"The Price of a Life"

"Restivo and Neidecker live modestly, on the salary from her job at the local post office. In 2010, he received a $2.2-million settlement from the State of New York, but much of that went to lawyers and to his mother, who for two decades had spent everything she could spare on his case, at one point putting up her house as bond. Restivo tries to live as if that settlement were the last money he will ever have. “When they handed me that check, I’m not thinking, Ah, I’m rich!” he said. “I’m not eligible for Medicaid. I’m not eligible for Social Security. I never put money in a 401(k). That money has to last me forever.”

But in April, 2014, a jury in Islip awarded Restivo eighteen million dollars in damages—effectively, a million for each year of his imprisonment. Nassau County is appealing the ruling, so the money will likely take years to materialize, if it comes at all. “I’ve been through too much in this world to think anything’s a given,” Restivo said. “I can’t start living off that money. Then I put myself in a hole and I’m screwed for the rest of my life.” His expenses are minimal: “I could live on the beach.” But he was concerned about his mother. He had just returned from spending several months repairing her house in Lynbrook, and she was in poor health. “These are my wishes—to know that she’s taken care of,” he said...

There is still no consensus about the value of lost time. Missouri gives exonerees fifty dollars a day for time served, California twice that much. Massachusetts caps total compensation at half a million dollars. In Maine, the limit is three hundred thousand; in Florida, it’s two million. The variation is largely arbitrary. “If there’s a logic to it, I haven’t seen it,” Robert J. Norris, a researcher at SUNY Albany who has studied compensation statutes, told me...

Compensation is intended in part as a deterrent: a municipality that has to pay heavily for police or prosecutorial misconduct ought to be less likely to allow it to happen again. But it is taxpayers, not police or prosecutors, who bear the costs of litigation and compensation. Prosecutors enjoy almost total immunity in cases of misconduct, even if they deliberately withhold exculpatory evidence from a jury. A 2011 Supreme Court ruling also made it virtually impossible to sue a prosecutor’s office for such violations. And, unless there is a civil-rights trial, there is no examination of the police practices that contributed to a wrongful conviction: it is seen simply as collateral damage in the fight against crime."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/the-price-of-a-life

I wonder about this. And what can be returned to people? And shouldn't' it be more than money - shouldn't it be things that let them have lives? Eligibility for services; mental health services! Free college? Employment assistance?