In a story that is almost painful to read, two North Carolina men have reached a settlement with North Carolina’s State Bureau of Investigation and its insurers after spending 31 years behind bars even though they were innocent.
The men will be paid $12.475 million, but there’s no price that can be put on decades of freedom.
One of the men, who is mentally disabled, was locked up for 14 years in a psychiatric hospital after SBI misconduct led to a false confession. The other man was exonerated in 2010 after being wrongly convicted of a 1993 murder. This conviction, too, resulted from SBI misconduct.
While we would like to think that cases like these are rare, that is sadly not the reality. In fact, there have been several large civil payouts made by the SBI, including to a death row inmate who spent nine years in prison and nearly lost his life after being wrongly convicted of murder.
For an in-depth look at this haunting story, please visit the source article below.
Source: News & Observer, “State agrees to $12 million settlement for two wrongly imprisoned men,” Joseph Neff and Mandy Locke, Aug. 13, 2013