There is an unfortunate ambiguity in incarceration for prejudgement and incarceration for punishment. The actual experience by the person held in prison has no real difference between the two. Undoubtedly there are real practical reasons for holding some suspects before their guilt or innocence is determined, but if an innocent person is so held for a very long time, the final release is frequently written off as just something to be accepted to make the system work and the person so injured has to go through a legal suit to get some compensation. If an automatic generous potential compensation for innocent people wrongly held were made as a regular part of law eliminating subsequent expensive and time consuming legal procedures to receive compensation, it would probably, in the long run, prove more economic and fair than the present system. And also, the knowledge that long time incarceration of innocents would prove cumulatively very expensive for the legal system might spur more speed in prosecuters in getting at the truth.
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Isn't this what Article I, Section 9, Clause 2 of the US Constitution is all about?
I think this is a really good idea, and feel like the DA's would be more accountable for their work. In Dallas in particular, you can google it on Google news, but we had about 30 citizens locked away and many went to prison before it was realized that all of the drugs they were accused of having were actually sheetwork ground up into powder. Dark day in the City of Dallas, and it was horrible that this happened to these people. With a system such as is proposed this in all likelihood would never have happened. And in Illinois, the Governor commuted the sentence of virtually every prisoner on death row in that state because the majority of cases they had time to review all had improprieties (sp?). Never in history has an entire states death row population been removed and converted to life sentences. Some DA's see the number of convictions they get as their ticket to glory and riches, and sometimes it is at the price of innocent lives, when a more careful investigation would have cleared the person on a timely basis. Although this would require a lot of what ifs and thought, the concept is great.
I think that another benefit of this idea would be in inmate behavior. If you're incarcerated before judgment and there's the chance that you will be found not guilty (either by actually not being guilty or by a great defense), I could see a marked improvement in inmate behavior. If you behave wrongly in jail before being found innocent, your compensation is revoked.
This could also help in not paying repeat offenders or those in criminal organizations, and create a penalty for being a member of a criminal organization - Repeat offenders misbehave more frequently while being locked up, so their chances of leaving jail and being compensated are lowered. For members of criminal organizations, simply being a member of organized crime is illegal, thus even by being in jail, you're breaking the law.
I am not sure that other commenters have fully understood sand's idea. What we are talking about here is remand prisoners. These are not prisoners subject to a miscarriage of justice, they are prisoners who have not even been tried yet. They are waiting in prison because bail has been refused, or they could not raise the money to cover it. These prisoners have not been convicted of a crime, they are supposedly "innocent until proven guilty", yet nevertheless they are kept in a prison.
Because of the huge delays and backlog in our legal systems, it is not uncommon for a remand prisoner to remain in prison for multiple years. When this prisoner eventually comes to trial, he or she may well be found not guilty. Think about what that means: a fellow citizen, accused of a crime, and found not guilty at trial -- thus, not only "presumed innocent", but determined to be innocent in a court of law -- who nevertheless has years of his or her life taken away, spending more time in a prison than the average convicted burglar. In fact as the legal system ges more and more backed up and remand periods longer and longer, the most common sentence handed out on conviction is "time already served" -- which means you get exactly the same treatment whether convicted or acquitted! So what does the State do for ths person whose life it has been thus stolen away and destroyed? Nothing.
It is horrible. It is unjust, one of the most unfair and unreasonable aspects of our entire legal system.
So as you may guess, I agree with anything which improves the plight of remand prisoners, including sand's idea.
But it doesn't go far enough, in my opinion. Remand made some sense in ages gone by, when the State had little choice but incarceration to ensure that the accused arrived at court. But in the modern world, there are far more options available and remand should only ever be used in the most extreme cases, such as violent offenders who have little chance of acquittal. For most people, it should be sufficient to surrender the passport, report daily to a court apointed remand officer, put a special lien on credit cards (no cash advances, no use outside radius x without approval from remand officer), and as a last resort, home detention.
Why not tie a punishment to those responsible for sending innocent people to death?