IMO the only fair solution is their own incarceration for the equal number of days, but the only real consequence will be a slap on the wrist.
Notable cunt Annie Dookhan[0] is responsible for putting up to 40,000 innocent people in jail by falsifying DNA records for the Massachusetts state AG. Over 21,000 cases have already been dropped. Her punishment? 3 years.
I think defendants should be compensated for fees and other damages for any level of failed prosecution, especially if they end up wrongfully incarcerated. If abusing the justice system has to come out of the budget, I think most of the incentives to do so will start to disappear.
It's not about revenge, tit for tat or subjective fairness. It's about stopping the behavior by creating the right disincentive. If that happens to be jail for an equivalent number of years, then great.
You would hope, a lot. There’s plenty of types of damage that can’t be repaired by money, but it’s generally how the courts choose to settle damages between parties. If one party illegally were to cause a comparable level of damage to another party, the damaged party would likely be entitled to a rather large amount of compensation for those damages. The fact that the government sees itself as above that level of accountability seems to be a significant part of the problem to me.
Prosecutorial misconduct like that should be punished by garnishing the perp's wages to help pay for the giant wad of cash that the state must hand over to the victim in abject apology.
I’ve always been a proponent of state actors being held to a higher standard like how the UCMJ is an additional judicial code that members of the military have to follow as well as the normal laws.
I propose this as a demonstration by the system that it is willing to respond to violations of the rules by the system. Such violations are inherently more problematic.
Sometimes the government does pay out for wrongful imprisonment, but it's always insultingly low numbers, in the range of a couple thousand usd per year. And in many cases prisoners are Monetized with the for-profit prison operator and their vendors collecting exorbitant fees for basic things.
You are a bad cop, and you expose the government to liability. After a few such liabilities, the government makes it clear to your chief that this will affect his (or her) budget.
Your buddy officers, with their pensions threatened, confront you in the locker room.
Or perhaps your department takes out insurance, and the premiums are high and rising. Buddy officers etc. "I'm sorry Binks, but there's no money for CoL this year with this wrongful conviction thing."
I'm just speculating. If the government insists against visiting the negatives on the culprit law enforcement agency, then it's the citizens who suffer instead. But I think that the costs would eventually exert influence on the problem children.
Notable cunt Annie Dookhan[0] is responsible for putting up to 40,000 innocent people in jail by falsifying DNA records for the Massachusetts state AG. Over 21,000 cases have already been dropped. Her punishment? 3 years.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Dookhan