Police and prosecutors? How about defense attorneys? Or judges and juries?

Your suggestion is a bad one, and I will tell you why now: if prosecutors/police have to cough up $250,000 for a man who spent 5 years behind bars out of their own budgets, it only increases their incentive to fight to keep innocent men behind bars even longer.

The underlying legislation would seem to be aimed at preventing lawsuits for wrongful prosecution/imprisonment, which likely are more expensive than $50,000 per year (although I could be wrong about this).

Sounds unconstitutional to me.

@1 See, now you have to take the license plates off your car, and never look at a street sign again as long as you live.

This sounds fair and equitable. The Republicans will never go for it. Now if Tina Orwall offered to give $50,000 to every millionaire in the state for every wrongly accused prisoner, then maybe we can talk.

Do you plan to make the juries pay as well, for the wrongful conviction?

Do you plan to make the defense attorneys pay because they didn't mount a sufficiently vigorous defense?

If the state wrongfully charges and prosecutes someone, and that person is subsequently convicted and incarcerated, it is the state's fault. Perhaps charging the state for those kinds of wrongful convictions will result in prosecutions that are considerably more circumspect.

@3

It depends state to state, but generally lawsuits based on wrongful imprisonment need to prove gross misconduct on the part of the prosecution, ie withholding evidence, presenting testimony known to be false, etc. It doesn't always exist and it's not an easy thing to prove even when it did, especially given the resources available to most people in that situation.

If you tried to make it come out of the pockets of the police, this bill would not pass before the heat death of the universe.

Word to @2. Why are the police obviously at fault? Why not prosecutors? Why not jury members? Why not nobody? Isn't it in the nature of any selection system to produce some false positives?

If an exonerated prisoner can show clear malfeasence, e.g. a police detective fabricating evidence or a judge being bribed, he can already sue for damages in civil court.

As long as nobody blames the voters who elect grandstanding mayors whose utter lack of executive talent lets the SPD run amok. Why should voters suffer the consequences for their decisions?

Did I say SPD? I was generalizing. I meant any department or mayor. Such as Mike McGinn, to take one example chosen at random.

It's a good idea and brings out a concept that is generally missing in our justice system; the idea of justice.

Expect the GOP to completely destroy it before it can become law.

This is just a Poor attempt at stifling lawsuits. The lawsuits generally pay much higher

50k? Thats double my salary.

First, as the headline so vividly puts it, $50k ain't shit compared to a wrongful conviction. And it doesn't even scratch the surface of what a wrongful conviction costs to a person who sold their house to pay for the legal defense, whose career was destroyed, whose loved ones may have remarried or died while they were in prison, etc.

Second, it doesn't address the real impediment to justice, which is the prosecutor's cloak of absolute immunity from civil liability. A prosecutor who, for example, hides exculpatory evidence from the defense cannot be sued for damages in civil court. Sure, the state can be sued for the prosecutor's bad acts, but the worst the prosecutor will get is fired. Connick v. Thompson is a timely example. (Yes, that's the Harry Connick, Sr. in case anyone's wondering.)

$50K is lowball. Texas of all places pays $80K/year. A good lawyer can get A LOT more than that. Depending on the outrageousness of the conviction I've seen up to $1 million/year (New York).

And well-deserved, IMO, when you consider that these people's reputations, relationships, lives are completely trashed, irreparably lost, often because of corrupt or ignorant prosecution.

In one case in Minneapolis a couple decades back, cops stuffed two Indians in their squad car's trunk to get them to the jail. They split $1 million for that indignity.

Why shouldn't the taxpayers pay? They elected the people or their subordinates who screw up. The money you'd take from them would be taxpayer money anyway. Insurance is an option. Let's see how blood-thirsty the hardasses are when they have to pony up.