Army pays vet $725 for wrongful imprisonment

[trumad]

LEESBURG, Florida (CNN) -- Samuel Snow thought when he got a check from the Pentagon that the Army was finally ready to give him the apology and the compensation he'd been denied for 63 years. He was wrong.

The Army imprisoned Snow in 1944 for a crime he says he couldn't have committed. The military overturned his conviction this year and sent him his back pay for the 15 months he spent in prison: $725.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/12/12/soldier.back.pay/index.html

[Double T]

1. pathetic pentagon.

where justice is never served.

[DFW]

2. What's that, about $1.75 a day for wrongful imprisonment?

And only 63 years after the fact, too.

It really makes me want to enlist and fly the flag proudly......

[MADem]

3. This might not be a bad law for Congress to work on, eh?

As a result of the findings, the Army overturned the convictions -- but stopped short of finding the defendants "not guilty."

"What it is saying is that they didn't receive their fair day in court," said Army spokesman Col. Dan Baggio.

The Army wrote checks to the surviving defendants as compensation for the back pay they were denied while in prison. Snow assumed that figure would be a substantial amount of money -- until the $725 check arrived at his home in central Florida.

If the payment had been adjusted for inflation, Snow would have received $7,768.13, according to the inflation calculator on the Labor Department's Web site.

If the $725 had been invested in 1946, when Snow was discharged from the Army, at 8 percent interest, compounded annually, it would have been worth more than $82,000 by now.

The Army said there are no legal provisions that allow it to consider adding accrued interest, adjustments for inflation or compensation for lost benefits.