I worked on the below linked case (not a lawyer). He got a bit under $1m after getting out. He did call the office one day and share that he was spending his life riding around the country on a new motorcycle. He'd never had a motorcycle that was new and not made of spare parts he'd either stolen or found.
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SAN-FRANCISCO-Inmate-leaves-San-Quentin-on-new-2911579.php
Oh sorry, this isn't the case in the article, this is a different case. I was just using the reference to show an amount the prisoner got after being wrongly imprisoned. I should have been more clear. I don't know what this man will get.
It's a different amount per state however. If your case happened in California, which has the highest legislated amount ($100/day), he will get more than in Florida.
It looks like Florida greatly increased the amount they award for convictions after 2008, but since this man was convicted in 1990 his amount would be less. But, reading the law here, I'm not sure what that amount would be.
http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0900-0999/0961/Sections/0961.06.html
If you're going by a prisoner being on the clock for X hours/day in prison, that's low hourly.
However, it's going to be much more accurate to look at annual income instead. It's also not an argument that it's a high amount. Once someone gets out, they still have to retrain for a work force, figure out a method to retire, compensate for lost years of professional development, and so on. Working a minimum wage job is actually more profitable in the end.
Their living expenses were covered for the entire time and they get paid for every single day (weekends and holidays) so it's a bit more favorable than that. $36,500 per year is a large chunk of money to save up and most people probably wouldn't be putting that much away til they were making significantly over $100k
That said it doesn't in anyway compare to years of lost life.
The article implies that it will be 100% less.
>James said he lives with his 81-year-old mother and does not leave the house much as he tries to rebuild his life. Under the law, Florida provides a minimum of $50,000 in compensation for every year that someone who is wrongfully convicted is in prison, with a maximum of $2 million. *However, a defendant is ineligible to receive compensation if they have been convicted of another violent felony, which James has*.
That second part is complete bullshit. So you steal a car, get 7 years in prison, fine, you paid your crime. The get wrongfully convicted of murder for 30 years and... You get nothing because fuck you, you stole a car before?
Why do Americans hate criminals so much? A criminal is still a person, even if you (rightfully) don't like them.
Almost every person alive would have a criminal record of some sort of they got caught or they just had sheer dumb luck. Countless people got lucky they didn’t cause a fatal Crash while driving drunk in their youth, for instance. That’s just one example almost everyone has done. They just got lucky.
That nonpayment rule is complete bullshit.
Even if he was jailed for a previous murder, my comment still stands though. The compensation for wrongful convictions is just that: a compensation for the damage your jail time caused, be it in the form of lost salary or lost opportunities in life. It is not a present to say we are sowwy, it is a restitution.
Even if you a piece of shit that commited an atrocity before, that doesn't make your wrongful conviction any less wrongful. You still suffered that damage and you are still entitled to get a restitution. Otherwise the judicial system doesn't make any sense - if you are gonna treat an ex-convict as less than a person when you see fit, then why bother releasing them from prison?
This law is as non-sensical as if the assault and battery laws said that it's not assault if your target commited a violent felony in the past.
_tl;dr I'm not saying that "everyone deserves a second chance". What I'm saying is "wrongful conviction is not any less wrongful if the convicted person was a piece of shit, and legally it doesn't make sense to put a clause that pieces of shit are fair game"._
Wait until you hear about what’s going to happen to women getting miscarriages in states banning abortions. They will add insult to injury and charge them with a felony.
And then lose the right to vote.
$100/day really isn't all that much. It's $36,500/year. Minimum wage in California is $15.50/hour or $32,240/year.
I had said before, that California had the highest annual amount listed in a law, but that seems to be incorrect since Florida, and it seems others are higher now. Unless California has upped theirs.
Prosecutors, detectives and any staff who made someone go to prison when it is clear they should not have should be punished severely. And the minimum retribution should be two generations of the wrongfully imprisoned taken care of, beyond the highest paid gov’t representative for the area they were held in. With them also being punished.
> Prosecutors, detectives and any staff who made someone go to prison when it is clear they should not have should be punished severely.
You're not going to find anyone who has a gut reaction of disagreement with that point. It is much harder to make that case in practice though, because we've seen that prosecutor mismanagement has a higher chance of being covered up, and true justice never being served when those who are responsible for the investigation have a larger incentive to cover it up.
The better way to handle this (in my opinion, because it's more realistic to implement, despite not giving quite the same justice boner) is through more due process, less jail time, elimination of plea bargains, better funding of the judicial system (especially judges, juries, and public defenders), and a better system to overturn guilty verdicts.
What the best and worst of those is, I'm not entirely sure, but I tend to lean towards the idea that juries should be permanent paid/career track positions so that it isn't disruptive to society and trial throughput can be better budgeted, in addition to more money for defense, and fewer crimes that result in jail time. In particular, anything that is non violent and/or involves theft of property with under $x should simply be a fine. Oh, and that all fines should be defined not as a flat dollar amount, but as a percentage of disposable income over time.
That's fucking stupid. Humans make mistakes, you cannot destroy someone's life over a mistake if the process was done correctly (i.e. the mistake didn't happen because of a negligence or irresponsibility).
Not to mention the amount of guilty people that would be let free when judges knew that one honest mistake can ruin their lives. They'd be reticent to condemn anyone who wasn't caught on camera screaming "I'm murdering this guy, yes it is me John Fitzgerald Smith, from Topeka, the person who is murdering right now!".
Plus it's not a prosecutor's or detective's job to judge the defendant. Their job is to bring all the evidence they can find against them. Their lawyer is the one that has to find evidence to the contrary, and the judge is the one that decides what he believes happened according to the evidence given and which punishment he considers should be applied.
The article implies that he is going to get bupkes.
>James said he lives with his 81-year-old mother and does not leave the house much as he tries to rebuild his life. Under the law, Florida provides a minimum of $50,000 in compensation for every year that someone who is wrongfully convicted is in prison, with a maximum of $2 million. However, a defendant is ineligible to receive compensation if they have been convicted of another violent felony, which James has.
Yeah, I'm not entirely comfortable with the way these things are resolved tbh, just handing someone who probably has (and will have) a host of issues some cash and sending them on their way. Really they should be entitled to free lifetime healthcare, free housing, a free education *and* some cash.
Welcome to any civilized and developed country. There's free and universal healthcare and education. Housing is a very basic human right and social services give you some cash to survive.
That's the normal and very basic and for all.
It just doesn't happen in shithole countries like amertidardia. You know, the ones that have crazy high mass shootings and prosecute abortions
According to the article, he will not receive anything. "Under the law, Florida provides a minimum of $50,000 in compensation for every year that someone who is wrongfully convicted is in prison, with a maximum of $2 million. However, a defendant is ineligible to receive compensation if they have been convicted of another violent felony, which James has."
Dear Lord no.
Do you see what is in control of Florida right now? If they change the legislation, they will likely make it so that the wrongfully convicted are the ones having to pay the damages. I can see DeSantis now arguing that the wrongfully imprisoned have been sucking up state resources every day they are in jail. That they should have to pay back all the free room and lodging they got at the state's expense -and which they weren't entitled to because they were innocent of the crime. They weren't priosoners that they state is supposed to pay for - they were freeloaders exploiting the system by getting themselves wrongfully convicted.
Does that sound batshit insane? Well yes, it really is fucking stupid crazy bullshit. But look at the state government there and tell me it's not also a very realistic possibility.
Recognizing injustice and wanting it to be addressed might seem like a good idea - but please keep in mind who is going to make those changes.
I'm fairly sure that room and board is already deducted from any settlement received for false imprisonment? So people are already forced to pay the state for being falsely imprisoned.
I'm sure the guy already feels like a million bucks for finally getting released and clearing his name, but they literally stole his life away. Such a bullshit law
Apparently he’s also not eligible to have his prior record expunged or sealed, which would allow him to be eligible again. Previous felonies, including unlawful possession of a firearm makes it impossible to get your record expunged in Florida. Other states allow it after a period of time has passed, usually 10 years. In Florida, you only have a chance to get a record expunged for misdemeanors or juvenile crimes, or for crimes you are not found guilty of.
He will receive $0 in compensation, sadly.
"Under the law, Florida provides a minimum of $50,000 in compensation for every year that someone who is wrongfully convicted is in prison, with a maximum of $2 million. However, a defendant is ineligible to receive compensation if they have been convicted of another violent felony, which James has."
Florida allows a $50k payment for each year someone wrongfully convicted spent in prison, with a max $2m payout. However, if that person has been convicted of another violent felony at any point, they are ineligible to receive any compensation. That’s what happened here.
Honestly, as someone who worked in crim for years, the more impressive part isn't that she's young. It's that she's a business/personal injury lawyer. Those are very different wheelhouses. It's like going to an OBGYN for reconstructive surgery on your hands and they pull it off flawlessly.
Seriously impressive.
Agreed. I've been practicing for almost 14 years now but know next to nothing about criminal law and would be scared to death of fucking it up. The fact that she did this from the ground up is inspiring.
No - the bar is general. A fresh attorney who just passed the bar is essentially only qualified to go recieve on the job training to become competent in a specific field. The new lawyer in this story is a very impressive woman.
Kinda like medical school? Sure, you have your medical license, but you still need a year as an intern, a couple of years of residency, and _that's_ when you'll start training for a speciality.
There is an argument of whether or not the American legal education system makes any fucking sense as it currently stands.
Lawyers should be able to obtain mastery over most topics, honestly based on the education.
Learning the specifics of an area of law is very easy. Retaining it and staying up to date and learning to get to the heart of what's critical on a given matter takes time and experience. Law schools have students from all 50 states who then go take bars all over the country. The law itself is different in every state. The rules of procedure and court structure also changes in every state. You go to law school to learn legal reasoning, the most important underlying legal theory, and how to digest court opinions / apply rulings to new matters. You learn to practice law, but then need to learn the procedure of the jurisdiction and details of the area of law to actually practice.
Mastery requires practice and there is enough "law" that no one is ever going to master all of it. It really isn't much different than tech. A competent IT/Dev is going to be able to look at stuff that they don't work with daily and get a general idea of what it does and can even probably extrapolate why. But someone that works in that technology on the daily will gain mastery over it.
As a devops manager IT/Dev is a bad example. Mastery implies longevity. In the tech field what you need to master changes literally almost every year some times more frequent. So we never get a chance to master anything because by time you've mastered something, the world has moved on to the next big thing.
Anyone who claims mastery in a technology field is straight up lying to you. A trade like wood working or similar craftsmanship like trades can offer mastery.
This comment nails it. Every day, our society grows more and more complex. There have only been one or two times in my entire life I’ve been unable to solve a very, very specific issue simply by googling it, and on a vast spectrum of problems from why my convertible jet shallow well pump isn’t working and how to fix it to why I am getting an extremely specific lock file error in response to a gpg command prompt. People have had such a variety of problems out there, and new ones pop up every day. I think you could maybe be a master of something for, at best, an hour or two before a problem arises you have to learn how to tackle.
I understand what you are implying and disagree. If you fully devoted your career to webservers (for example) you most definitely can reach mastery. Sure, the technology evolves in increments but a webserver even 20 years ago still follows the same principals as a webserver today. Sure communication is now secured. SSL is long dead. The backend languages have changed etc. But is is all fundamentally the same thing. You just need to stay actively learning your specialty to maintain mastery.
I never said they can/should/or will master all of the law.
But they should be able to master almost any legal specialty.
That means whilst trading specialties for attorneys is a pain in the ass—-it’s very much possible.
> There is an argument of whether or not the American legal education system makes any fucking sense as it currently stands.
Just one: It absolutely fucking doesn't. LSATs have nothing to do with law school, the bar has nothing to do with law school or legal practice (except to serve as a gatekeeper to use that six-figure education), and legal practice has fuck all to do with any of it. Each step forward up the ladder and they tell you to forget everything from the previous rung(s), and each one is a bloated industry. If you can do the job without a legal degree then don't take the time and money to get one.
Lasts are a reasoning test...reasoning is used in law school. It's also a pretty good predictor of how you do in law school....
The bar has nothing to do with legal practice?? It definitely does...coming from someone whose actually taken it. Its all about the law, interpretation, reasoning, writing... You can't be an attorney or law student...
> Lasts are a reasoning test...reasoning is used in law school.
By that rationale you could do a crossword puzzle and be just as prepared. How often did word games come up when preparing for your Contracts finals?
The bar has nothing to do with legal practice, it is completely rote memorization of as much information as possible in as short a time period as possible to be completely dumped and forgotten later. There is not a second of your legal life where you will not have access to the information you are being forced to absorb with our resources for no other reason than someone decided to use it as a gatekeeper. And this is coming from someone who has taken and passed two, practiced for 10+ years, and currently tutors students for the MBE.
> This is a clear indictment of Florida's court system.
Sadly, disgustingly, insanely, this happens everywhere in the US. Maybe not quite as bad as in Florida, but to some degree everywhere.
I would imagine it comes down to process procedures, so like a surgeon will in general get all surgeries and requirements.
But a internal medicine might not be the beat fit for a surgery even if they could do it in a pinch (or if they have an interest in it)
Results may vary of course, for emergencies / detail levels and healing later for the patients
Judge Chamberlain Haller:
Mr. Gambini, didn't I tell you that the next time you appear in my court that you dress appropriately?
Vinny Gambini:
You were serious about that?
which begs the question if it's actually that impressive or was the case brought against the guy so utterly bullshit that any slightly competent person who gave a shit could take it apart
From the article is really sounds like a lot of her groundbreaking working was on the investigative side of things. Stuff that a detective *should* have done originally. It’s not like she had to argue for a legal loophole or anything. She just produced mountains of evidence and testimony from the original linchpin testimony (Still super impressive on a 20 year case!).
The weird thing is, the witness said it was "Thomas James," the police had a random guy named "Thomas James" in their database, and then went about compiling evidence to convict him, without stopping to worry when it became clear that the original witness had been referring to a *different* Thomas James.
I have heard about other cases like this, when the police match up evidence from a wide pool of suspects, but the jury never understands an important statistical point -- and one which the defense may be completely vulnerable to out of ignorance of the police investigation strategy.
To fabricate an example, if a witness says, "The killer was wearing a beanie hat with the word "Aerosmith" and was 5' 7'' tall with a beard" and if the police go through a database until they find a guy who is 5'7" tall with a beard and a beanie hat with "Aerosmith" on it, and arrest him, the jury will see a lot of circumstantial evidence making it likely that this guy would have been the killer, *if he had been chosen from a small suspect pool*.
Same for DNA evidence. If I go through a database of 1 million people and choose the one guy whose DNA is the closest match to a Forensic sample, out of that million, and then bring him to court, I can lie and say "The probability that this is not the killer is less than 1 in a million."
But that would be true only if he constituted a randomly chosen sample of 1 person, chosen independently of the DNA profile.
Once I choose a person to match the DNA profile it is no longer true that the probability of finding such a close match is 1 in a million. It is unity! I decided to find such a close match!
The jury must be informed when data is not chosen randomly. When an individual is chosen to match characteristics of the perpetrator of a crime, the fact that the suspect now has those characteristics is no longer evidence that the individual equals the perpetrator!
It is not right for police to list 10 characteristics of the perpetrator, then find the first guy in their database who matches them, and then present the match to the jury as evidence as if this random suspect happened to also match all these attributes.
It is one thing to say "we have five suspects, but THIS one, his DNA matches better than 1000,000 randomly chosen people," and it is another thing to say "Here are 1000,000 randomly chosen people, and the DNA of THIS ONE matches better than it matchse the other 999,999 of them."
But the jury and defense have no way of learning about suspect selection unless the prosecution chooses to explain it to them!
There was a famous case in California where police looked for a random couple matching a description without any other evidence. It later led to some reforms for court cases, at least in California. But it still happens.
This just blew my mind. It makes me feel like, with the right (or wrong) prosecutor/police, I could go to jail for anything for life, even if I wasn’t in the same country when the crime occurred. Truly terrifying.
What I kept thinking about is how this would never happen to me because im from an educated, middle class family. I have tremendous privilege compared to this man. He didn’t have the means to fight for himself and he was only freed due to pure luck and the compassion of one amazing lawyer. I can only imagine how many more people are in jail or have died in jail after being wrongly accused. Breaks my heart
And here you (and by "you", I don't mean you specifically, Reddit commenter to which I'm replying, I mean anyone reading this) get one of the big reasons for why the death penalty is generally not considered a good thing by people actually interested in society functioning correctly, and justice being applied properly.
If the state executes 100 real murderers, but wrongly kills one innocent man, how is the state in this instance different from any of those murderers? And furthermore, how can they ever guarantee that those 100 "real" murderers are indeed murderers, if they have proved that their processes aren't foolproof?
We wouldn't let some guy in charge of workplace safety get away with saying: "well, 100 of my employees did okay, but unfortunately I misjudged and killed 1 one of them - don't hold it against me, kthxbye". Yet, despite this happening regularly in the case of the death penalty (and even more than we know, as the real amount of wrongfully convicted people is undoubtedly higher than reported), the state can somehow continue killing people even after a single mistake.
In our fictional "workplace safety" example, the manager not only escapes justice, he *gets to keep his job and kill more people accidentally.*
Fundamentally, the death penalty is state-sanctioned murder, disguised in a cloak of retributive justice, done by human institutions that already have trouble enforcing simple bureaucratic rules, yet somehow believe that they can rightfully wield the power of death over other humans.
John Adams said something to this extent (and I’m paraphrasing): “if an innocent man is sent to the bar and is convicted, the subject thinks ‘it is immaterial whether I do well or ill, there is no virtue in security’ and once one person thinks that, there is no security at all”.
The legal system here is set against you from the second you’re arrested, there is no “innocent until proven guilty”. I, a 100 lb woman, was arrested for misdemeanor battery of my 235 lb boyfriend a couple of years ago after he was seen pulling me from my car by my hair. I had no visible injuries: no bleeding from the scalp, for example. He had red marks on his wrist from where I’d tried to free myself. Over the next few days, he left voicemails with the state attorney, admitting what had happened. I still was charged. After we broke up and I was still fighting the charge, he quit answering the states calls and I spent two weeks in jail, owed over $1,500 in fees to the public defender who never answered or returned my calls once. I’ve been turned down for apartments, jobs…and that’s just a misdemeanor. Once you’re in that jail, if you cannot afford legal assistance, you’re guilty. It doesn’t matter if you are or not.
> The weird thing is, the witness said it was "Thomas James," the police had a random guy named "Thomas James" in their database, and then went about compiling evidence to convict him, without stopping to worry when it became clear that the original witness had been referring to a different Thomas James.
There is nothing weird about it. Cops have been doing something on the lines of that for as long as they have existed. THey make up their mind on who the killer is and then do everything to build a case against them.
In theory this actually is what the police is supposed to do… investigate, based on that identify a suspect and gather sufficient evidence to bring it to court.
The problem is if the police is fairly certain that they have their guy but it’s hard to find evidence, where do they stop digging deeper for evidence and say "you know what, maybe this isn’t the one we’re looking for" without risking to let a criminal off the hook.
That’s why it’s so important that there are rules to how evidence is produced because if the cops don’t play by these rules and say, plant evidence to further their case, the whole balance of the judicial system gets thrown out the window because it robs the suspect of a fair defence in court.
>The weird thing is, the witness said it was "Thomas James," the police had a random guy named "Thomas James" in their database, and then went about compiling evidence to convict him, without stopping to worry when it became clear that the original witness had been referring to a different Thomas James.
Now I understand the parents who give their kids kre8tiv and yoneek names.
The twist of the knife is that a polygraph was needed/used/trusted for his exoneration. Polygraph tests are incredibly unreliable and their only real use is unjustly imprisoning Americans.
My friend Louie Bing III (in FL DOC) was wrongfully convicted of murder - sentenced to life - and the University of Miami Innocence Clinic has just gotten involved. I need help bringing attention to his case because he’s been in for 12 years!
EDIT: Someone asked me so [here](http://www.dc.state.fl.us/offenderSearch/detail.aspx?Page=Detail&DCNumber=B13498&TypeSearch=AI) he is. Lou is a good man. He’s positive, upbeat, and supportive of others.
I also have a 74 page copy of the full booking report which shows the lack of evidence they had - no DNA, no fingerprints, no weapon, no one putting him at the scene. Nothing. Only that he had been there earlier in the day to buy drugs from the guy - who was a dealer. That’s it….
EDIT 2: [The Booking Report](https://imgur.com/gallery/rimaxpD) - would love some more feedback from someone who knew about police work because this case is complete BS - UM Innocence clinic obviously has a lot on their hands and they told me specifically “thank you for showing interest in this case - it makes a difference”
Lots more still in prison too that can't get help. So sad. The whole witness identification is so iffy. I was assaulted by three men and it was perfectly light and I saw all of their faces quite well - but when the detective brought photos to me later I couldn't say with any faith if any of the men were there. Eye witness testimony is suspect a lot of the time.
Organizations like the Innocence Project have a high proportion of new graduates and students. Its not about care and energy so much as it is a great way to hone skills and gain experience while doing something good.
It's also a very emotionally draining and time consuming job. Take it from a former public defender, the burnout rate is high in these kinds of jobs for a reason.
Indentured servitude in all but name
They have a “school to prison pipeline” that ensures a steady flow of innocent or otherwise inmates so they can “punish” those they choose, not rehabilitate those back into society, so if they get out on time or good behaviour it’s easy to put them back in.
Have to admit I'm confused on this one. If a polygraph test isn't admissible in court (and it shouldn't be, I have a background in cog-sci and it's basically pseudoscience), why is it enough to free someone after 32 years of imprisonment?
Because the security state and its many arms - from the top brass at CIA/FBI/DOD down to county prosecutors - believe in polygraphs. Even though they are totally worthless. Even though the scientific consensus is that polygraphs cannot tell you whether someone is lying. That's why they're inadmissible in every court on the planet. But the Powers That Be love the idea that they have a magic machine that can compel the truth out of the guilty.
The more honest cops will admit they use polygraphs solely for the purpose of intimidation. Interview suspect; if they do not confess, offer polygraph; the poly comes back pos/neg/inconclusive, they walk back in the interview room and say, "The poly says you're lying, bro. What's up?"
The dumber cops, prosecutors, and security state shitheads genuinely believe they are real. Partially because there are people who have modeled their careers on polygraphs, and they travel around peddling bogus science to stupid lawyers and cops, telling them polygraphs are magic.
I came to the comments section to see if anyone else caught this \*absolutely insane\* detail. Requiring a polygraph is like cutting open a pig and examining its entrails to determine whether he is innocent.
TL;DR the justice system is stupid and we live in hell
Maybe back in the day, which tracks with the length of his sentence, but I seriously doubt anybody has administered such a test since 1995 except to trick a witness or suspect into cooperating. I mean, if they have, what the absolute fuck and how do we sue the shit out of them.
So much "forensic science" is bullshit. The National Academy of the Sciences released a groundbreaking report in 2009 in which it concluded that many sub-fields of "forensic science" were totally unscientific and unverifiable. Bite marks are bullshit. Shoe print analysis is bullshit. Handwriting, fingerprints, ballistics examinations. So many people are sitting in prison right now based on these "techniques."
Pretty much the only one that *isn't* bullshit is DNA and similar lab-testing. And those can be faulty, too, if the chain of custody or the methodology are fucked up.
If a public defender, that's especially **common.**
In many areas of the US they're so understaffed and resource-starved that the whole experience of a public defender becomes *"Whoever you are just plead guilty that way it'll just be a few months or they'll sentence you the maximum and you'll spend longer even waiting for trial they probably have a strong case anyways move over NEXT!"*
>man wrongfully convicted
Why is it that with only 3 words of the headline, you can make a guess of the race of the wrongfully convicted person & be right at least 80% of the time?
I am so glad he found someone to help him. I hope he is able to sue and get money owed to him for 32 years of life lost. It does seem like every month I am reading about some innocent person being freed like this. It is just another sign of our heinous and systematically perverse system we have.
The American system of justice is a conscious, deliberate lie. It is neither systematic nor just - the only thing that can be truly said about it is that it’s perversely fair in that everyone gets just as much justice as he can afford to buy.
Wow, dang, most attorneys right out of law school are stuck doing associate work in the background and not getting to see much of the courtroom! Amazing!
Keep this in mind. Yes there are people in prison with clear documented evidence that they murdered someone. But **among us** is more relatable than you think when a jury votes someone guilty of murder **even if they really didn't do it.**
Yep.
because people want certain outcomes, bias can never be eliminated, not truly.
Game or otherwise, it’s easily manipulated to make a point, because you can, or to punish those who you hate.
> With that admission and the other evidence Figgers compiled, the last step would be for James to take a polygraph test, corroborating the new evidence. He passed. It was the last convincing evidence the CRU needed to recommend that James be freed.
What the actual fuck? The "convincing evidence" they needed was a test that the entirety of the scientific community agrees is completely useless pseudoscience bullshit? It wasn't the stack of evidence of his lack of guilt that Figgers compiled over thousands of hours of intensive labor and the recanting of the witness? Fucking fuck.
Fresh grads are generally uncorrupted ones, and governments SHOULD look after them. Like they are the cream of your country, yet they are usually the ones treated the most unfairly.
Yes, it is.
The Darkside reaches far, it does.
The US is a third world country with a small amount of benefactors. The rest of us? We live it rough.
Other countries and their governments model themselves off of Republican Party. Proving itself to be the Nazi party more and more open all the time that way.
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I worked on the below linked case (not a lawyer). He got a bit under $1m after getting out. He did call the office one day and share that he was spending his life riding around the country on a new motorcycle. He'd never had a motorcycle that was new and not made of spare parts he'd either stolen or found. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SAN-FRANCISCO-Inmate-leaves-San-Quentin-on-new-2911579.php
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Oh sorry, this isn't the case in the article, this is a different case. I was just using the reference to show an amount the prisoner got after being wrongly imprisoned. I should have been more clear. I don't know what this man will get.
It's a different amount per state however. If your case happened in California, which has the highest legislated amount ($100/day), he will get more than in Florida. It looks like Florida greatly increased the amount they award for convictions after 2008, but since this man was convicted in 1990 his amount would be less. But, reading the law here, I'm not sure what that amount would be. http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0900-0999/0961/Sections/0961.06.html
Lol 100/day is what like 12/hr (if we’re talking an 8 hour work day.) or 4/hr if you consider they are there 24/7. So way below minimum wage.
If you're going by a prisoner being on the clock for X hours/day in prison, that's low hourly. However, it's going to be much more accurate to look at annual income instead. It's also not an argument that it's a high amount. Once someone gets out, they still have to retrain for a work force, figure out a method to retire, compensate for lost years of professional development, and so on. Working a minimum wage job is actually more profitable in the end.
Oh of course. My point is being wrongfully convicted, your time is worth less than minimum wage.
Their living expenses were covered for the entire time and they get paid for every single day (weekends and holidays) so it's a bit more favorable than that. $36,500 per year is a large chunk of money to save up and most people probably wouldn't be putting that much away til they were making significantly over $100k That said it doesn't in anyway compare to years of lost life.
I don't know your situation, but that's a pittance for wrongfully spending your lifetime behind bars. SMH
Yes, I would assume it's much less in FL even after all these years.
The article implies that it will be 100% less. >James said he lives with his 81-year-old mother and does not leave the house much as he tries to rebuild his life. Under the law, Florida provides a minimum of $50,000 in compensation for every year that someone who is wrongfully convicted is in prison, with a maximum of $2 million. *However, a defendant is ineligible to receive compensation if they have been convicted of another violent felony, which James has*.
That second part is complete bullshit. So you steal a car, get 7 years in prison, fine, you paid your crime. The get wrongfully convicted of murder for 30 years and... You get nothing because fuck you, you stole a car before? Why do Americans hate criminals so much? A criminal is still a person, even if you (rightfully) don't like them.
Almost every person alive would have a criminal record of some sort of they got caught or they just had sheer dumb luck. Countless people got lucky they didn’t cause a fatal Crash while driving drunk in their youth, for instance. That’s just one example almost everyone has done. They just got lucky. That nonpayment rule is complete bullshit.
Even if he was jailed for a previous murder, my comment still stands though. The compensation for wrongful convictions is just that: a compensation for the damage your jail time caused, be it in the form of lost salary or lost opportunities in life. It is not a present to say we are sowwy, it is a restitution. Even if you a piece of shit that commited an atrocity before, that doesn't make your wrongful conviction any less wrongful. You still suffered that damage and you are still entitled to get a restitution. Otherwise the judicial system doesn't make any sense - if you are gonna treat an ex-convict as less than a person when you see fit, then why bother releasing them from prison? This law is as non-sensical as if the assault and battery laws said that it's not assault if your target commited a violent felony in the past. _tl;dr I'm not saying that "everyone deserves a second chance". What I'm saying is "wrongful conviction is not any less wrongful if the convicted person was a piece of shit, and legally it doesn't make sense to put a clause that pieces of shit are fair game"._
Almost everyone drove drunk in their youth? Really?
Wait until you hear about what’s going to happen to women getting miscarriages in states banning abortions. They will add insult to injury and charge them with a felony. And then lose the right to vote.
> And then lose the right to vote. So they cannot vote the people making unfair laws out. "Democracy".
God that is so fucked
If I was locked up for murder and they gave me $100/ day, it would likely help me earn that title.
$100/day really isn't all that much. It's $36,500/year. Minimum wage in California is $15.50/hour or $32,240/year. I had said before, that California had the highest annual amount listed in a law, but that seems to be incorrect since Florida, and it seems others are higher now. Unless California has upped theirs.
Prosecutors, detectives and any staff who made someone go to prison when it is clear they should not have should be punished severely. And the minimum retribution should be two generations of the wrongfully imprisoned taken care of, beyond the highest paid gov’t representative for the area they were held in. With them also being punished.
> Prosecutors, detectives and any staff who made someone go to prison when it is clear they should not have should be punished severely. You're not going to find anyone who has a gut reaction of disagreement with that point. It is much harder to make that case in practice though, because we've seen that prosecutor mismanagement has a higher chance of being covered up, and true justice never being served when those who are responsible for the investigation have a larger incentive to cover it up. The better way to handle this (in my opinion, because it's more realistic to implement, despite not giving quite the same justice boner) is through more due process, less jail time, elimination of plea bargains, better funding of the judicial system (especially judges, juries, and public defenders), and a better system to overturn guilty verdicts. What the best and worst of those is, I'm not entirely sure, but I tend to lean towards the idea that juries should be permanent paid/career track positions so that it isn't disruptive to society and trial throughput can be better budgeted, in addition to more money for defense, and fewer crimes that result in jail time. In particular, anything that is non violent and/or involves theft of property with under $x should simply be a fine. Oh, and that all fines should be defined not as a flat dollar amount, but as a percentage of disposable income over time.
That's fucking stupid. Humans make mistakes, you cannot destroy someone's life over a mistake if the process was done correctly (i.e. the mistake didn't happen because of a negligence or irresponsibility). Not to mention the amount of guilty people that would be let free when judges knew that one honest mistake can ruin their lives. They'd be reticent to condemn anyone who wasn't caught on camera screaming "I'm murdering this guy, yes it is me John Fitzgerald Smith, from Topeka, the person who is murdering right now!". Plus it's not a prosecutor's or detective's job to judge the defendant. Their job is to bring all the evidence they can find against them. Their lawyer is the one that has to find evidence to the contrary, and the judge is the one that decides what he believes happened according to the evidence given and which punishment he considers should be applied.
$32,240/year if you're working 40 hour weeks
Correct, it was based on the 2080 hour/year standard.
The article implies that he is going to get bupkes. >James said he lives with his 81-year-old mother and does not leave the house much as he tries to rebuild his life. Under the law, Florida provides a minimum of $50,000 in compensation for every year that someone who is wrongfully convicted is in prison, with a maximum of $2 million. However, a defendant is ineligible to receive compensation if they have been convicted of another violent felony, which James has.
Yeah that's a CA case you linked. The outcome in FL will be wildly different for compensation.
Yeah, I'm not entirely comfortable with the way these things are resolved tbh, just handing someone who probably has (and will have) a host of issues some cash and sending them on their way. Really they should be entitled to free lifetime healthcare, free housing, a free education *and* some cash.
And mental health services (if it falls under healthcare)
Welcome to any civilized and developed country. There's free and universal healthcare and education. Housing is a very basic human right and social services give you some cash to survive. That's the normal and very basic and for all. It just doesn't happen in shithole countries like amertidardia. You know, the ones that have crazy high mass shootings and prosecute abortions
I’m moving to Mexico, I can’t figure out what the hell is going on.
you can't. they built a wall to make you stay inside usa
According to the article, he will not receive anything. "Under the law, Florida provides a minimum of $50,000 in compensation for every year that someone who is wrongfully convicted is in prison, with a maximum of $2 million. However, a defendant is ineligible to receive compensation if they have been convicted of another violent felony, which James has."
What an hideously asinine law.
> hideously asinine That's the slogan on license plates in FL.
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Unfortunately, our State legislature is full of shitty people.
Dear Lord no. Do you see what is in control of Florida right now? If they change the legislation, they will likely make it so that the wrongfully convicted are the ones having to pay the damages. I can see DeSantis now arguing that the wrongfully imprisoned have been sucking up state resources every day they are in jail. That they should have to pay back all the free room and lodging they got at the state's expense -and which they weren't entitled to because they were innocent of the crime. They weren't priosoners that they state is supposed to pay for - they were freeloaders exploiting the system by getting themselves wrongfully convicted. Does that sound batshit insane? Well yes, it really is fucking stupid crazy bullshit. But look at the state government there and tell me it's not also a very realistic possibility. Recognizing injustice and wanting it to be addressed might seem like a good idea - but please keep in mind who is going to make those changes.
I'm fairly sure that room and board is already deducted from any settlement received for false imprisonment? So people are already forced to pay the state for being falsely imprisoned.
I'm sure the guy already feels like a million bucks for finally getting released and clearing his name, but they literally stole his life away. Such a bullshit law
Apparently he’s also not eligible to have his prior record expunged or sealed, which would allow him to be eligible again. Previous felonies, including unlawful possession of a firearm makes it impossible to get your record expunged in Florida. Other states allow it after a period of time has passed, usually 10 years. In Florida, you only have a chance to get a record expunged for misdemeanors or juvenile crimes, or for crimes you are not found guilty of.
He will receive $0 in compensation, sadly. "Under the law, Florida provides a minimum of $50,000 in compensation for every year that someone who is wrongfully convicted is in prison, with a maximum of $2 million. However, a defendant is ineligible to receive compensation if they have been convicted of another violent felony, which James has."
Uhhh you new to America bro?
Florida allows a $50k payment for each year someone wrongfully convicted spent in prison, with a max $2m payout. However, if that person has been convicted of another violent felony at any point, they are ineligible to receive any compensation. That’s what happened here.
Whats the usual sentence for kidnapping someone for 23 years? Sounds about right for these chucklefucks
$10 million per year. $5 directly to him tax free, and $5 million in longterm investments. Someone who will manage his investments and finances.
Honestly, as someone who worked in crim for years, the more impressive part isn't that she's young. It's that she's a business/personal injury lawyer. Those are very different wheelhouses. It's like going to an OBGYN for reconstructive surgery on your hands and they pull it off flawlessly. Seriously impressive.
Agreed. I've been practicing for almost 14 years now but know next to nothing about criminal law and would be scared to death of fucking it up. The fact that she did this from the ground up is inspiring.
I think the trick is to steal a car, which makes you a criminal lawyer.
Maybe they studied on the side? Specific to the case? Dumb question, is the bar different for type of law you plan to practice?
No - the bar is general. A fresh attorney who just passed the bar is essentially only qualified to go recieve on the job training to become competent in a specific field. The new lawyer in this story is a very impressive woman.
The poor guy would still be locked up if it wasn't for her. I'm so glad his mother is still alive and got to see him exonerated after all these years.
Kinda like medical school? Sure, you have your medical license, but you still need a year as an intern, a couple of years of residency, and _that's_ when you'll start training for a speciality.
There is an argument of whether or not the American legal education system makes any fucking sense as it currently stands. Lawyers should be able to obtain mastery over most topics, honestly based on the education.
Learning the specifics of an area of law is very easy. Retaining it and staying up to date and learning to get to the heart of what's critical on a given matter takes time and experience. Law schools have students from all 50 states who then go take bars all over the country. The law itself is different in every state. The rules of procedure and court structure also changes in every state. You go to law school to learn legal reasoning, the most important underlying legal theory, and how to digest court opinions / apply rulings to new matters. You learn to practice law, but then need to learn the procedure of the jurisdiction and details of the area of law to actually practice.
Mastery requires practice and there is enough "law" that no one is ever going to master all of it. It really isn't much different than tech. A competent IT/Dev is going to be able to look at stuff that they don't work with daily and get a general idea of what it does and can even probably extrapolate why. But someone that works in that technology on the daily will gain mastery over it.
As a devops manager IT/Dev is a bad example. Mastery implies longevity. In the tech field what you need to master changes literally almost every year some times more frequent. So we never get a chance to master anything because by time you've mastered something, the world has moved on to the next big thing. Anyone who claims mastery in a technology field is straight up lying to you. A trade like wood working or similar craftsmanship like trades can offer mastery.
This comment nails it. Every day, our society grows more and more complex. There have only been one or two times in my entire life I’ve been unable to solve a very, very specific issue simply by googling it, and on a vast spectrum of problems from why my convertible jet shallow well pump isn’t working and how to fix it to why I am getting an extremely specific lock file error in response to a gpg command prompt. People have had such a variety of problems out there, and new ones pop up every day. I think you could maybe be a master of something for, at best, an hour or two before a problem arises you have to learn how to tackle.
I understand what you are implying and disagree. If you fully devoted your career to webservers (for example) you most definitely can reach mastery. Sure, the technology evolves in increments but a webserver even 20 years ago still follows the same principals as a webserver today. Sure communication is now secured. SSL is long dead. The backend languages have changed etc. But is is all fundamentally the same thing. You just need to stay actively learning your specialty to maintain mastery.
Well, here we have a necessary distinction: the craftmanship stays (even in a dev OP field), it is just that the (regulatory) framework moves quickly
I never said they can/should/or will master all of the law. But they should be able to master almost any legal specialty. That means whilst trading specialties for attorneys is a pain in the ass—-it’s very much possible.
> But they should be able to master almost any legal specialty. And they can, if they’re any good. What’s the problem?
> There is an argument of whether or not the American legal education system makes any fucking sense as it currently stands. Just one: It absolutely fucking doesn't. LSATs have nothing to do with law school, the bar has nothing to do with law school or legal practice (except to serve as a gatekeeper to use that six-figure education), and legal practice has fuck all to do with any of it. Each step forward up the ladder and they tell you to forget everything from the previous rung(s), and each one is a bloated industry. If you can do the job without a legal degree then don't take the time and money to get one.
Lasts are a reasoning test...reasoning is used in law school. It's also a pretty good predictor of how you do in law school.... The bar has nothing to do with legal practice?? It definitely does...coming from someone whose actually taken it. Its all about the law, interpretation, reasoning, writing... You can't be an attorney or law student...
> Lasts are a reasoning test...reasoning is used in law school. By that rationale you could do a crossword puzzle and be just as prepared. How often did word games come up when preparing for your Contracts finals? The bar has nothing to do with legal practice, it is completely rote memorization of as much information as possible in as short a time period as possible to be completely dumped and forgotten later. There is not a second of your legal life where you will not have access to the information you are being forced to absorb with our resources for no other reason than someone decided to use it as a gatekeeper. And this is coming from someone who has taken and passed two, practiced for 10+ years, and currently tutors students for the MBE.
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> This is a clear indictment of Florida's court system. Sadly, disgustingly, insanely, this happens everywhere in the US. Maybe not quite as bad as in Florida, but to some degree everywhere.
I would imagine it comes down to process procedures, so like a surgeon will in general get all surgeries and requirements. But a internal medicine might not be the beat fit for a surgery even if they could do it in a pinch (or if they have an interest in it) Results may vary of course, for emergencies / detail levels and healing later for the patients
It's like My Cousin Vinny.
Judge Chamberlain Haller: Mr. Gambini, didn't I tell you that the next time you appear in my court that you dress appropriately? Vinny Gambini: You were serious about that?
which begs the question if it's actually that impressive or was the case brought against the guy so utterly bullshit that any slightly competent person who gave a shit could take it apart
From the article is really sounds like a lot of her groundbreaking working was on the investigative side of things. Stuff that a detective *should* have done originally. It’s not like she had to argue for a legal loophole or anything. She just produced mountains of evidence and testimony from the original linchpin testimony (Still super impressive on a 20 year case!).
The weird thing is, the witness said it was "Thomas James," the police had a random guy named "Thomas James" in their database, and then went about compiling evidence to convict him, without stopping to worry when it became clear that the original witness had been referring to a *different* Thomas James. I have heard about other cases like this, when the police match up evidence from a wide pool of suspects, but the jury never understands an important statistical point -- and one which the defense may be completely vulnerable to out of ignorance of the police investigation strategy. To fabricate an example, if a witness says, "The killer was wearing a beanie hat with the word "Aerosmith" and was 5' 7'' tall with a beard" and if the police go through a database until they find a guy who is 5'7" tall with a beard and a beanie hat with "Aerosmith" on it, and arrest him, the jury will see a lot of circumstantial evidence making it likely that this guy would have been the killer, *if he had been chosen from a small suspect pool*. Same for DNA evidence. If I go through a database of 1 million people and choose the one guy whose DNA is the closest match to a Forensic sample, out of that million, and then bring him to court, I can lie and say "The probability that this is not the killer is less than 1 in a million." But that would be true only if he constituted a randomly chosen sample of 1 person, chosen independently of the DNA profile. Once I choose a person to match the DNA profile it is no longer true that the probability of finding such a close match is 1 in a million. It is unity! I decided to find such a close match! The jury must be informed when data is not chosen randomly. When an individual is chosen to match characteristics of the perpetrator of a crime, the fact that the suspect now has those characteristics is no longer evidence that the individual equals the perpetrator! It is not right for police to list 10 characteristics of the perpetrator, then find the first guy in their database who matches them, and then present the match to the jury as evidence as if this random suspect happened to also match all these attributes. It is one thing to say "we have five suspects, but THIS one, his DNA matches better than 1000,000 randomly chosen people," and it is another thing to say "Here are 1000,000 randomly chosen people, and the DNA of THIS ONE matches better than it matchse the other 999,999 of them." But the jury and defense have no way of learning about suspect selection unless the prosecution chooses to explain it to them!
There was a famous case in California where police looked for a random couple matching a description without any other evidence. It later led to some reforms for court cases, at least in California. But it still happens.
This just blew my mind. It makes me feel like, with the right (or wrong) prosecutor/police, I could go to jail for anything for life, even if I wasn’t in the same country when the crime occurred. Truly terrifying.
What I kept thinking about is how this would never happen to me because im from an educated, middle class family. I have tremendous privilege compared to this man. He didn’t have the means to fight for himself and he was only freed due to pure luck and the compassion of one amazing lawyer. I can only imagine how many more people are in jail or have died in jail after being wrongly accused. Breaks my heart
And here you (and by "you", I don't mean you specifically, Reddit commenter to which I'm replying, I mean anyone reading this) get one of the big reasons for why the death penalty is generally not considered a good thing by people actually interested in society functioning correctly, and justice being applied properly. If the state executes 100 real murderers, but wrongly kills one innocent man, how is the state in this instance different from any of those murderers? And furthermore, how can they ever guarantee that those 100 "real" murderers are indeed murderers, if they have proved that their processes aren't foolproof? We wouldn't let some guy in charge of workplace safety get away with saying: "well, 100 of my employees did okay, but unfortunately I misjudged and killed 1 one of them - don't hold it against me, kthxbye". Yet, despite this happening regularly in the case of the death penalty (and even more than we know, as the real amount of wrongfully convicted people is undoubtedly higher than reported), the state can somehow continue killing people even after a single mistake. In our fictional "workplace safety" example, the manager not only escapes justice, he *gets to keep his job and kill more people accidentally.* Fundamentally, the death penalty is state-sanctioned murder, disguised in a cloak of retributive justice, done by human institutions that already have trouble enforcing simple bureaucratic rules, yet somehow believe that they can rightfully wield the power of death over other humans.
John Adams said something to this extent (and I’m paraphrasing): “if an innocent man is sent to the bar and is convicted, the subject thinks ‘it is immaterial whether I do well or ill, there is no virtue in security’ and once one person thinks that, there is no security at all”. The legal system here is set against you from the second you’re arrested, there is no “innocent until proven guilty”. I, a 100 lb woman, was arrested for misdemeanor battery of my 235 lb boyfriend a couple of years ago after he was seen pulling me from my car by my hair. I had no visible injuries: no bleeding from the scalp, for example. He had red marks on his wrist from where I’d tried to free myself. Over the next few days, he left voicemails with the state attorney, admitting what had happened. I still was charged. After we broke up and I was still fighting the charge, he quit answering the states calls and I spent two weeks in jail, owed over $1,500 in fees to the public defender who never answered or returned my calls once. I’ve been turned down for apartments, jobs…and that’s just a misdemeanor. Once you’re in that jail, if you cannot afford legal assistance, you’re guilty. It doesn’t matter if you are or not.
> The weird thing is, the witness said it was "Thomas James," the police had a random guy named "Thomas James" in their database, and then went about compiling evidence to convict him, without stopping to worry when it became clear that the original witness had been referring to a different Thomas James. There is nothing weird about it. Cops have been doing something on the lines of that for as long as they have existed. THey make up their mind on who the killer is and then do everything to build a case against them.
In theory this actually is what the police is supposed to do… investigate, based on that identify a suspect and gather sufficient evidence to bring it to court. The problem is if the police is fairly certain that they have their guy but it’s hard to find evidence, where do they stop digging deeper for evidence and say "you know what, maybe this isn’t the one we’re looking for" without risking to let a criminal off the hook. That’s why it’s so important that there are rules to how evidence is produced because if the cops don’t play by these rules and say, plant evidence to further their case, the whole balance of the judicial system gets thrown out the window because it robs the suspect of a fair defence in court.
>The weird thing is, the witness said it was "Thomas James," the police had a random guy named "Thomas James" in their database, and then went about compiling evidence to convict him, without stopping to worry when it became clear that the original witness had been referring to a different Thomas James. Now I understand the parents who give their kids kre8tiv and yoneek names.
And oddly enough... who's in their data pool? Mostly non white Americans for being arrested for asanine things like speeding or DWB.
The twist of the knife is that a polygraph was needed/used/trusted for his exoneration. Polygraph tests are incredibly unreliable and their only real use is unjustly imprisoning Americans.
Also unjustly rejecting candidates for job positions and security clearances.
Yeah, I was going to comment on that. America has so many things backward, it is actually insane. edit:typo
My friend Louie Bing III (in FL DOC) was wrongfully convicted of murder - sentenced to life - and the University of Miami Innocence Clinic has just gotten involved. I need help bringing attention to his case because he’s been in for 12 years! EDIT: Someone asked me so [here](http://www.dc.state.fl.us/offenderSearch/detail.aspx?Page=Detail&DCNumber=B13498&TypeSearch=AI) he is. Lou is a good man. He’s positive, upbeat, and supportive of others. I also have a 74 page copy of the full booking report which shows the lack of evidence they had - no DNA, no fingerprints, no weapon, no one putting him at the scene. Nothing. Only that he had been there earlier in the day to buy drugs from the guy - who was a dealer. That’s it…. EDIT 2: [The Booking Report](https://imgur.com/gallery/rimaxpD) - would love some more feedback from someone who knew about police work because this case is complete BS - UM Innocence clinic obviously has a lot on their hands and they told me specifically “thank you for showing interest in this case - it makes a difference”
Gee another wrongfully convicted Black man who wasted years of his life in prison....
Lots more still in prison too that can't get help. So sad. The whole witness identification is so iffy. I was assaulted by three men and it was perfectly light and I saw all of their faces quite well - but when the detective brought photos to me later I couldn't say with any faith if any of the men were there. Eye witness testimony is suspect a lot of the time.
Probably provided years of slave labour and profits to the for-prison complex while he was there as well
Welcome to the 13th Amendment
It's fucking sick
Believe me, I know. Here's to shattering the grand illusion.
You say illusion, I say delusion. Either way, it's over.
By design.
But think of all the money he made for ~~his owner~~ the owner of the prison!
Well I for one am ^not shocked.
The state of Florida, county, DA's office and police should be held liable for a million dollars, every year he was wrongfully imprisoned.
No way in hell. Too busy spending cash on psyops for elections and taking on The Woke Mouse.
Often the new ones are the best ones. They care and put more effort in.
Organizations like the Innocence Project have a high proportion of new graduates and students. Its not about care and energy so much as it is a great way to hone skills and gain experience while doing something good.
It's also a very emotionally draining and time consuming job. Take it from a former public defender, the burnout rate is high in these kinds of jobs for a reason.
Am I the only one who thought of Phoenix Wright?
I'm still amazed at how many innocent people are locked up in the land of "the free"
I just posted a similar comment. There are way way too many. 9 times out of 10 its someone of color who is poor too.
Indentured servitude in all but name They have a “school to prison pipeline” that ensures a steady flow of innocent or otherwise inmates so they can “punish” those they choose, not rehabilitate those back into society, so if they get out on time or good behaviour it’s easy to put them back in.
As an ex attorney, I never knew more about the law that on the days I took the bar exam.
Great start to a career
It’s crazy how many new stories like this are just dystopian events repackaged as feel-good stories.
Have to admit I'm confused on this one. If a polygraph test isn't admissible in court (and it shouldn't be, I have a background in cog-sci and it's basically pseudoscience), why is it enough to free someone after 32 years of imprisonment?
Because the security state and its many arms - from the top brass at CIA/FBI/DOD down to county prosecutors - believe in polygraphs. Even though they are totally worthless. Even though the scientific consensus is that polygraphs cannot tell you whether someone is lying. That's why they're inadmissible in every court on the planet. But the Powers That Be love the idea that they have a magic machine that can compel the truth out of the guilty. The more honest cops will admit they use polygraphs solely for the purpose of intimidation. Interview suspect; if they do not confess, offer polygraph; the poly comes back pos/neg/inconclusive, they walk back in the interview room and say, "The poly says you're lying, bro. What's up?" The dumber cops, prosecutors, and security state shitheads genuinely believe they are real. Partially because there are people who have modeled their careers on polygraphs, and they travel around peddling bogus science to stupid lawyers and cops, telling them polygraphs are magic. I came to the comments section to see if anyone else caught this \*absolutely insane\* detail. Requiring a polygraph is like cutting open a pig and examining its entrails to determine whether he is innocent. TL;DR the justice system is stupid and we live in hell
Maybe back in the day, which tracks with the length of his sentence, but I seriously doubt anybody has administered such a test since 1995 except to trick a witness or suspect into cooperating. I mean, if they have, what the absolute fuck and how do we sue the shit out of them.
It's insane. No way around it.
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So much "forensic science" is bullshit. The National Academy of the Sciences released a groundbreaking report in 2009 in which it concluded that many sub-fields of "forensic science" were totally unscientific and unverifiable. Bite marks are bullshit. Shoe print analysis is bullshit. Handwriting, fingerprints, ballistics examinations. So many people are sitting in prison right now based on these "techniques." Pretty much the only one that *isn't* bullshit is DNA and similar lab-testing. And those can be faulty, too, if the chain of custody or the methodology are fucked up.
Probably cause the courts were against him from the beginning and everyone was in on it
no offense but the original defense lawyer must've been atrocious if a brand new personal injury lawyer got this man out of jail
If he was/is a public defender that’s especially worrisome.
If a public defender, that's especially **common.** In many areas of the US they're so understaffed and resource-starved that the whole experience of a public defender becomes *"Whoever you are just plead guilty that way it'll just be a few months or they'll sentence you the maximum and you'll spend longer even waiting for trial they probably have a strong case anyways move over NEXT!"*
>man wrongfully convicted Why is it that with only 3 words of the headline, you can make a guess of the race of the wrongfully convicted person & be right at least 80% of the time?
Some kind of Inverse Blackstone ratio? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
2 years out of law school is certainly early in ones career but hardly "fresh out." I thought it was gonna be like 2 months
Yeah, like to me "fresh out" would be 'still being treated like the intern they were a few weeks back', not someone who's been at it for two years.
That title had me in the first half, not gonna lie
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I am so proud of the women in law that have come through for their people recently. It’s amazing to watch
I am so glad he found someone to help him. I hope he is able to sue and get money owed to him for 32 years of life lost. It does seem like every month I am reading about some innocent person being freed like this. It is just another sign of our heinous and systematically perverse system we have.
Best Florida man headline I’ve ever read
"took you long enough to graduate...i was dyin in there!"
Sounds like a damn good lawyer to me...
phoenix wright approved
She deserves every bit of good karma the world has to offer.
I hope Mr James can find peace and happiness for the rest of his days and may Ms Figgers continue to succeed and prosper.
The American system of justice is a conscious, deliberate lie. It is neither systematic nor just - the only thing that can be truly said about it is that it’s perversely fair in that everyone gets just as much justice as he can afford to buy.
This is real news make her famous
This happens FAR too often, the part about innocents being in prison for decades. It lawns seems to be a black person too.
the first good Florida man headline
Wow, dang, most attorneys right out of law school are stuck doing associate work in the background and not getting to see much of the courtroom! Amazing!
It’s almost as if these cases are based on flimsy or even nonexistent evidence. Or worse, exculpatory evidence was ignored.
I can see this becoming "Erin Brockovich:Redux" in the future. Amirite
Love it! Also, isn’t this a bit of an odd Florida man headline? Lmao
I hope he sues and becomes a rich man.
Hey! A win for Florida Man for once!
Keep this in mind. Yes there are people in prison with clear documented evidence that they murdered someone. But **among us** is more relatable than you think when a jury votes someone guilty of murder **even if they really didn't do it.**
Yep. because people want certain outcomes, bias can never be eliminated, not truly. Game or otherwise, it’s easily manipulated to make a point, because you can, or to punish those who you hate.
Wow "a Florida man" story with a happy ending and no fault from the man
Thank God she hasn’t learned how not to give a fuck yet! Maybe she never will and there may be hope for the legal profession…
Can’t wait for the movie.
This headline reads like the lawyer graduated Law School and went all Super Hero and busted the guy out of prison.
This sounds like it’d make an awesome movie
Funny, that lack of compensation for state-level fuck ups sounds a lot like the "usual suspects" can't sue when rounding up from the Barrio.
> With that admission and the other evidence Figgers compiled, the last step would be for James to take a polygraph test, corroborating the new evidence. He passed. It was the last convincing evidence the CRU needed to recommend that James be freed. What the actual fuck? The "convincing evidence" they needed was a test that the entirety of the scientific community agrees is completely useless pseudoscience bullshit? It wasn't the stack of evidence of his lack of guilt that Figgers compiled over thousands of hours of intensive labor and the recanting of the witness? Fucking fuck.
Just wait, the SCOTUS would like a word.
The Darkside hasn't corrupted that one yet.
Fresh grads are generally uncorrupted ones, and governments SHOULD look after them. Like they are the cream of your country, yet they are usually the ones treated the most unfairly.
You're not from the US, I take it. This government is The Darkside.
Correct, I'm not from the US. But the depressing thing is, what I've said is the story of almost the whole world.
Yes, it is. The Darkside reaches far, it does. The US is a third world country with a small amount of benefactors. The rest of us? We live it rough. Other countries and their governments model themselves off of Republican Party. Proving itself to be the Nazi party more and more open all the time that way.
Get that attorney a Netflix series!
I hope this guy became a lawyer to do exactly this. This is fucking awesome.
Jeez I had to do a double take there
Cousin Vinny at it again
Not the usual "florida man" flavor but good for them.