Can someone in the UK confirm the accuracy of this report? (Via Jim Henley.)
WHAT do you give someone who’s been proved innocent after spending the best part of their life behind bars, wrongfully convicted of a crime they didn’t commit? An apology, maybe? Counselling? Champagne? Compensation? Well, if you’re David Blunkett, the Labour Home Secretary, the choice is simple: you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in British prisons. On Tuesday, Blunkett will fight in the Royal Courts of Justice in London for the right to charge victims of miscarriages of justice more than £3000 for every year they spent in jail while wrongly convicted … spokesmen in the Home Office say it’s a completely “reasonable course of action” as the innocent men and women would have spent the money anyway on food and lodgings if they weren’t in prison. The government deems the claw-back ‘Saved Living Expenses’.
Is this a step in the calculation of compensation money prior to paying it to the victims, or an attempt to grab some of that money back after the fact? (Is that distinction even relevant?) The sang froid of the British Legal Establishment never ceases to amaze. Maybe they could take it out of Lord Denning’s estate. He said he wanted to be remembered in good works.
That is awful but I believe that in some ways the US is even worse—it looks as though the UK actually compensates the wrongly imprisoned, but in the US:
“Under federal law, someone falsely detained is entitled to only $5,000, regardless of how long the imprisonment. In most states, the only way for the exonerated to be compensated is through civil suits filed against local police departments and the district attorney’s office. Yet civil litigation places the burden of proof solely on the exonerated, who need undeniable proof of a police frame-up or malicious prosecution by the DA’s office.” Here’s more; as you’d expect, it varies from state to state.
So it would seem that, even with the L3000 taken out, prisoners in the UK might get more compensation than those in the US who can’t win a suit if they don’t live in a state with a decent law. I’m not sure how the numbers work out.
For the record this looks about right, judging from the BBC report last night. The claw back appears to be deducted from the compensation sum at the time of calculation.
The BBC interviewed Paddy Hill, an Irishman who was wrongly convicted on terrorist charges and served 16 1/2 years. His compensation has been reduced by £52,000 for “board and lodging”, but he has stopped fighting the case because some of his co-defendants are now so old after a series of delays in making any payment that it wouldn’t be reasonable to delay their payments any longer.
Unsurprisingly, he is a bitter man. As he points out, had he been guilty, he would have been housed in prison for free. The government refused to comment.
Further comment seems superfluous. Anyway, Matt’s picture of the situation in the States leaves me speechless.
It would be interesting to see if, following this principle, people convicted of kidnapping will be able to sue those they kidnapped for room and board. After all, they would have spent the money on food and lodging if they hadn’t been kidnapped.
Come to think of it, I think I’ll sue my university for all the money I could have earned if I hadn’t come here. Now does just one possible world count, or can I sum up a bunch of them?
I hate to say anything that might be construed as defending Blunkett, but the picture isn’t very clear from the two articles I’ve managed to find. Presumably, when assessing the amount of compensation due, the independent assessor takes account of things like income foregone whilst in prison. Obviously, the right figure to look at there has to be net of taxes and I guess the HO are arguing that there should be some further deduction to take some account of expenses that anyone would have had over the period concerned. So my guess is that this is an argument about how one element in the total compensation formula should be calculated. If so, then to represent it as having people “facing a bill” for £N000 is somewhat misleading (though if I were in their position I might do the same).
Having said that I hope they (people like the Birmingham 6) get as much as possible, since no amount of money would compensate for what they endured. But that doesn’t mean that Blunkett and co are necessarily applying the existing rules for determining compensation otherwise than they should.
As an aside, when I was an undergraduate (long, long ago), Denning’s was a name to conjure with among my law student friends, on the basis of his fondness for judge-made law.
I trace my distrust of judicial activism (now amply vindicated by the Rehnquist Court in the US) to my early exposure to Denning.
Oh rats, I was going to post on this but my two points (that the amount of compensation determined by the courts using whatever calculus they do was intended to be the amount received, and the kidnap analogy) have been pre-empted. Ruined what may have been a good post.
I may have to stop reading Crooked Timber.
BTW, three grand a year is nothing like the cost of keeping a prison inmate, as any Mail reader no.
Had the victims of these miscarriages of justice not been imprisoned, they might have bought houses and benefitted financially from house price inflation. Possibly the compensation they are due accounts for this; if not, the idea of charging for board and lodging is a bit silly, since these people have certainly been prevented from participating in the property market and might well have made a profit from doing so….
Some googling around revealed some interesting pages:
On this page , solicitors for the Hickeys (another case) are arguing that their clients shouldn’t have “living expenses” deducted because the assessor made no such deduction for the Birmingham 6. Though the page also quotes some lines of statute which suggest that deducting such expenses is required under Administration of Justice Act 1982.
And here there is a page outlining some of the general issues surrounding compensation. Some of it is pretty shocking: you get less if you’ve been in prison before, you get less for each additional year you spend in prison etc etc.
Pictured next to the fact that in her Maj’s country, companies can default on pensions, this paints the picture of a state gone insane. And all this by a Labour government.
What do other countries (other than U.K. and U.S.) do to compensate victims of a miscarriage of justice ? Honest question, just interested…
I rather doubt they would have spent those years paying for prison quality food. If they took 3,000 £ from me I’d want 10,000 for the crap I had to eat.
just as if they wanted 5,000 for the free gym membership I’d want 15,000 cause there weren’t any martial arts courses, and roughhousing was a disciplinary action.
If you really want to be left speechless, head to the first Google hit for “wrongly+imprisoned+compensation.” The author (who seems to be more or less a random person) says, when an innocent person is imprisoned without prosecutorial misconduct, “A terrible thing has happened to an innocent person, and compassion says that he should be compensated… somehow. But should the State compensate somebody for a tragic circumstance in which nobody’s actually to blame?”
Myself, I think this is a case for strict liability.
I don’t know what the situation is like in other countries—obviously this is a discussion that only takes place in democracies—I am comparing the reality to what I think is ideal.
Hey, that suing the universities is a good idea. And we should all sue our parents for not selling us into slavery (unless they did, of course) and investing the proceeds in a nice bond or two that might be worth something by now (or not, as the case may be). We should sue tv companies for all the time we spend watching when we could be out making money. We should sue mattress companies for all the time we spend asleep when we could be out making a profit. We should
Perhaps it’s my debased American sense of justice, but it seems to me that a tort solution to the problem—which is the case in the US—is probably, on average, more just and equitable than the relatively arbitrary, automatic compensation exemplified above.
For example, I know that you guys across the pond are familiar with the Tulia, TX travesty of justice…there was a BBC show on it. You might not have seen that all of them are released now, and that another of the civil suits on their behalf has resolved (in this case between they and the city of Amarillo) with a $5 million settlement to be distributed among the 45 people (a 46th has died). I think the average length of incarceration was something close to 2 years; so that works out to be about 55K a year for each person. And, again, this is not the only civil suit.
Now, I suppose that what we’re talking about above are not like the Tulia case, but more like “honest mistakes” in which a jury would be unlikely (but who knows?) to penalize the authorities. And maybe that’s different. Maybe there should be, as in the UK, a minimum compensation for anyone effectively found to have been wrongly imprisoned. But I’d be really wary of such a mechanism canceling someone’s right to sue for equitable compensation for their false imprisonment.
Finally a topic I can agree with you all on. The state, even if it did nothing improper at the time of conviction, should still compensate innocent people whom it imprisons. The state took away their lives, it should feel obligated to give compensation for being wrong about it.
A tort solution might be workable for true misconduct, but I’m not convinced it would be workable for many other cases where the prosecution didn’t really do anything wrong.
I’ve never given this issue much thought before, but I’ll throw this out—since there seems to be general agreement that compensation, either through torts or policies—is good and just. But how much? Based on what principle? Should it be more for victims of gross misconduct and not simple error? Should it be tied to reasonable estimates of lost wages, or egalitarian? Should there be pain and suffering/mental anguish? Where should the money come from—should the prosecutor’s offices have to foot some of the bill, at least in cases of misconduct, as a deterrant?
Seems like a wealth of issues for normative/legal theorists to sink their teeth into.
“Should it be more for victims of gross misconduct and not simple error?”
Simple error would be handled like a car accident, through a civil lawsuit. Gross misconduct would be a criminal matter as well (as would intentional false prosecution).
So giving someone the death penalty acidentally would be the same as running someone over in your car accidentally. Intentional or gross misconduct would be the same as intentionally running someone over in your car, or doing so while drunk.
“But how much? Based on what principle? … Should it be tied to reasonable estimates of lost wages, or egalitarian? Should there be pain and suffering/mental anguish?”
Seems like a simple tort idea is a good place to start: pay them enough to make them indifferent between being imprisoned and not. In other words, make them whole.
Difficult to administer, but not that difficult; there would be standards created, and evidentiary proceedings if people thought they were significantly different than the standard case.
It might cost quite a bit, though. The system would have to set its error rate accordingly, especially for the harsher punishments.
“Where should the money come from—should the prosecutor’s offices have to foot some of the bill, at least in cases of misconduct, as a deterrant?”
Well, in a public system, the public would pay most of the time; then public servants could be fired for screwing up so badly. In some cases, we might be able to pin the mistake on a single person or group, and in that case we could sue them instead (or as well).
In a private system … oh wait, this is CT …
“you give them a big, fat bill for the cost of board and lodgings for the time they spent freeloading at Her Majesty’s Pleasure in British prisons.”
You should pay even more than that; after all, if the government runs your entire life for you, you’re much better off than if you were allowed to make your own decisions :-).
“I rather doubt they would have spent those years paying for prison quality food.”
Nor for prison-quality torture. This is the Birmingham 6, right? Whose photos at their bail hearings showed black eyes & bruises & noone gave a toss? Whose prison-quality food was pissed in for years.
The papers are full of the “survey” that 1976 was the best year ever in England. Not for the dozens stitched up by crooked police and crooked judiciary it wasn’t.
One thing that the Sunday Herlad, then Perry and everyone else who commented seem to have left out is that Blunkett is not trying to impose new law. He’s actually trying to uphold thecurrent law : not what we normally expect of him.
Compensation became a statutory ( rather than ex gratia ) payment in the 1988 Criminal Justice Act. Essentially, the amoutn should be calculated in the same manner as civil damages.
Fine and Dandy.
However, in the 1982 Administration of Justice Act we have :
““in an action ….for personal injuries any saving to the injured person which is attributable to his maintenance wholly or partly at public expense in a hospital, nursing home or other institution shall be set off against any income lost by him as a result of his injuries”. “
So it is not a choice by anyone. The appraiser is simply applying the law.
It’s also asinine, but then who ever said the law had to make sense ?
Of much greater import to my mind are the delays in actually paying the compensation. One easy way to make this faster : interest is due on the compensation from the date of the quashing of the conviction, rather than the current system of interest being due only form the date of agreement : which means that the interim payments to the victims garner interest which has tobe paid back.
À Gauche
Jeremy Alder
Amaravati
Anggarrgoon
Audhumlan Conspiracy
H.E. Baber
Philip Blosser
Paul Broderick
Matt Brown
Diana Buccafurni
Brandon Butler
Keith Burgess-Jackson
Certain Doubts
David Chalmers
Noam Chomsky
The Conservative Philosopher
Desert Landscapes
Denis Dutton
David Efird
Karl Elliott
David Estlund
Experimental Philosophy
Fake Barn County
Kai von Fintel
Russell Arben Fox
Garden of Forking Paths
Roger Gathman
Michael Green
Scott Hagaman
Helen Habermann
David Hildebrand
John Holbo
Christopher Grau
Jonathan Ichikawa
Tom Irish
Michelle Jenkins
Adam Kotsko
Barry Lam
Language Hat
Language Log
Christian Lee
Brian Leiter
Stephen Lenhart
Clayton Littlejohn
Roderick T. Long
Joshua Macy
Mad Grad
Jonathan Martin
Matthew McGrattan
Marc Moffett
Geoffrey Nunberg
Orange Philosophy
Philosophy Carnival
Philosophy, et cetera
Philosophy of Art
Douglas Portmore
Philosophy from the 617 (moribund)
Jeremy Pierce
Punishment Theory
Geoff Pynn
Timothy Quigley (moribund?)
Conor Roddy
Sappho's Breathing
Anders Schoubye
Wolfgang Schwartz
Scribo
Michael Sevel
Tom Stoneham (moribund)
Adam Swenson
Peter Suber
Eddie Thomas
Joe Ulatowski
Bruce Umbaugh
What is the name ...
Matt Weiner
Will Wilkinson
Jessica Wilson
Young Hegelian
Richard Zach
Psychology
Donyell Coleman
Deborah Frisch
Milt Rosenberg
Tom Stafford
Law
Ann Althouse
Stephen Bainbridge
Jack Balkin
Douglass A. Berman
Francesca Bignami
BlunkettWatch
Jack Bogdanski
Paul L. Caron
Conglomerate
Jeff Cooper
Disability Law
Displacement of Concepts
Wayne Eastman
Eric Fink
Victor Fleischer (on hiatus)
Peter Friedman
Michael Froomkin
Bernard Hibbitts
Walter Hutchens
InstaPundit
Andis Kaulins
Lawmeme
Edward Lee
Karl-Friedrich Lenz
Larry Lessig
Mirror of Justice
Eric Muller
Nathan Oman
Opinio Juris
John Palfrey
Ken Parish
Punishment Theory
Larry Ribstein
The Right Coast
D. Gordon Smith
Lawrence Solum
Peter Tillers
Transatlantic Assembly
Lawrence Velvel
David Wagner
Kim Weatherall
Yale Constitution Society
Tun Yin
History
Blogenspiel
Timothy Burke
Rebunk
Naomi Chana
Chapati Mystery
Cliopatria
Juan Cole
Cranky Professor
Greg Daly
James Davila
Sherman Dorn
Michael Drout
Frog in a Well
Frogs and Ravens
Early Modern Notes
Evan Garcia
George Mason History bloggers
Ghost in the Machine
Rebecca Goetz
Invisible Adjunct (inactive)
Jason Kuznicki
Konrad Mitchell Lawson
Danny Loss
Liberty and Power
Danny Loss
Ether MacAllum Stewart
Pam Mack
Heather Mathews
James Meadway
Medieval Studies
H.D. Miller
Caleb McDaniel
Marc Mulholland
Received Ideas
Renaissance Weblog
Nathaniel Robinson
Jacob Remes (moribund?)
Christopher Sheil
Red Ted
Time Travelling Is Easy
Brian Ulrich
Shana Worthen
Computers/media/communication
Lauren Andreacchi (moribund)
Eric Behrens
Joseph Bosco
Danah Boyd
David Brake
Collin Brooke
Maximilian Dornseif (moribund)
Jeff Erickson
Ed Felten
Lance Fortnow
Louise Ferguson
Anne Galloway
Jason Gallo
Josh Greenberg
Alex Halavais
Sariel Har-Peled
Tracy Kennedy
Tim Lambert
Liz Lawley
Michael O'Foghlu
Jose Luis Orihuela (moribund)
Alex Pang
Sebastian Paquet
Fernando Pereira
Pink Bunny of Battle
Ranting Professors
Jay Rosen
Ken Rufo
Douglas Rushkoff
Vika Safrin
Rob Schaap (Blogorrhoea)
Frank Schaap
Robert A. Stewart
Suresh Venkatasubramanian
Ray Trygstad
Jill Walker
Phil Windley
Siva Vaidahyanathan
Anthropology
Kerim Friedman
Alex Golub
Martijn de Koning
Nicholas Packwood
Geography
Stentor Danielson
Benjamin Heumann
Scott Whitlock
Education
Edward Bilodeau
Jenny D.
Richard Kahn
Progressive Teachers
Kelvin Thompson (defunct?)
Mark Byron
Business administration
Michael Watkins (moribund)
Literature, language, culture
Mike Arnzen
Brandon Barr
Michael Berube
The Blogora
Colin Brayton
John Bruce
Miriam Burstein
Chris Cagle
Jean Chu
Hans Coppens
Tyler Curtain
Cultural Revolution
Terry Dean
Joseph Duemer
Flaschenpost
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Jonathan Goodwin
Rachael Groner
Alison Hale
Household Opera
Dennis Jerz
Jason Jones
Miriam Jones
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Steven Krause
Lilliputian Lilith
Catherine Liu
John Lovas
Gerald Lucas
Making Contact
Barry Mauer
Erin O'Connor
Print Culture
Clancy Ratcliff
Matthias Rip
A.G. Rud
Amardeep Singh
Steve Shaviro
Thanks ... Zombie
Vera Tobin
Chuck Tryon
University Diaries
Classics
Michael Hendry
David Meadows
Religion
AKM Adam
Ryan Overbey
Telford Work (moribund)
Library Science
Norma Bruce
Music
Kyle Gann
ionarts
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Greg Sandow
Scott Spiegelberg
Biology/Medicine
Pradeep Atluri
Bloviator
Anthony Cox
Susan Ferrari (moribund)
Amy Greenwood
La Di Da
John M. Lynch
Charles Murtaugh (moribund)
Paul Z. Myers
Respectful of Otters
Josh Rosenau
Universal Acid
Amity Wilczek (moribund)
Theodore Wong (moribund)
Physics/Applied Physics
Trish Amuntrud
Sean Carroll
Jacques Distler
Stephen Hsu
Irascible Professor
Andrew Jaffe
Michael Nielsen
Chad Orzel
String Coffee Table
Math/Statistics
Dead Parrots
Andrew Gelman
Christopher Genovese
Moment, Linger on
Jason Rosenhouse
Vlorbik
Peter Woit
Complex Systems
Petter Holme
Luis Rocha
Cosma Shalizi
Bill Tozier
Chemistry
"Keneth Miles"
Engineering
Zack Amjal
Chris Hall
University Administration
Frank Admissions (moribund?)
Architecture/Urban development
City Comforts (urban planning)
Unfolio
Panchromatica
Earth Sciences
Our Take
Who Knows?
Bitch Ph.D.
Just Tenured
Playing School
Professor Goose
This Academic Life
Other sources of information
Arts and Letters Daily
Boston Review
Imprints
Political Theory Daily Review
Science and Technology Daily Review