If you’ve been wrongfully convicted, and wrongfully spent years, if not decades, of your life in prison, you may or may not be entitled to compensation after exoneration. Thirty states, the District of Columbia, and the federal government provide some form of compensation to the wrongfully convicted. The conditions under which compensation is paid, and how much is paid, vary widely from state to state. And there are twenty states that provide nothing.
Now imagine this. You’ve been exonerated of a crime you never committed after spending many years in prison. You successfully sue the state for compensation, and then find out the federal government is going to levy income tax on your award. Does that sound right? Of course not, but that’s the way it’s been.
Thankfully, Congress has just passed The Wrongful Convictions Tax Relief Act of 2015, which will eliminate federal income tax on wrongful conviction compensation.
See the story from The Innocence Project here.
Roseanne Beckett, wrongly convicted for conspiracy to kill her husband in 1991, served 10 years of her 12 year sentence. She finally overturned her conviction in 2005. This month, 26 years later, she successfully sued the New South Wales (Australia) government for AU$2.3m for malicious prosecution after proving that it was the corrupt detective, Peter Thomas and his obsession with Beckett, that led to her wrongful conviction. In a lengthy ruling, the judge stated;
The case of Andrew Mallard (pictured here) will be well known to those in Australia – he was wrongly convicted in 1995 of the murder of two women in Western Australia, spending 12 years in prison before his conviction was overturned. Mallard was eventually awarded AU$3.25 for his 12 years wrongly imprisoned, but the litany of ‘errors’ during the police investigation continue to come to light.
Wrongful Convictions Blog 