Over the last few weeks, the Rodney Reed case has ignited a firestorm of interest, as celebrities, activists, and politicians worked to delay his Nov. 20 execution on the basis that he might be innocent. After facing mounting pressure, a Texas appeals court granted Reed a stay of execution, allowing him to fight allegations that he committed murder more than two decades ago.
On average, from the time a person enters the criminal justice system until they are exonerated, $1.26 million is spent per inmate who is facing the death penalty. In cases where there is no capital punishment charge, the cost drops to $740,000. With 123 exonerated inmates previously on death row, roughly $155 million was spent to incarcerate them. An additional $1.7 billion was spent to incarcerate the remaining 2,392 people that weren’t facing the death sentence.
“The reason it isn’t higher than that is because there are some who don’t seek compensation at all, and those who seek it and are denied,” he said. Gutman’s NRE study finds that on average, exonerees receive compensation from the state worth $70,000 for each year they were incarcerated, and then $307,000 for each lost year from civil suits. If all 2,515 exonerees received compensation for the years lost, they would be owed anywhere from $1.6 billion to upwards of $7 billion.
“There is the cost of incarceration — oftentimes that’s decades. What does that mean to a family when a father is not present?... And as a family, availing themselves of basically public assistance to stay afloat because the family structure has been devastated by incarceration,” she said.The cost to a person’s family, to their community, and to society at large, says Klara Stephens, a research fellow at the NRE, is not “quantifiable by any measure.
“You wonder,” she said, “if the grandfather hadn’t been wrongfully imprisoned where the grandson would be today. Would he have been able to provide? It’s multigenerational, the impact.” “It’s very clear racism plays a huge role,” says Stephens. “In death sentences alone, and death sentences for people who were later exonerated.”
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