Previous posts on Govinda Mainali’s case here.
From the Japan Times:
¥68 million redress eyed for Mainali
May 25, 2013
The Tokyo District Court has endorsed paying about ¥68 million in compensation to a Nepali man who was wrongly detained and imprisoned in Japan for 15 years, according to sources.
Govinda Prasad Mainali, 46, was charged with murdering a Japanese woman in 1997 and was handed a life term that was finalized in 2003 before being cleared in a retrial last November.
Mainali was kept in prison until the decision on his retrial was reached last June after the prosecutors were shown to have withheld crucial DNA evidence that could have cleared him. He was acquitted in his initial trial.
What financial number would you put on the loss of nine years, nine years of freedom exchanged for nine years in prison? What’s the price of family separation, damaged relationships, stress and anxiety? What’s fair compensation for health ramifications and ongoing required treatment? What about lost wages and impaired future earnings? As mentioned on this blog today (here), Nicholas V. Midey Jr., Judge of the New York Court of Claims, ruled on April 4, 2013, that for Daniel Gristwood, 46, a father of five who spent nine years in prison for a crime he did not commit, the appropriate compensation from New York state is $5,485,394.
Directly from Judge Midey’s 22-page ruling: Continue reading
Myles Frederick McLellan from the University of Ottawa Department of Criminology has posted the above-titled article on SSRN. Download article here. The abstract states:The plight of the wrongfully convicted is gaining prominence with the growing awareness of the prodigious harms to innocent persons at the hands of the criminal justice system. Most of the attention, both scholarly and legislatively, has been focused on the causes of miscarriages of justice. What needs to now be addressed more comprehensively is the issue of how to provide redress to those persons whose lives have been inexorably damaged; and how to best compensate them in their efforts to rebuild a life. Virtually all western democracies have turned their attention to this issue, some more effectively than others. This paper looks at the similarities and the differences in the approaches between the United States and Canada in this regard. Lessons can be learned from both.
Yesterday, the Texas House voted on HB 166, a bill that would create the Timothy Cole Exoneration Review Commission. This so-called innocence commission would investigate past exoneration cases to find out why the wrongful conviction happened in the first place. The group would not intervene in pending cases or open cases without an exoneration.
A Vancouver man suing for compensation for 27 years in prison for sex assaults he didn’t commit has won a preliminary round in court against the provincial government. The government opposed Ivan Henry’s application in B.C. Supreme Court to change his legal claim that would spell out the circumstances where the province can be held liable for breaching his rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The government claimed the rule of prosecutorial immunity only allows claims for charter breaches to succeed if they arose from malicious conduct by the prosecutor. But Justice Richard Goepel ruled in Henry’s favour, finding “that a claim lies against the province for charter damages if the plaintiff can establish that Crown counsel acted in a marked and unacceptable departure from the reasonable standards expected of Crown counsel.”
This month marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most significant Supreme Court decisions this country’s criminal justice system has ever known – Gideon V. Wainwright. The case, along with later decisions, cemented the 6th amendment right to counsel for anyone, regardless if they have the ability to pay.But in a quick scan of the media today of monthly magazines to news dailies on the topic, readers will find one unified reflection expressed — half a century after Gideon, we are far from realizing effective representation for all. Keep reading here…
In 2011 the Better Government Association in Illinois reported that wrongful convictions had cost taxpayers $214 million in settlements. An update (here) indicates that, since the 2011 investigation—which was done with the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law—government agencies have agreed to pay another nearly $39 million to settle lawsuits resulting from persons wrongfully convicted, primarily of murder and other serious felonies. And according to an ABC7 report (here), at least ten cases are currently pending in Illinois courts, which could soon move the cost of wrongful convictions to $300 million or more in the state of Illinois alone.
Of course, the settlement costs do not include the cost of incarcerating 85 innocent people for a total of 926 years since 1989, nor the human costs of wrongful incarceration, nor the costs of crimes committed by the real perpetrators who escaped apprehension while innocent persons languished in prison. Continue reading
