And ... quelle surprise ... nobody seems to have bothered. Or bothered to understand what it was saying.
For those who may miss the news down in the gun dungeon, here's a little assistance I posted there.
Hill now lives on a farm with his wife and children near Beith in Scotland. He has been charged £50,000 for living expenses by the Home Office.
It wasn't until two years ago that Hill was finally awarded £960,000 in compensation. However, during the years since his release, while waiting for the pay-out, the government had given him advances of around £300,000. When his compensation came through, the £300,000 was taken back along with interest on the interim payments charged at 23% - that cost him a further £70,000.
He was awarded £960,000, i.e. £40,000 for each year he was in prison. That's about
$72,000/year US -- a decent salary these days, let alone in 1980 -- for a total of about
$1,738,000 US.
Out of that, the proposal is that he be charged back £3,000/year ($5,400 US) for his living expenses. That's a deal you wouldn't likely get on the outside.
I don't see a proprosal to charge people who are *not* awarded compensation for their living expenses. I really don't know how it works in the US, but I'm aware of a couple of Canadian cases where wrongfully convicted/imprisoned persons have been given hefty compensation awards, and this seems to be the practice in the UK as well.
On the other hand, awards of compensation for anything, e.g. by civil courts, simply do not spiral off into the stratosphere in Canada and the UK the way they do in the US. An award of nearly $2 million US is a very big award.
The point is that if his compensation represents what he lost, he didn't *lose* the money that he would have spent on the basic living expenses that were covered by the prison system. I'd have expected the compensation calculation to take this into account, rather than doing it as a charge-back, and I'd hardly have been surprised if it had taken it into account.
Oh look:
The Home Office said an "independent assessor appointed by the Home Secretary takes into acccount the range of costs the prisoner might have incurred had they not been imprisoned". The spokes man said the assessor was "right" to do this, adding: "Morally, this is reasonable and appropriate."
That is, in fact, exactly what they do. So damned if I don't think it's just a trifle, um, dishonest for someone to say this:
He is now facing a bill of around £80,000 for the living expenses he cost the state.
No one is "facing a bill"; what he is evidently facing is a reduction in the compensation he will receive, to account for living expenses he did not incur while in prison.
A person here (in Canada) who is, say, awarded a hefty amount in damages for a disability-causing injury, and who received a public disability pension while awaiting judgment, will have the amount of the social assistance received deducted from the judgment and paid to the government that paid the assistance out. Similar principle.
I might have a couple of quibbles, but I'd need to know more than the amateurish report cited tells. It reports that he was charged interest on advances on the award -- but was there re-judgment type interest included in the award? If so, he didn't *lose* anything. If not, there's an arguable injustice.
What a big flap about nothing particularly significant, if you ask me. And, unless somebody can show me the great tenderness and respect with which the wrongfully convicted are systematically treated in the US, I'd say just another case of pot and kettle. It might make sense for people in a social democracy of sorts to express criticism like this, but coming from the USofA it's just lame.
And sure enough, a little quick research, after I was accused of "bashing" the US in the above, found the following.
http://www.talkleft.com/archives/000919.html New York and Illinois were pioneers in passing laws allowing compensation. The Innocence Protection Act, as originally introduced, provided for $50,000 per year in federal cases. The recent amendment to the bill lowered it to $10,000 per year.
From the Justice Policy Project analysis of the original bill and amendment:
"The bill includes a substantially smaller increase in the federal cap on compensation for unjust imprisonment. Under current law, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims may award up to $5,000 against the United States in cases of unjust imprisonment. The IPA as introduced raised this cap - which has not been raised since 1938 - to $50,000 for each year that the plaintiff spent in prison, or $100,000 per year if the plaintiff was sentenced to death. The bill raises the cap to $10,000 per year. In addition, while the original bill conditioned federal prison grants on States agreeing to pay reasonable compensation to exonerated death row inmates, the bill simply expresses the sense of Congress that States should provide such compensation."
Hmm, $10,000/year US ... versus $72,000/year US with a $3,000/year US deduction for living expenses.
Pop quiz, now; if you were a wrongfully convicted person, where would you rather have served your time?
http://www.justicedenied.org/compensate.htm On December 9, 1998, the New Zealand Ministry of Justice instituted a system to compensate people whose convictions of crimes had been overturned on appeal. This precedent-setting act went completely ignored by the American media. Thirty-five years earlier, when New Zealand became the first country in modern times to institute a system to compensate crime victims, the American media ignored that as well. Yet a mere five years after that, both California and New York established victim compensation programs.
... Precedents for compensating the wrongfully convicted exist in federal law and the laws in 14 states and the District of Columbia, albeit with severe limitations on conditions and maximum awards ... . These limitations include brief time limits for filing and strict standards of proof of innocence. ...<T>here are exceptions to these generalizations -- New York, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia have no limit on award maximums, for instance. ...<T>hese statutes do not prevent the unjustly convicted and the falsely accused from using tort law to sue government agencies and entities for false imprisonment, civil rights violations, libel and defamation. One such example is that of Anthony Porter, who recently received $145,875, the maximum allowable under Illinois's compensation statute -- but still plans to sue Chicago under tort law.
Hey, that there's a USAmerican bashing the US; don't be blaming moi.
http://leahy.senate.gov/press/200207/071102b.html LEAHY-SPECTER-FEINSTEIN-BIDEN-DURBIN-EDWARDS
SUBSTITUTE AMENDMENT TO THE INNOCENCE PROTECTION ACT
SECTION-BY-SECTION SUMMARY
TITLE IV—COMPENSATION FOR THE WRONGFULLY CONVICTED
Sec. 401. Increased compensation in Federal cases. This section increases the maximum amount of damages that the U.S. Court of Federal Claims may award against the United States in cases of unjust imprisonment from a flat $5,000 to $10,000 per year.
Sec. 402. Sense of Congress regarding compensation in State death penalty cases. This section expresses the sense of Congress that States should provide reasonable compensation to any person found to have been unjustly convicted of an offense against the State and sentenced to death.
Maybe somebody can find out where all that stands now ... and work out what that guy in the UK would likely have got had he been wrongfully convicted in a US state instead.
Just the facts, seems to me.
Of course, that's not what the lead post consisted of. It consisted of an attempt to portray the situation in the UK as amounting to charging the wrongfully imprisoned for bed and board ... when what it is, is an attempt to deduct a piddling amount for their living expenses from the extremely generous (well, by USAmerican standards) compensation they are given for their wrongful imprisonment.
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