Earlier this year, Michael Woolfolk attended a legislative committee in Georgia where lawmakers considered for a third year whether to compensate the 45-year-old for the 19 years he spent behind bars for a 2002 killing before charges against him were dismissed.
Behind him sat Daryl Lee Clark, also 45, who spent 25 years in prison for a 1998 murder conviction that was vacated over a series of legal and police errors. It was his second attempt to obtain compensation.
Georgia is one of 11 states with no law on compensating people found to have been wrongfully convicted. Individuals seeking compensation take their cases to the legislature, where they seek a lawmaker to sponsor a resolution to pay them. Critics say it mires the process in politics.
Lawmakers have been considering legislation to move the decision to judges, but now it’s unclear if that will pass this year.
“We need to take care simply of people who have lost so many years of their lives and their ability to make money, have a job, have a family, create stability,” Republican Rep. Katie Dempsey, a sponsor of the Georgia bill, told The Associated Press. “Many are at the age where they would be looking at their savings, and instead, there’s none.”
No that’s bullshit. I mean if you want to do some retribution quid pro quo stuff for punishments sake that’s one thing and a totally separate argument but there is no chance I’d settle for that.
If you wrongfully lock me up for a decade or more? Hell even a couple of years? In a hellish prison where I’m going to get some kind of trauma probably? You better fucking pay me handsomely. Time is the one resource I absolutely cannot recover by any means and if you rob that from me over some bullshit the least you can do is give me a boatload of cash so I can spend several years or even the rest of my life (depending on how long you fucked me over, some of these people get fucked for decades) not working and like traveling the world or whatever to make up for it.
even that is nothing in comparison. I will spend the whole time thinking “man I wonder what it was like to be a free person at “20/30/40/etc” and thinking about all the life experiences that you stole from me, that I will never get back. But at least it’s some kind of reparation
The amount of money that’s paid out for this is pitiful in comparison to how much you’d need to actually feel compensated. It’s $50k-$100k per year of imprisonment (depending on state and length of imprisonment), so for 20 years you’re getting (in most states) $2 million or so, but then you’re charged for services rendered while you were imprisoned in most states - for example, health insurance, room and board, etc., which severely reduce that value. Even if you got the full $2 million, you’ve lost 20 years - and the career development you would have had during that time - not to mention technology has likely completely moved on from what you remember. Good luck getting anything more than a minimum wage job at that point, and $2 million is not going to last you for the rest of your life unless you were already 50 or so when you were convicted.
To be clear, I agree with you that people falsely convicted should be monetarily compensated. Just pointing out that current compensation is embarrassingly low.