Summary: Stephen Slevin gets arrested for DUI. He has some mental health problems, so he is put in solitary confinement. He gets virtually no medical care except for sedatives from a nurse. He loses 50 pounds. Fungus grows on his skin. He pulls his own tooth because he was denied access to a dentist.
22 months later, his trial is cancelled because the charges are dismissed. Today, he’s awarded $15 million. His mental health is worse than ever.
Un-fucking-believable. Someone should be locked up for this, and it isn’t Mr. Slevin.
I hadn’t read the details, but I heard about this earlier today and my first thought was: “I’d seriously consider two years in solitary to be worth $7.75m/year.” I had to really think about it, but I could do two years at that rate.
Now, this guy in particular appears to be mentally ill and probably unable to really care for himself or enjoy $15.5m, so there is that.
I often wonder about the people who occasionally get multimillion dollar settlements for wrongful imprisonment. Most of these people usually are not upstanding citizens who had their lives together before going to prison (probably less so afterward.) I wonder how they fare with managing their new found wealth? We know that a great many lottery winners handle it poorly, and if release services for the wrongfully convicted are what I hear they are (basically non-existent and way less than what rightfully convicted and paroled people get) I’d imagine a great many of them squander their settlement money quickly through ignorance and falling prey to “friends and relatives.”
He was in solitary in a county jail, not even a prison. And the charges under which he was arrested were never prosecuted. He wasn’t even convicted of the crime but served nearly 2 years in solitary anyway.
At least the jerkwad county finally did the right thing and dropped their appeal.
The reporting made his lung-cancer prognosis sound pretty grim, so one suspects he won’t have a lot of time to enjoy his wealth in any case (which also makes the fact that he spent two of his last years yanking his own teeth out in solitary extra depressing).
In other news, I vow never to complain about my life again.
Reminds me of a man who was sent to prison without trial for two years, and denied access to a lawyer at all. He finally had another inmate smuggle a message to a lawyer who got him released. Never did find out what he ended up suing for, but I imagine it was a lot, given that about fifty officials broked all kinds of laws and several Constitutional protections (though out of ignorance and apathy rather than spite).
You really think you could spend two years in a prison cell with no windows, no human interaction, no recreation time, no outdoors, etc and come out a sane and well adjusted person? Seriously?
Probably paid by insurance. However the county will have problems down the line.
What happens at government run facilities are the responsibility of the people. People elect Sheriffs, DAs, Judges. They elect county officials who are in charge of oversight. It is justice that they pay for this crime.
And he has lung cancer? Well that will eat up his 15 million real quick. Maybe he’ll have enough left over for a funeral.
This is not at all the same. If you KNOW you’ll get out after the agreed time, and know that you have the money to look forward to, and have time to mentally prepare, and have, say, a get-out clause in case it’s harder than you thought, sure, it could be a way to earn money. That is NOT what happened to Stephen Sliven. What happened is that somebody got put into jail with (seemingly) no further communication, no idea of when or in fact IF he’d get out, not even receiving basic medical care. As far as he knew, he could have died in there with nobody every knowing.
Also, I always thought that solitary confinement was only for the worst offenders, or used as a punishment. I had no idea that it could be seen as normal for all the people who came into contact with Stephen.