After 20 years on death row, inmate cleared by DNA
Austin to pay wrongly imprisoned man $5.3 million
I've often pondered the question of what, if any, debt society owes to a person who is wrongly accused, convicted, and incarcerated for a crime. DO we have a responsibility to compensate someone for mistakes made by an imperfect system? Or do we accept the premise that our criminal justice system IS an imperfect system, and that, for the greater good, we must be willing to accept a certain amount of error as a "cost of doing business"?
Well, Austin seems to have come down on the side of compensating victims, which, in all honesty is probably the only right and fair thing to do.
AUSTIN - The city of Austin has agreed to pay $5.3 million to a Texas man who spent 12 years in prison for a rape and murder he didn't commit.
Christopher Ochoa, now a Wisconsin resident, was released from prison in 2002, two years after he wrote to the Wisconsin Innocence Project for help. The project is a class of second- and third-year law students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who investigate possible wrongful convictions.
Ochoa confessed to killing Nancy DePriest at an Austin Pizza Hut in 1988 but later said he was coerced by homicide detectives.
Through DNA evidence, Ochoa became the first wrongly convicted man to be freed from prison through the work of the project.
The Austin City Council voted Nov. 20 to settle Ochoa's suit, which had sought $70 million.
Ochoa is now a first-semester law student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
People are imperfect human beings, so it stands to reason that a criminal justice system designed by human beings would be imperfect as well. The question, of course, is what sort of compensation should be paid to someone falsely imprisoned. There is no way, of course, to give them back the time, the heartache, or perhaps even their lost reputation in the community. That leaves money, and though it can be difficult, if not impossible, to place a dollar figure on suffering, what other option is out there?
How much is enough? Austin's decision should probably be read as a recognition that these sorts of cases need to be accepted and dealt with fairly. The question of fairness, of course, will produce widely varying answers depending on the jurisdiction. Perhaps it is time that we as a society address this question directly and determine what is fair and how much compensation a victim can reasonably expect. This money, after all, will be coming out of our tax dollars, so it would only be sound public policy to develop an across-the-board manner of finding a fair standard that can be uniformly applied. It's the right thing to do.
