a case in North Carolina recently where a man was imprisoned for 18 years for raping a child, then DNA evidence exonerated him. Link.
They gave him $20k per year (approximately)…I guess, estimating what he would have netted had he been free. The whole case was very sad. His son was born after he was imprisoned, so he missed out on his entire childhood. He was a small, “pretty” young man when he went to jail and was immediately targeted for sex. I read an interview with him in which he said he couldn’t picture himself with a woman now, since for his entire adult life, he’d only been with men. The mother of his child tried to get part of his compensation for back child support, but she was unsuccessful. All that, and he got just over $360,000.
If you go into a 7-11 with a gun with the intent to rob it, you’re guilty of a felony. And because you’ve got a gun, you’re assumed to be thinking of using it. And not just for target practice. So you’re in trouble.
I’m just wondering about the term “wrongful imprisonment.” Because in cases like this due process was executed, it’s not that anyone did anything wrong, it’s just that they didn’t have all the facts.
(BTW in the OP the soap opera storyline, the lady at her trial swore she only put in a teaspoon full of rat poison. The truth came out on a death bed confession when the guy said he increased the amount of poison and told the cops exactly what she did. He only could have known those details if he watched her do it. So the cops believed her story as she ment to sicken not kill them)
I addressed this point in the staff report linked in the previous post. In just about any case, it’s fair to say that they had the wrong person in prison. Whether you want to suggest that compliance with minimum requirements of due process makes that something other than wrongful is and issue better addressed in Great Debates. In some of the cases, it’s more than just that they didn’t have all the facts–somebody either screwed up or cheated. But it’s true that in many cases, it’s about newly discovered evidence (DNA mostly) that disproves prior eyewitness testimony or more primitive forensic evidence.