Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Man Gets $45M for 20 Years in Prison While Innocent" video.

@Jirodyne That is absolutely insane. The jury is just there to weigh the evidence that has been presented to them and the judge doesn't necessarily know about evidence that isn't submitted either due to it being actively withheld or because it wasn't collected. I do think that when it comes to the cops, judge and prosecution that it should be taken on a case by case basis as sometimes there are legitimate reasons to believe that the convicted is legitimately guilty.
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@Jirodyne You can never reach the level of evidence that would make that reasonable. You'd literally have to use a jury comprised solely of people that witnessed the crime and that has massive problems. We don't allow witnesses of a crime to be on the jury for that act for a reason. And often times we won't have jurors that have themselves been involved in a similar crime either.
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It's hard to say exactly how much being locked up should be worth, but that number seems like a reasonable starting point.
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@Jirodyne BS
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@frankney8284 That kind of thinking is why so many convicts wind up back in prison shortly after release.
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In general people coming out of prison ought to have the money to start over as they're coming out of prison with no job and probably no money. An innocent person will have it slightly better in terms of not having a criminal conviction on their record, but there's still potentially decades of gaps in the employment history and for somebody being discharged from prison after that long in the last 20 years there's been a massive amount of change that they wouldn't know how to deal with.
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The payments for people that are jailed despite being innocent should be automatic in cases where there's a plea deal. Attorneys for the cleared person should only be involved in so far as it comes to figuring out how much the compensation should be. This person was in for 20 years, which means that they've lost somewhere between 1/3 and 1/5 of their life depending upon how long they live. I hope that some of this money can be used on concerts and vacations and trying to make up for some of the stuff that was out of reach for those decades.
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@davidh9638 There's the disincentive to future abuse, but there's also the matter of compensating people for what was taken. No amount of money will truly compensate for losing such a large portion of ones life and the horrific conditions in prisons that have people on such long sentences.
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