My lawyers were from a law firm in Philadelphia who dedicated 16 years of their lives to proving my innocence. If they hadn't, I'd be dead. No doubt about it.
Of course, if Louisiana had paid for us to have real defenses in the first place, we wouldn't have been wrongly condemned to die, our families wouldn't have suffered years of trauma, the families of the victims wouldn't have suffered as long, the state would have saved money and the real perpetrators might have been more quickly caught.
John Thompson is now the director of a prison rights organization called "Resurrection After Exoneration" in New Orleans.
My attention was drawn to the past paragraph in Thompson's letter, where he says, -- if Louisiana had paid for us to have real defenses in the first place, we wouldn't have been wrongly condemned to die"."
He is referring to the "loser pays" principle that's in effect in many countries, including Germany and the United Kingdom. Lawyers are of divided opinions on the issue, which is incredibly complicated and littered with examples of unintended consequences.
The nation's lawyers are nowhere near addressing, much less resolving, resolving this problem. And, while some states have already implemented some version of the rule, it applies only to civil, not criminal, cases.
Compensation for unlawful imprisonment obligates some states to compensate the exonoree , some not. Today, 22 states, the District of Colombia, and the Federal Government, will make a cash award to those freed after doing unlawful jail time; the rest have no such provision. In those, the outward-bound gift is something like $75.00 and a bus ticket. In other states, the award can be substantial -- in the millions, depending on the length of incarceration.
And sometimes, that system itself goes wrong. One exonoree was awarded $14 million for spending a generation on death row. Within days, the state did a 180 and withdrew the aware, giving the former prisoner nothing.
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