The price of exoneration

How do you repay someone who has been falsely convicted and jailed for several years of their lives?

How do you help them vanquish the pent up anger of being locked up in a cell knowing they were not the perpetrators who committed the crime?

How do you help them readjust to society, and the advancements of technology?

I raise these questions because 19 men in Dallas County, Texas have been exonerated after years of being falsely imprisoned. Thanks to DNA testing, which obviously was not available at the time of their convictions, they are now cleared and free.

But, some of these men have been locked up for 20+ years. They have missed watching their kids grow up. The culture has changed. For them, they are in an unfamiliar world trying to adjust to life as free men.

One of the men, Wiley Fountain spent 15 years in prison for an aggravated sexual assault he did not commit. The State awarded him $190,000 dollars after he was released. That amounts to a pitiful $12,666 dollars for each year he spent in jail. Some of the other freed men received absolutely no compensation.

Wiley is now homeless.

Most of the men have not been able to find steady work as their false charges still appear on criminal background checks, and the State has done little to nothing to help transition them back to society.

And, of course, some have had trouble with the law.

But, I can't see how this would be a surprise.

These men wrongfully lost their freedom, and had to learn how to survive in prison. That couldn't have been an easy task. And I'm sure some, if not all, have repeated nightmares of some of the things they may have seen or experienced while being imprisoned.

The real questions to me are why isn't the state of Texas doing more for these men? How do they expect them survive after all these years without any help? And how is it that all these men are not millionaires?

Aside from their charges appearing on criminal background checks, who is really going to hire a middle-aged person with no experience? And if they were to get hired, what kind of salary could they command?

The state of Texas should be ashamed of itself.

The Wizard has spoken.