The last victim of Charles Smith has finally been released:
Smith was a pathologist employed by the Province of Ontario who investigated child deaths. This article doesn’t give you the full story - it’s such a long and well covered story that anyone who reads a Toronto paper regularly will know it. To sum up, what Smith liked to do was to discard the evidence and just make shit up, and then go to court and testify that innocent people had murdered their children. These were not honest mistakes; by all accounts Smith because a self-deluded Judge Dredd whose goal in life was to get people sent to prison no matter what the evidence said.
Smith, at a conservative guess, sent half a dozen people to prison, some for over ten years, for crimes they didn’t commit. As in the example cited, their lives were ruined; the woman lost the prime of her life and both her living children.
My question is; what should the responsibility of the government be when a person is wrongfully imprisoned?
Personally, I think it should be massive. The Smith cases make me fucking sick. Aside from the fact that Smith himself (after being duly convicted beyond a reasonable doubt) should never, ever leave a tiny little bare concrete cell again as long as he lives, I think someone like Tammy Marquardt, who was convicted based on deliberate lies by an agent of the Crown, should be paid millions of dollars. She should be supported for the rest of her life.
I think someone wrongfully convicted based on honest mistakes should also be handsomely paid, but perhaps not as much.
What do you think? I know some people disagree with this notion.
From this case it appears that Smith did all this on his own,
ergo, he is the only one responsible. He not only misconstrued the facts for his own pleasure, but his mislead the juries, judges, and the Canadian government.
Maybe all of his assets should be equally divided between the wrongly convicted AND the canadian government. (!!!) If I knew that purjury would end up with my house, car and possessions going to the government (in any country), I’d really make sure my truth was true.
He represented a portion, not the whole thing. The government backed him, paid him, thinking he was honest, but the lies and evidence tampering was all his own. Wasn’t it?
This brings up an interesting issue in law - the vicarious liability of an employer or agency for the acts of its employee or agent.
I’m no expert in this area, but my impression is that this can in law be a rather complex issue. Basically and in summary, the employer should be “on the hook” so to speak where the acts committed were acts “in the course of employment” which were methods (albeit improper methods) of doing what the employee was supposed to be doing.
This makes some sense, as a corporation or other employer should carry the risks associated with employees who do tortious stuff to advance the interests of the company or employer.
The complex issue arises when, as here, the employee was in essence doing something that, while in the ostensible course of employment, was directly contrary to the interests of the employer.
Think of two scenarios from the realm of private law: one where a company agent uses some sort of fraud to get more sales for the company; and the other, like here, where the agent uses some sort of fraud on a frolic of his or her own - where if the fraud is successful it will not advance the company interests. It makes sense that the company should in essence act as the insurer for anyone defrauded in the first case: it stood to benefit if the fraud succeeded and ought to be dinged by way of encouraging it to avoid such behaviours by its agents in the future.
But does it make sense that the company should act as insurer in the second situation? Arguably, the answer is also yes, to encourage the company to take better care in hiring agents; but the case certainly is not as strong, and there are certainly arguments the other way - namely that the company was also being victimized by the fraud (or at the least, not benefiting from it and suffering from the fallout).
Now I readily admit that the case of wrongful imprisonment raise different issues, and it may make perfect sense to compensate all persons who were wrongly accused, quite independently of any rights to damages for the frauds.
I think the government has to think not only of who is responsible but the nature of the harm.
The government is responsible in that it was the authority that tried. The government is partially responsible simply because it is the government that imprisoned. Restitution is appropriate.
But all that aside, compensation should be made, because these persons were unjustly treated. I would hope some compensation would be made even they were falsely imprisoned by criminals.
It seems to me that if we’re willing to imprison innocent people on occasion, in order to be sure to catch the guilty in a sufficiently wide net, we’re basically demanding that random innocent people be sacrificed for the greater good. If we’re willing to ask such a tremendous sacrifice of a few people, we ought to be able to ask a smaller sacrifice of everyone else whose safety is protected by the imprisonment of the innocent: namely, the wrongfully accused ought to be set for life, assuming that they’re found clearly innocent of their imprisonment. It oughtta be like winning the ultimate compensation prize. A million dollar salary for life seems like a good start.
It seems to me that this is an … interesting … way to phrase it. Yes, as a society we are “willing” to accept that innocent people will be imprisoned, but only because the alternative (no one ever imprisoned) would be catastrophic to the society.
If the LHOD’s compensation raffle was the ONLY benefit a person gets from the government, I would agree. But it’s not, and never has been. As part of accepting the risk of wrongful imprisonment, people get the security and protection of the criminal justice system. It’s part of that whole social contract thing. People gain the benefit of having a government, but they also need to bear some risk of the same, including the hopefully incredibly rare chance of being wrongfully imprisoned.
Which is why I think the government should compensate the wrongfully convicted only if they bear responsibility for the misconduct that led to it. Knowing suborning perjury, police misconduct, prosecutorial misconduct, and the like would be compensated. But relying on the testimony of a witness who lies, that responsibility belongs on the witness.
The Smith case in the OP is tough because it is somewhere in the middle.
That seems unbelievably high. I would guarantee you that thousands of people would “frame” themselves in order to get a payout. Hell, I certainly would.
A million would do it. That’s roughly 110 bucks an hour, every hour of the day, which is a pretty good salary for most people. Now that I have three beautiful girls, it would be a lot tougher call to actually do it. But with a few decades left in my life expectancy, I’d certainly take a guaranteed million a year for a year of my life now. And, oddly enough, roughly 85% of the American population have a lower family income than we do, which would make the offer even more attractive to them.
Even if it was his own doing, he had to be answerable to someone, there had to be oversight by someone. Who was that, and why didn’t they notice that over the span of years, Smith was off on his renegade trip and breaking the law?
Money won’t solve anything. Lives are ruined. The guilty should get life imprisonment, at a minimum. I don’t think prisons solve anything, but our society can’t administer capital punishment fairly.
Sure it would. If you give them nothing, then they can’t get a good job because they’ve missed 10 years of training, education, promotion, etc. The money gives them 10 years of vacation. They suffered under the gov’t’s thumb for a decade, so they should get 10 years without working.
Sorry about the kids and youth part…nothing I can do there. I’m not paying. They should get something like $15 an hour for the whole time they were in prison. That’s $1,314,720 for the whole decade. That’s cheap enough from the gov’t’s point of view and enough from the personal point of view to go another 30 years without working.
I have long held the belief that if someone is wrongfully imprisoned and looses a vital part of the only life they are going to have that the govt. should have to pay through the nose. I think they should be given a million tax-free dollars for every year of false imprisonment. If they are kept even one day into a new year they should get the million for that, also. I think that the tax-free money paid out and any interest it earns should not be taxed for the rest of that person’s life.
I know if it was me and I spent many years wrongfully imprisoned and cames out old I wouldn’t care about anything but pay back, big time, no matter what it took to achieve it, up to and including my life just to make a point to the public and the judicial system.
The evidence provided by the pathologist should have been properly quality controlled, it wasn’t. Which organisation is responsible for ensuring the competance of its employees? all of them and if they don’t then they should be liable.
It gets much more complex in some situations, here in the UK we have had one person who was a serial confessor, he served 27 years, but DNA evidence has cleared him. At the time of this conviction, the technology was not avalable.
He was convicted in good faith based upon the evidence of the time which was considered robust.
Given the confession, should he be compensated? Probably not, but some support is going to be needed to reintegrate this person back into society.
In the UK, wrongful convictions are not always compensated, in fact there are distinctions made about such convictions, some are wrongful based upon points of law, others are wrongful by fact, some by malice incompetance or malfeasance, still others by non-disclosure of facts material to a defence.
We have a formal compensation application system where cases are reviewed, however claims can also be brought before the Civil Courts.
Each case is evaluated on its own merits, just as the original criminal conviction was also evaluated on its own merits, seems to me to be a sensible way to proceed.
But it isn’t the case that the gov’t cast an overly-wide net here. The standard is, and has always been, “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt”. What happened here is not that the gov’t cast too wide a net, but that an expert scientific witness who is supposed to be impartial simply lied for some perverse reason of his own.
In short, tghe fault lay not on the court or the trier of fact (dunno whether it was judge alone or jury), but with the guy who, for strange reasons of his own, set out to deliberately screw up the system. The “fault” on the gov’t is that it did not catch on to this guy sooner - but I assume he’s a very clever (if very evil) person, well able to fake the evidence necessary to cover up his wrong-doing.
I think that what both **left hand of dorkness ** and I meant is that it’s irrelevant if it’s the government/court fault or not. The idea is that we want a justice system to protect us against criminals, knowing perfectly that occasionally it will wreck havoc in some innocent people’s life. And so that we should be ready to properly indemnify those accidental victims of the system that generally keep us all safer.
If you disagree, you want the cost of this protection to fall only on the unlucky souls who draw the wrong number at this anti-lottery and were convicted and jailed despite being innocent. I believe that it’s much fairer to share the burden, and give them a generous indemnity for their hardships, even when it was really nobody’s fault, but just an unintended but unavoidable consequence of a system we all want and all benefit from.
Plus, you should keep in my mind that it’s probably often actually to some extent “somebody’s fault”. Maybe the prosecutor was a little too much trigger happy (though not to an unacceptable level), the police officers too lazy, the jurors too willing to have somebody convicted for the odious crime, the non-wealthy convict not adequately represented by his lawyer, or maybe there were more egregious and unacceptable mistakes made, that would still be difficult to prove in a court of law.
Giving some cents more in taxes to ease the life of the innocent guy who spent 20 years being the bars labelled as a child murderer doesn’t seem an excessive burden to me in the grand scheme of things, and certainly seems more just.
It vaguely reminds me of this short story where someone has to suffer horribly for the whole village to be happy. In this case it wouldn’t be difficult to somewhat alleviate the suffering by being willing to send some money the way of the wrongfully sentenced man, without the difficult and in probably in many cases pointless process of investigating whether or not it was someone’s fault, and whose fault exactly.