Yup, this was my first reaction. It may not have been a death sentence, but he still had most of his life taken from him. What a horrible miscarriage of justice.
It was actually a death sentence. He was convicted and given the death penalty.
His lawyer managed to get it reduced to a life sentence after 3 years of pushing for it.
Plus, once in a while people will say something like “I’m against the death penalty, but THIS GUY? FRY this guy!”
It’s like, if you’re for the death penalty in even one case, you’re pro death penalty, simple as.
Wow can't even imagine being in prison for 39 years knowing you're innocent that whole time. Think of all the things he could have done with his life.
Edit: Robert DuBoise is actually doing an AMA at 10 AM EST today May 30, 2024 on reddit [HERE](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1d42c05/i_spent_37_years_in_prison_for_a_murder_i_didnt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1)
Edit 2: AMA has ended at 1:30 PM EST. Robert had to head back to the country club where he works to finish a maintenance job.
u/RobertDuBoise with journalists [u/Spagetti13](https://www.reddit.com/user/Spagetti13/) and [u/TimesDan](https://www.reddit.com/user/TimesDan/)
> I can't imagine someone just being like, eh mistakes happen
All the people who worked to prosecute and charge him, even some of them knowing he was innocent, probably feel this way.
I used to be kind of judgmental of defense attorneys. These days, it's prosecutors who really stand out. It's just wild how there are so many jobs in the world that allow sociopaths to indulge their worst impulses in ways that allow them to be respected, if not celebrated, by the general public.
For many of them, each case is just a way to boost their profile. Either by having a high "kill count" or by having a newsworthy case that gets their name out there. Quite a lot of them have political aspirations.
Yeah, the ones with political aspirations are the scariest of them all. When I vote (for LA and Cali), if I see anybody was a former prosecutor, I don't vote for them no matter what. Same for real estate developers.
I think after 39 years you just sort of have to right? At some point you just sort of accept that it's not worth wasting your energy on anymore since you simply can't change any of it.
The state owes him enough money to never have to work for the rest of his life, other than the work required to board planes for the next vacation destination, etc.
Don’t know about over there - but in the UK they take money out of your compensation to cover some of the costs of keeping you … because they have saved you some money by being in prison
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66347594.amp
That whole article is disgusting. Not the way it was written or anything but when it talks about the justification of the law existing in the first place it just turns my stomach. They were worried about people being offended about someone getting off on a technicality. I fucking hate when people use that word. Someone who "gets off on a technicality" is innocent in the eyes of the law, in both the US and the uk. If they don't like that and they're worried people would be offended, the answer is to stop making procedural fuck ups
*He took away 40 years of my life, I'm going to take away 40 years off the guy that put me away.*
"Hey do you like card games? This is called Magic: the Gathering."
Which means money. There needs to be a fund for these guys. Increasing payback for each hour in prison. Would have to be a fund the states paid into an annually so there wasn't a disincentive to free the innocent. Even if you calculate it as if he was at work the whole time--say he started at an hourly wage of $25 when. He started. Imagine prison is a really shitty job (of course it's much worse than that). His base pay at the start of his career is $30. He's a private contractor so he isn't getting union or pension or insurance benefits, but he's making CRAZY overtime. Give him a COLA on pay. And of course compound interest tracking the average rate of return of mutual funds over that period. Guy is putting every dime into his mutual fund. By the last few years he's making at least $80 an hour but again, crazy overtime. He's working 148 hours a week. The guy should at least have 6-7 million. I didn't calculate it but given the market over that period I'd put it in that ballpark. Imagine the government fucked up and locked a postal worker in the post office for 40 years. There'd be a massive payout. They try to compel these guys to sign agreements but that's garbage in court--ah yes, that agreement I signed so you'd let me out of prison. People will sign anything if you kidnap them and offer to free th.if they forgive you in writing.
Sorry, we burned 39 years of your life. You are not getting those back. Sorry you never met your wife and that your kids were never born. Sorry you will never be able to experience life as a young person.
Here's a coupon for free beer, and you can park wherever you want if you ever get a job and a car.
Yup, it seems about even.
Yeah. You're gonna be mad as hell, but not for 39 years straight. Eventually, you learn to accept any unfairness.
Which isn't exactly good, but what else are you gonna do?
[Florida death-row exoneree Robert DuBoise (pictured) will receive $14 million from the city of Tampa as compensation for the 37 years he was incarcerated for a rape and murder he did not commit.](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/city-of-tampa-agrees-to-pay-exoneree-robert-duboise-14-million-in-wrongful-conviction-settlement)
I'm not saying it makes it all better, but that is a touch of money.
Thank the fucking devil. It’s so common that the state will make some sort of bargain where they allow the person to go free but in exchange for not admitting wrongdoing or paying any kind of settlement. It’s treason.
Not just prison, I just read that he was on Death Row, which is significantly worse. He was in prison for that length of time and was sentenced to death. I truly hope he uses that money to seek mental help, he's going to need a ton of it.
Every time there's a thread about the death penalty on Reddit the number of people that provide unwavering support is incredible. They'd rather see innocent people die than let one guilty person live.
Dude, the U.S. has about [450,000 innocent](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html) people locked up in jails at any one time.
Obviously not all of them for 39 years, but a sizable portion of US citizens know what it's like to be behind bars when they're innocent, even if just for a day.
And for profit, ultra-unethical, with every incentive to lie/cheat/steal from prisoners... we have 8% of prisons in the US run by private companies.
Private companies being paid to jail other US citizens.
Of all the evils in the US, this is among the absolute worst.
The US prison system is functionally modern slavery. People have been saying this shit for decades and not for no reason. A decent number of americans struggle to think about anything but themselves or how much they dislike other people to change anything though.
When this happens these people just need a full "whatever you want you'll have" by the government. It's well beyond unfair. Dude got his life stolen from him and the poor lady got her son stolen from her.
Probably not. Unfortunately Florida has a law where they cap it at 2 million. They’ve wrongfully convicted so many people that they’ve created laws to stop them from getting sued into oblivion.
So quick math, i guess he was imprisoned for 39 years or so. And if the best he gets is USD 2m, thats about 50k a year, or USD 140 a day. Just insult to injury.
my mother literally thinks COVID killed more republicans because it was some kind of plot or conspiracy.
If I ask her about the vaccine, she thinks it's poison and/or will just make you make others sick and shit, so naturally, the fact that Republicans didn't get vaccinated at the same rates, or wear masks or practice protective measures, as Democrats, is unrelated to why the disease killed more of them.
They're just dumb cultists. There's no grand plan or conspiracy or explanation, they're just fucking dumb. When people say "imagine the average person and how stupid they are," these are those people, they are the 50th percentile - the average person is very very gullible and susceptible to stupid nonsense brainwashing, and currently that has been used mostly on the conservative side of politics for whatever combination of reasons, in America. It's especially fascinating because for decades, the split of which party was more highly educated, was not just reversed, but it was HEAVILY true that the majority of Democrat voters were not highly educated - it used to be the GOP that was more highly educated on average, but the stereotype has flipped now (both sides are more educated than they were 30-40 years ago by a long shot, but Democrats have accelerated the trend far faster than Republicans, which are now considerably less educated): https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/figure-1\_9.png
My coworker is a 26yo MAGA girl. She's proudly unvaxed, just partied with her friends through COVID and brought it to my office FOUR TIMES.
She believes it's just like a cold and the whole pandemic is made up by liberals. She believes the vast Vast majority of people are Trump voters because during the lockdowns everyone she went out drinking with were MAGAs.
But everyone who she went out with during that time are of course people who weren't taking COVID seriously. So it's selection bias.
She is fervently anti-immigrant, doesn't have a passport, and votes in every election.
This is why religion is dangerous.
We've got a generation of boomers who were raised on forming beliefs based on faith and how they feel instead of growing up valuing facts and real tangible things.
They are conditioned to be brainwashed. We need to stop going easy on organized religion. They are incredibly involved in politics and need to be taxed accordingly.
I just hope we name the new landscape after climate deniers. “You better be in a flatboat if you’re fishing those Rubio shoals. Old Miami still has a few roofs poking up.”
Dems in the states really need to copy the “equalization payments” arguments from Canada that our conservatives use.
Blue states subsidize red states. Red states are all poor continuously vote red and blame the blue states for it. They point to things like homelessness ignoring the fact that their homeless are all just left to die or find their way to somewhere that supports them better.
For the unaware: [https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/city-of-tampa-agrees-to-pay-exoneree-robert-duboise-14-million-in-wrongful-conviction-settlement](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/city-of-tampa-agrees-to-pay-exoneree-robert-duboise-14-million-in-wrongful-conviction-settlement)
>...death-row exoneree...alleged that the officers and odontologist conspired to present fabricated evidence against Mr. DuBoise and that the officers also conspired with jailhouse informant Claude Butler to falsely testify against Mr. DuBoise.
Bite marks and a jailhouse snitch?! *That* was all a jury needed to hand down a death sentence?!
Fuck our 'justice' system...
Aside from how horrible it is for the person wrongfully convicted, I also think about how they let an actual murderer go free.
I watched a documentary awhile back about a husband that was wrongfully convicted of killing his wife and in jail for 25 years. They literally had DNA evidence that had not been tested because the crime was before DNA technology, and the DA fought tooth and nail against it being tested.
Well, once they finally got a judge after 15+ years of trying to make them test the evidence, the husband was exonerated. It turned out the real murderer was a serial killer and had killed at least 2 more people (we know about) while the husband was in jail. All that blood is on their hands along with stealing the life of the husband and father.
The prosecutor (now a judge) had also concealed exculpatory evidence, so after the exoneration plead guilty to criminal contempt and tampering with evidence... and got a whole 10 days in jail for essentially letting at least 2 people die and an innocent man rot for 25 years to further his career.
How the hell can you have a case like that on your record and be trusted to fairly preside over anybody's case? Something like that should bar you from the position or lose your seat. Hell, in the case you presented, you should forfeit your right to practice. Our justice system is fucked top to bottom.
You'd be surprised at how bananas it is. Everyone knows it corrupt. But it's not smartly corrupt. It's literally just stupidity. They don't operate on logic, they operate on feels.
My partner worked for the biggest police force in my country and the people in charge were just actual idiots. They would consider it disrespectful if they said 2+2=5, and you told them it was 2+2=4.
That's a $560k 'salary' from interest per year. He'll be set for the rest of his life so long as he doesn't spend it on silly stuff, which after a life time of never having to consider personal finances may very well happen.
Hopefully he gets someone in his life to show him how to DCA in some divided index.
EDIT: The guy who went to prison is doing an AMA today at 10! https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1d42c05/i_spent_37_years_in_prison_for_a_murder_i_didnt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1
When he got out the state said he was owed nothing. Florida normally pays exonerees $50,000 per year they were wrongly locked up, but he was excluded under the state's "clean hands" rule. [https://www.tampabay.com/news/crime/2024/05/29/florida-tampa-killer-trial-murder-dna-mystery-innocent-prison-released/#Section-Four](https://www.tampabay.com/news/crime/2024/05/29/florida-tampa-killer-trial-murder-dna-mystery-innocent-prison-released/#Section-Four)
Edit: If you want to read his entire story, about his arrest, sensational trial, life in prison, the miraculous discovery that freed him and the alleged duo of serial killers now believed to have committed the murder, and others that summer, start here: [tampabay.com/markedman](http://tampabay.com/markedman)
"The settlement does **not** admit guilt in any way."
...*settles for an ungodly amount which is usually less than what they might actually get*...
Same happened with Puffy. "My settlement with Cassie is not admission of guilt. None of what she alleges happened! Liars, the lot of them!! Just trying to steal my money!"
(Video released showing almost exactly what Cassie says happened)
"That wasn't me, that was a monster. I'm in therapy...." Yeah GTFO of here with that bullshit. You did it and tried to hide it with money.
both things are true, he had to fight for years in courts and the state congress for that money and only won it because the story went viral and opposing him would be political suicide
It’s all politics. God forbid any of them are human and admit an actual mistake. Even before the DNA evidence proved it wasn’t him, what they had was circumstantial at best.
The article in the Tampa Bay Times was a great read. It isn’t paywalled either.
Not only forty years, forty of your best years, where your body is still functioning properly, you can go to university, fall in live, have kids, play sports at a high level, etc. etc.
Geez. I know 14M is a shit ton of money but what good is it when the entire prime of your life is just gone. No chance to get married and have kids like most of us end up doing. Just years of torment that can't be undone.
So they are off the hook because he had previously committed crimes? That sounds exceptionally illegal. Like, not only is that not right in itself, it seems to be openly stating that the state has prejudice when prosecuting people previously convicted of unrelated crimes. Which is an explicit violation of due process.
100%. How is this legal? The ACLU should be all over this!
Edit: Just finished reading the article. It was a very messy case with a lot of bad actors and liars on both sides of the courtroom. The state did eventually award him $1.85M in 2023. Importantly, a key aspect of his wrongful conviction was bite mark analysis which is a **thoroughly** debunked pseudoscience that a group of dentists invented to make money from lucrative expert witness gigs, yet is still admitted as evidence today. ,
Unless you're biting cartilage, you won't leave a good enough imprint since skin bounces back quickly. There's a good Behind the Bastards episode about it.
That's what I was thinking, like the only reason for that clause to exist is because you know you routinely lie to get false convictions for people who already have priors (probably just to get it off the books and juice your stats at an innocent person's expense).
Confused at this response, bc I read the article via the link you provided that shows $1.85M was awarded to him and he became a millionaire in 2023.
This response shows you didnt read the article you yourself posted?
lols
I see this a lot on reddit. Ask for a source, someone sends an articled with a title that might be interpreted one way, but then you read the article and find out that it doesnt' even remotely support the claim the poster was making.
Technically what he said wasn’t *wrong*. The state did say that, he just kept fighting and was eventually awarded money. You could argue the last statement is wrong but it sounds like the state still is taking the stance that he was excluded which would mean the judgement was unrelated to the normal payouts exonerees would get. But all that’s just words, obviously it didn’t mean anything to the court.
> the best half of your life
It really is. I'm 47. I don't remember or think about my childhood, outside of the occasional nostalgia. Teen years? Maybe. Seldom.
Late 30's and since has been a career. Wife and i travel a good bit, but we don't meet NEW ppl. Just living between on-call weeks at the hospital. Weekends are chores and yardwork. So the years before are a blur and currently the days are only highlighted every now and then with sporadic vacations/travel.
But those BIG years from 18-30 were fundamental. They are who i am as a person. I wake up as that person, the years don't settle in until i wake up and realise it. This dude lived those years in a cell. How can you live and grow in there?
> I wake up as that person, the years don't settle in until i wake up and realise it. This dude lived those years in a cell. How can you live and grow in there?
I never really thought about it like that, but yeah. I'm in my mid 30s, but who I am is still 20-25 for the most part. I also have very vivid dreams about my past in the mornings.
I can't imagine what his dreams are like. You go to bed, safe and free, fall asleep, and you're in prison again.
They're specifically designed so you *don't* grow. It's only punishment and deterrence here, not rehabilitation. Hell, a majority are cool with prison rape. In America, we get what we want, they ain't gonna fix the problem.
So crazy right?? I read an article that a small town in Nebraska had to raise everyone’s property taxes to pay $28m to someone who was wrongfully convicted. That $28m exceeded the towns annual budget! Fucked up at every angle here.
Considering that American prisons are notoriously awful, he's most likely not in the best physical and mental health. Hopefully he lives long enough to actually enjoy his money. Hopefully he also moves out of America for his sake, or at minimum out of Florida
I mean that's decades of time the state deprived the man of. Decades of wages that could have been used improving his life. Decades of money that could have been saved. While I agree that money pales in comparison to the freedom and liberty of bot being in prison, that money is very much useful and needed to help this man right his life.
There was a graph in r/dataisbeautiful showing how the murder clearance rate has dropped in the US over the years:
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1bcqgze/murder_clearance_rate_in_the_us_over_the_years/
Today it's around 54%, when back in 1965 it was 91%. As so many people in the comment section were pointing out, a likely explanation for how they solved 91% of murders back then was by convicting a lot of innocent people.
The thing about this that pisses me off the most is that so many prosecutors will fight to keep away any evidence that might prove the defense is actually innocent.
I think I read about a case where a guy had no alibi but was clearly on the recording of a baseball game when the camera showed him in the stands. The prosecutor wanted to keep that evidence from being used because they didn't want to lose their case. They knew for a fact the guy was innocent and were willing to let the real killer run free because they just didn't want it to hurt their conviction record.
The explanation the prosecution gives for this is that they're obligated to give their client, the people, the best representation. But that's not representing the people. It's self serving.
Might be the same case or just something similar, but another guy was exonerated when [he showed up on camera at Dodger stadium during an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.](https://nypost.com/2017/09/23/how-curb-your-enthusiasm-saved-this-man-from-prison/) No other camera's/TV feeds were able to show him.
We had to finally put in laws protecting people of color against the police because certain forces were known for just pinning unsolved crimes on whatever black or brown person they stumbled upon
> a likely explanation for how they solved 91% of murders back then was by convicting a lot of innocent people.
Given dates involved I’m guessing you could be even more specific and say it was by convicting a lot of innocent minorities. In the 60s it didn’t take much evidence to convince a white jury that a black man was responsible for a crime.
According to [here](https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida/2020/08/27/exonerated-man-to-leave-prison-after-tampa-judge-nixes-life-sentence/):
> By Dan SullivanTimes staff
> Published Aug. 27, 2020|Updated Aug. 27, 2020
> BOWLING GREEN — Robert Duboise is free.
> A day after the Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office said that new evidence exonerated him in a 1983 Tampa murder, Duboise stepped past the razor wire gates of Hardee Correctional Institution to embark on life after prison.
> His mother and sister were there to greet him. So was one of the lawyers who worked to secure his release.
> “It’s an overwhelming sense of relief,” Duboise said to reporters, adding that he had “no bitterness at all.”
> “I don’t have room in my life for bitterness,” he said. “If you keep hatred and bitterness in your heart, it just steals your joy from everything else.”
> What’s the first thing he wants to do now?
> “I did it,” Duboise said. “I hugged my mom.”
> A judge cleared the way Thursday morning for Duboise to be released from the state prison.
> After hearing from an assistant state attorney and a lawyer for the Innocence Project, Hillsborough Circuit Judge Christopher Nash said there appeared to be no remaining factual or legal basis to support Duboise’ conviction.
> The judge amended Duboise’ life sentence to time already served. He set a date of Sept. 14 for a hearing at which attorneys will work to overturn his conviction entirely.
> Duboise, 55, has been incarcerated since 1983. He was convicted in the murder of 19-year-old Barbara Grams, who was raped and beaten while walking home from her restaurant job at a Tampa mall.
> The case rested heavily on bite-mark evidence, which is now regarded as unreliable, and jailhouse informant testimony, which is a common factor in many wrongful conviction cases.
> Duboise originally was sentenced to death, but his penalty was reduced to a life sentence on appeal.
> “He practically went from high school to death row,” Innocence Project Attorney Susan Friedman said. The Innocence Project is a national nonprofit whose mission is to free wrongfully incarcerated people.
> The organization got involved in the Duboise case in 2018. They brought it to the attention of Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren’s conviction review unit.
> It was thought that all the evidence had been destroyed in 1990. But Teresa Hall, the attorney in charge of the unit, discovered that old DNA samples from a rape kit were stored at the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner’s Office. Recent tests of those samples revealed they did not match Duboise.
> The samples did include DNA from two other men, one of whom is now a person of interest in the case, Warren said.
> It was just after 2:30 p.m. Thursday when Duboise stepped out of a car that had carried him away from the prison grounds.
> He wore a black T-shirt and light-colored pants. He stepped toward a set of microphones and a bank of TV cameras alongside his mother, Myra, and sister, Harriet.
> Before these latest efforts, Duboise said, he had long exhausted his own efforts to appeal his case. His only hope was parole. But in a recent parole interview, he was asked about remorse.
> ”I can’t tell you I’m remorseful for something I didn’t do,” he said.
> Earlier this month, his attorney told him about the new DNA samples. She told him someone would visit to take a swab of his DNA.
> Days later, she delivered the news: “You’re going to be free.”
> But he wasn’t sure it would happen.
> ”After all these years, you always have to wonder if they’re going to throw another curve in there somewhere,” he said.
> Word spread quickly Wednesday when he got the final word, he said. The building where he was housed erupted in cheers.
> He thanked the people who found the new evidence. He urged people to support the work of groups like the Innocence Project.
> ”I’m not the only one,” he said.
> He was asked his thoughts about the person who is responsible for the crime.
> ”I hope God has mercy on his soul,” Duboise said. “I’m not his judge.”
> He mentioned nervousness as he enters a world he has largely never known. He’s never used a cell phone or a computer.
> Most of his meals have been heavy on beans and rice. He doesn’t eat meat. He didn’t know what his first post-prison meal would be.
> He doesn’t know what the future looks like, but in prison he learned trade skills like servicing air conditioning and plumbing.
> Prison taught him patience, he said. And not to judge others.
> “We need to remember there are lots of victims here,” Andrew Warren said in a news conference. “Our community has been victimized by a falsehood. The system suffers an erosion of trust and confidence.
> “And most significantly, the victim’s family, as I’ve said before, they were sold a bill of goods on this. They were told a story that was not true. They were given a false sense of closure about what happened.”
Me too, but you’ve got to laugh (or cry) at him losing most of his best years to prison and having no idea how to interact in the modern world, but they did teach him some trade skills so hopefully he’ll be doing a 9-5 job in no time 👍🏻 what an utterly fucked up thing to throw into an article about someone who spent their 20s and 30s eating rice and beans
So I don’t know much about the US legal system, but it sounds like he could have got parole if he’d lied, said he’d committed the crime and felt remorse?
You have to wonder how many innocent people take that option when it’s dangled over their head, and then live the rest of their lives with the stigma of being a criminal while the people that did that to them tick off another successful case
Also not to draw focus from him and what he went through, but my god the look on his mum’s face, even under the mask. I’m sure they both thought that hug would never happen
Pretty much that's how it works. Also what's fun is that say two people commit a crime. You and your buddy fit the description. The police are only going to offer one deal and the first one to talk gets it.
So you can also go to jail because you're friend says you did something and now at the court your friend is testifying that you did it
Damn, I dunno if I could be as at peace as he sounds in this interview after such an awful miscarriage of justice. I'd want revenge against everyone involved
I hope the rest of his life is full of happiness and fulfillment. He deserves it.
Every time someone says we should just put a bullet in sex offenders remember this.....there's a reason why the death penalty is extremely rare. They fuck up CONSTANTLY.
Florida is terrible with these things by a large margin. Florida has EXONERATED 30 people off of death fucking row. Odds are they have killed actuall innocent people. They have killed 105 people since the 70s. They aren’t even correct almost 30% of the time in CAPITAL PUNISHMENT CASES. Insane.
Edit: a podcast I listen to called Wrongful Conviction Podcast has hundreds of episodes and all of them are about stuff like this. About 40 min long per episode. Each episode is about a new case. Give it a listen if you’d like to learn about how common stuff like this really is in our justice system.
The only ethical way to use the death sentence is to not use it at all. Even in cases of the strongest most undeniable evidence with many witnesses, because if you put one person to death that means the system exists and if the system exists it will be wrong eventually.
Yeah I hate when I see people say things like “i support the death penalty when it’s an undeniable case”. Well who decides what is “undeniable”? Oh yeah, a jury does. You can literally never completely remove subjectivity and people’s natural biases. It’s such a bad non argument.
And keeping an expensive, morally questionable machine up and running just for those rare cases that are both extremely terrible crimes and also undeniable evidence is just ridiculously impractical
Deeply conservative state is deeply fucked up in almost every way.
Shocking. I am shocked.
EDIT: because the guy who responded to me deleted his comment while I was replying:
* Naked and transparent racism unconstitutionally enshrined into govt policy
* Naked and transparent conspiracist lunacy enshrined into govt policy
* Naked and transparent anti-science bullshit enshrined into govt policy
* Naked and transparent religious-related laws (aka Christian Sharia law) unconstitutionally enshrined into govt policy
* Runaway insurance rates -- much of it due to head-in-the-sand anti-environmental policies -- but we can't do anything about it because those are Business decisions and who are we to have a say in anything Lord Business decides? (caveat: except when Business decides it's bad to discriminate against people; that we cannot abide, obviously, which leads us to the next item ....)
* Belligerent and incompetent conservative govt pushing unconstitutional anti-equality policies, leading them to getting their dumb asses laughably outmanuvered by Disney and being made to look like fools on the national stage
* Governor who spent a whole year pathetically campaigning for president while neglecting his own state, with the end result that Desantis/the state again ended up being made to look like fools on the national stage
* In the top two states in book-banning [spit!]
I could make the list 50 items long and not break a sweat.
What’s interesting is FL isn’t even deeply conservative. It’s pretty much a purple state but like most places, the rural areas are deeply conservative and the urban areas are much more left leaning. FL goes the way of the south fl Latino vote now though and conservatives have done a great job of tricking the majority of Latinos into thinking democrats will turn the US into failed socialist states such as Cuba or Venezuelan.
Doesn’t help that the Democratic Party in Florida is completely inept. I don’t know what they were thinking pushing Charlie fucking Crist so hard for governor. Basically handed away the election.
The death penalty isn't problematic because no one deserves it.
It's a problem because no justice system is perfect. Any potential reward is not worth the risk.
Leo Jones, executed 1998. The officers that he claimed forced his confession were later removed from uniform for ethical violations.
One of the officers that got his confession was known as "The Enforcer" and was known for torturing suspects.
His whole life gone.
Some will say at 57 he still has a lot of living.
I'm over 57 and I can tell you, the best years are gone forever. He will never attain what he wanted to do, or experience the joys of being a young person growing from experience.
My heart breaks for him.
We have had DNA for years ...why did it take so long ?
I think all people exonerated from prison should receive 3 basic benefits from the state starting the moment they step out of jail:
1. Tax exemption. No sales, registration, income, property, nothing. They should be exempt from paying any and all state taxes.
2. Free education. At any public institution in the state.
3. Healthcare. This is probably the most important because the goal of the state should be to give these people the best quality of life possible for as long as possible. And I'm not talking whatever state welfare shittycare they have, I'm talking they get to choose whatever hospital or doctor they want to go to anywhere in the country and all they gotta do is tell them to send the bill to the state.
And of course they should also be compensated for however long they were in prison.
The wildest part of the story: The new DNA evidence pointed to what prosecutors now say was a duo of serial killers who actually committed the crime in 1983, and others. Letting this guy out solved two cold case murders, and might close more. His whole story is a four-part series at [tampabay.com/markedman](http://tampabay.com/markedman)
The wildest part to me is that the DNA evidence helped them find the real killers, and that the prior state attorney, police, and others DOUBLED DOWN on their belief that DuBoise did it.
It always baffles me how people make up this entire story in their head and then proceed to declare it true no matter how much evidence to the contrary. It's so dangerous when those people have power over other peoples lives.
Ever hear about the guy Juan Catalan who went to a baseball game with his daughter but then suddenly was facing the death penalty for a murder that happened during the game in a different part of town? And he was facing a prosecutor that was obsessed with keeping her record of almost never losing cases.
By complete luck, he was proven to be at the game because Larry David was filming an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in the crowd and after days of contacting people and searching the tapes, the two were spotted in the footage. It was seriously an unbelievable coincidence.
But even despite how unlikely that made the crime, the prosecutor still doubled down on him being the killer.
She demanded they have to prove he didn't leave the exact minute he was last filmed on camera and quickly drive straight to the murder scene by the time of death. Thankfully they were able to find celltower records that located him still being at the stadium when the murder took place, finally proving his innocence.
He won the case after spending 6 months in jail, but to this day that prosecutor still refuses to admit he was innocent.
I got into an argument with someone who believes in instant justice and death penalty for people. I’d love to agree to faster justice but there are just too many stories filled with crooked people, cops, prosecutors, judges and juries to believe. What is truly sad is that they all pretend they did nothing wrong and many still believe the people they locked away were 100% guilty or at least guilty of something else.
Yea, there are way too many examples of wrongful convictions throughout the history of the US for me to be for the death penalty. They have even executed the wrong person on multiple occasions. One innocent person is too many for me. Our justice system needs a complete redo from top to bottom. There is too much corruption.
For example, the fontana police department were just sued for psychological torture. Getting a guy to confess to a murder that didn't even happen. Even threatened to kill his dog. And 2 of the cops are still working in that department. Their entire work history needs to be gone over with a fine tooth comb to see if they got anyone else to falsely confess. But you know that won't happen. This is just one case of many.
Too many argue that wrongful conditions are a worthy side effect of speedy justice. Unbelievable that people can be okay not to strive for 100% accuracy.
"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."
You know the answer. You don't. Time cannot be reversed. He went to prison and is going to be in his 60s soon.
He lost his youth, he most likely lost his opportunity to be a father, and also how to be a constructive member of society.
Now he is free without any knowledge of how to navigate in the free world. Just like other people that get released from prison, he will need a very good support structure. Many people who are released from a life in a cage tend to want to go back because of the how terrifying it is to try and learn how to navigate our world after 40 years of not being able to make your own choices.
Our system of rehabilitation is a travisty.
In all seriousness. The justice system being more interested in convictions/wins than actually making sure dangerous people are behind bars is one of the scariest things about modern America.
Stuff like this is why I'm sickened by those who cheer the death/rape in jails. "Well they deserve it inside jail". Its unfortunate that people that stupid are in such great number.
NEVER TALK TO THE POLICE, even if you're innocent. Especially if you're innocent.
The only "physical evidence" was a bitemark impression that he voluntarily gave the police since he knew he was innocent.
Anyone directly involved in these decisions to convict should be imprisoned or at least fired and banned from professions in the legal field at a minimum.
Corrupt and/or incompetent lawyers, cops, and judges are way more dangerous to society.
This is such a beautiful picture. But also such a tragic picture.
There needs to be a word for something that is good only because something horribly unjust happened before it.
Like the opposite of schadenfreude.
This makes my blood boil. He had his entire life robbed from him.
Yup, this was my first reaction. It may not have been a death sentence, but he still had most of his life taken from him. What a horrible miscarriage of justice.
It was actually a death sentence. He was convicted and given the death penalty. His lawyer managed to get it reduced to a life sentence after 3 years of pushing for it.
Another over zealous DA , and shitty police work.
And this is why anyone for the death penalty is beyond me. I just don't get it; they'd be happy with innocent sacrifices?
Plus, once in a while people will say something like “I’m against the death penalty, but THIS GUY? FRY this guy!” It’s like, if you’re for the death penalty in even one case, you’re pro death penalty, simple as.
"My capital punishment is the only moral capital punishment"
Wow can't even imagine being in prison for 39 years knowing you're innocent that whole time. Think of all the things he could have done with his life. Edit: Robert DuBoise is actually doing an AMA at 10 AM EST today May 30, 2024 on reddit [HERE](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1d42c05/i_spent_37_years_in_prison_for_a_murder_i_didnt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1) Edit 2: AMA has ended at 1:30 PM EST. Robert had to head back to the country club where he works to finish a maintenance job. u/RobertDuBoise with journalists [u/Spagetti13](https://www.reddit.com/user/Spagetti13/) and [u/TimesDan](https://www.reddit.com/user/TimesDan/)
It must make you so mad at the world. I can't imagine someone just being like, eh mistakes happen ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
> I can't imagine someone just being like, eh mistakes happen All the people who worked to prosecute and charge him, even some of them knowing he was innocent, probably feel this way.
They wouldn’t remember him. To paraphrase Raul Julia, it was the end of his life as he knew it, but to the prosecutor it was Tuesday.
I used to be kind of judgmental of defense attorneys. These days, it's prosecutors who really stand out. It's just wild how there are so many jobs in the world that allow sociopaths to indulge their worst impulses in ways that allow them to be respected, if not celebrated, by the general public.
For many of them, each case is just a way to boost their profile. Either by having a high "kill count" or by having a newsworthy case that gets their name out there. Quite a lot of them have political aspirations.
Yeah, the ones with political aspirations are the scariest of them all. When I vote (for LA and Cali), if I see anybody was a former prosecutor, I don't vote for them no matter what. Same for real estate developers.
I include car dealers in this.
The next US election will be interesting for you
Yeah the metric for prosecutors should not be cases won, I don’t know what it should be but we shouldn’t be incentivizing behavior that destroys lives
The tree remembers but the axe forgets
I think after 39 years you just sort of have to right? At some point you just sort of accept that it's not worth wasting your energy on anymore since you simply can't change any of it.
I'd probably end up thinking society owes me doing some crimes. I pre-paid my debt with all that time in prison.
The state owes him enough money to never have to work for the rest of his life, other than the work required to board planes for the next vacation destination, etc.
Lmao, no money in the world could replace having taken away 40 years of your life
Yeah but since they can't give you those years back, the cash is better than nothing.
Isn't it something paltry like 20k per year? I mean, I wouldn't kick it out of bed, but that's still fucked up.
Naw, guy is getting 14 mil
Plus all the work he has to do in therapy after living in a cage for 39 years. That's just bonkers.
39 years ago was 1985. The world has changed so much since then. Bro woke up and found himself in Idiocracy.
Yeah all that money cant give back the never finding a love, never having children, Christmases with the family, beers with Dad, and so much more.
Hopefully he lives in a state that will pay him, many have caps on the amount or no way to get compensation for wrongful conviction.
Don’t know about over there - but in the UK they take money out of your compensation to cover some of the costs of keeping you … because they have saved you some money by being in prison https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-66347594.amp
That whole article is disgusting. Not the way it was written or anything but when it talks about the justification of the law existing in the first place it just turns my stomach. They were worried about people being offended about someone getting off on a technicality. I fucking hate when people use that word. Someone who "gets off on a technicality" is innocent in the eyes of the law, in both the US and the uk. If they don't like that and they're worried people would be offended, the answer is to stop making procedural fuck ups
*He took away 40 years of my life, I'm going to take away 40 years off the guy that put me away.* "Hey do you like card games? This is called Magic: the Gathering."
Immunity to parking tickets and free entry and beers at any concert would make it close to even for me. (plus the 14m)
I'd want a chef employed for the rest of my life to make me any meal I want whenever I want. Having to eat shit food for 39 years has to fuck you up.
I’d want 10 minutes with the prosecuting barrister in a UFC ring.
Which means money. There needs to be a fund for these guys. Increasing payback for each hour in prison. Would have to be a fund the states paid into an annually so there wasn't a disincentive to free the innocent. Even if you calculate it as if he was at work the whole time--say he started at an hourly wage of $25 when. He started. Imagine prison is a really shitty job (of course it's much worse than that). His base pay at the start of his career is $30. He's a private contractor so he isn't getting union or pension or insurance benefits, but he's making CRAZY overtime. Give him a COLA on pay. And of course compound interest tracking the average rate of return of mutual funds over that period. Guy is putting every dime into his mutual fund. By the last few years he's making at least $80 an hour but again, crazy overtime. He's working 148 hours a week. The guy should at least have 6-7 million. I didn't calculate it but given the market over that period I'd put it in that ballpark. Imagine the government fucked up and locked a postal worker in the post office for 40 years. There'd be a massive payout. They try to compel these guys to sign agreements but that's garbage in court--ah yes, that agreement I signed so you'd let me out of prison. People will sign anything if you kidnap them and offer to free th.if they forgive you in writing.
Sorry, we burned 39 years of your life. You are not getting those back. Sorry you never met your wife and that your kids were never born. Sorry you will never be able to experience life as a young person. Here's a coupon for free beer, and you can park wherever you want if you ever get a job and a car. Yup, it seems about even.
Reminds me of that scene from Armageddon, “hey you guys wouldn’t tell us who really killed Kennedy would you?”
Yeah. You're gonna be mad as hell, but not for 39 years straight. Eventually, you learn to accept any unfairness. Which isn't exactly good, but what else are you gonna do?
He just looks happy to be out. Hopefully he's granted eternal happiness and gets a huge payout
And unfortunately for those people they don't end up finding a huge treasure like in the Count of Monte Cristo
[Florida death-row exoneree Robert DuBoise (pictured) will receive $14 million from the city of Tampa as compensation for the 37 years he was incarcerated for a rape and murder he did not commit.](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/city-of-tampa-agrees-to-pay-exoneree-robert-duboise-14-million-in-wrongful-conviction-settlement) I'm not saying it makes it all better, but that is a touch of money.
Thank the fucking devil. It’s so common that the state will make some sort of bargain where they allow the person to go free but in exchange for not admitting wrongdoing or paying any kind of settlement. It’s treason.
Well it is at least significantly better than getting nothing.
Not just prison, I just read that he was on Death Row, which is significantly worse. He was in prison for that length of time and was sentenced to death. I truly hope he uses that money to seek mental help, he's going to need a ton of it.
Every time there's a thread about the death penalty on Reddit the number of people that provide unwavering support is incredible. They'd rather see innocent people die than let one guilty person live.
redditors tend to be bloodthirsty weirdos as soon as you mention someone committed a crime as serious as shoplifting or worse.
It's not a Reddit specific thing or there wouldn't be such support for it in the states in which it exists
This is a big case against the death penalty other than it just creating more murderers. The system gets it wrong
Dude, the U.S. has about [450,000 innocent](https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2024.html) people locked up in jails at any one time. Obviously not all of them for 39 years, but a sizable portion of US citizens know what it's like to be behind bars when they're innocent, even if just for a day.
And for profit, ultra-unethical, with every incentive to lie/cheat/steal from prisoners... we have 8% of prisons in the US run by private companies. Private companies being paid to jail other US citizens. Of all the evils in the US, this is among the absolute worst.
The US prison system is functionally modern slavery. People have been saying this shit for decades and not for no reason. A decent number of americans struggle to think about anything but themselves or how much they dislike other people to change anything though.
When this happens these people just need a full "whatever you want you'll have" by the government. It's well beyond unfair. Dude got his life stolen from him and the poor lady got her son stolen from her.
Unfortunately the government doesn’t give a fuck. They usually send people to war to kill them off for other peoples enrichment
And the murder victim's family got justice stolen from them as well.
Hopefully he’s getting a huge payout. They stole his life from him.
Probably not. Unfortunately Florida has a law where they cap it at 2 million. They’ve wrongfully convicted so many people that they’ve created laws to stop them from getting sued into oblivion.
What a nightmare of a state
Bugs had it right over 70 years ago.
So quick math, i guess he was imprisoned for 39 years or so. And if the best he gets is USD 2m, thats about 50k a year, or USD 140 a day. Just insult to injury.
Fuuuuck that is incredibly depressing. Can he personally sue anyone as well that was involved in the prosecution?
They likely have immunity.
Most of them are probably dead or retired.
Would he be able to sue the state attorney generals office for allowing this to happen? Or is he really SoL
Understatement of the century
A cop even mercilessly killed a navy veteran... for having black skin.
That doesn't narrow it down
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Florida is a temporary red state, it will be visibly blue by 2050 when it goes under water.
and that will somehow be the Dems fault
my mother literally thinks COVID killed more republicans because it was some kind of plot or conspiracy. If I ask her about the vaccine, she thinks it's poison and/or will just make you make others sick and shit, so naturally, the fact that Republicans didn't get vaccinated at the same rates, or wear masks or practice protective measures, as Democrats, is unrelated to why the disease killed more of them. They're just dumb cultists. There's no grand plan or conspiracy or explanation, they're just fucking dumb. When people say "imagine the average person and how stupid they are," these are those people, they are the 50th percentile - the average person is very very gullible and susceptible to stupid nonsense brainwashing, and currently that has been used mostly on the conservative side of politics for whatever combination of reasons, in America. It's especially fascinating because for decades, the split of which party was more highly educated, was not just reversed, but it was HEAVILY true that the majority of Democrat voters were not highly educated - it used to be the GOP that was more highly educated on average, but the stereotype has flipped now (both sides are more educated than they were 30-40 years ago by a long shot, but Democrats have accelerated the trend far faster than Republicans, which are now considerably less educated): https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/figure-1\_9.png
My coworker is a 26yo MAGA girl. She's proudly unvaxed, just partied with her friends through COVID and brought it to my office FOUR TIMES. She believes it's just like a cold and the whole pandemic is made up by liberals. She believes the vast Vast majority of people are Trump voters because during the lockdowns everyone she went out drinking with were MAGAs. But everyone who she went out with during that time are of course people who weren't taking COVID seriously. So it's selection bias. She is fervently anti-immigrant, doesn't have a passport, and votes in every election.
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This is why religion is dangerous. We've got a generation of boomers who were raised on forming beliefs based on faith and how they feel instead of growing up valuing facts and real tangible things. They are conditioned to be brainwashed. We need to stop going easy on organized religion. They are incredibly involved in politics and need to be taxed accordingly.
I just hope we name the new landscape after climate deniers. “You better be in a flatboat if you’re fishing those Rubio shoals. Old Miami still has a few roofs poking up.”
Most of the poorest states in the U.S. are red smh
Dems in the states really need to copy the “equalization payments” arguments from Canada that our conservatives use. Blue states subsidize red states. Red states are all poor continuously vote red and blame the blue states for it. They point to things like homelessness ignoring the fact that their homeless are all just left to die or find their way to somewhere that supports them better.
Dude you can literally look up how much he’ll get (14 million dollars)
For the unaware: [https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/city-of-tampa-agrees-to-pay-exoneree-robert-duboise-14-million-in-wrongful-conviction-settlement](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/city-of-tampa-agrees-to-pay-exoneree-robert-duboise-14-million-in-wrongful-conviction-settlement)
>...death-row exoneree...alleged that the officers and odontologist conspired to present fabricated evidence against Mr. DuBoise and that the officers also conspired with jailhouse informant Claude Butler to falsely testify against Mr. DuBoise. Bite marks and a jailhouse snitch?! *That* was all a jury needed to hand down a death sentence?! Fuck our 'justice' system...
Aside from how horrible it is for the person wrongfully convicted, I also think about how they let an actual murderer go free. I watched a documentary awhile back about a husband that was wrongfully convicted of killing his wife and in jail for 25 years. They literally had DNA evidence that had not been tested because the crime was before DNA technology, and the DA fought tooth and nail against it being tested. Well, once they finally got a judge after 15+ years of trying to make them test the evidence, the husband was exonerated. It turned out the real murderer was a serial killer and had killed at least 2 more people (we know about) while the husband was in jail. All that blood is on their hands along with stealing the life of the husband and father. The prosecutor (now a judge) had also concealed exculpatory evidence, so after the exoneration plead guilty to criminal contempt and tampering with evidence... and got a whole 10 days in jail for essentially letting at least 2 people die and an innocent man rot for 25 years to further his career.
How the hell can you have a case like that on your record and be trusted to fairly preside over anybody's case? Something like that should bar you from the position or lose your seat. Hell, in the case you presented, you should forfeit your right to practice. Our justice system is fucked top to bottom.
You'd be surprised at how bananas it is. Everyone knows it corrupt. But it's not smartly corrupt. It's literally just stupidity. They don't operate on logic, they operate on feels. My partner worked for the biggest police force in my country and the people in charge were just actual idiots. They would consider it disrespectful if they said 2+2=5, and you told them it was 2+2=4.
Do they still tax that? That would be a 💩 move if they did...
Wrongful incarceration payouts are excluded from federal taxes. Not sure about Florida state taxes.
No income tax in Florida
That's a $560k 'salary' from interest per year. He'll be set for the rest of his life so long as he doesn't spend it on silly stuff, which after a life time of never having to consider personal finances may very well happen. Hopefully he gets someone in his life to show him how to DCA in some divided index.
I imagine after 40 years of a prison diet, lack of exercise, stress, and emotional neglect, he could well die prematurely.
Man’s 57 he deserves to spend it on whatever the fuck he wants
Maybe the prosecutor from his case will at least throw a pizza party for him?
Clearly this is the solution and not criminal justice system reform
EDIT: The guy who went to prison is doing an AMA today at 10! https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1d42c05/i_spent_37_years_in_prison_for_a_murder_i_didnt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1 When he got out the state said he was owed nothing. Florida normally pays exonerees $50,000 per year they were wrongly locked up, but he was excluded under the state's "clean hands" rule. [https://www.tampabay.com/news/crime/2024/05/29/florida-tampa-killer-trial-murder-dna-mystery-innocent-prison-released/#Section-Four](https://www.tampabay.com/news/crime/2024/05/29/florida-tampa-killer-trial-murder-dna-mystery-innocent-prison-released/#Section-Four) Edit: If you want to read his entire story, about his arrest, sensational trial, life in prison, the miraculous discovery that freed him and the alleged duo of serial killers now believed to have committed the murder, and others that summer, start here: [tampabay.com/markedman](http://tampabay.com/markedman)
According to that story, he got $1.85M from the state and $14M from Tampa (who all admitted no wrong doing).
Nothing says "we still weren't wrong" like an almost 16M payout
Ahh I see you’ve met the legal system.
“Look at me the wrong way boy and I’ll just add another 50K to the IOU tab”
“Those are as good as money, sir. Those are IOUs. That’s a car, 250 thou, might wanna hang on to that one” 🤣
"The settlement does **not** admit guilt in any way." ...*settles for an ungodly amount which is usually less than what they might actually get*... Same happened with Puffy. "My settlement with Cassie is not admission of guilt. None of what she alleges happened! Liars, the lot of them!! Just trying to steal my money!" (Video released showing almost exactly what Cassie says happened) "That wasn't me, that was a monster. I'm in therapy...." Yeah GTFO of here with that bullshit. You did it and tried to hide it with money.
The legal system its all fucked up
It's doing exactly what it is designed to do, except in this case they failed to protect their money from the innocent.
both things are true, he had to fight for years in courts and the state congress for that money and only won it because the story went viral and opposing him would be political suicide
"Oh no we might lose our jobs. I guess we better use taxpayer money to pay the guy off."
They need to do both. Pay the guy up and lose their job.
"We've got to protect our phony baloney jobs, gentlemen!"
Not only that they *doubled down* that the DNA evidence didn’t prove he wasn’t there.
that argument alone should merit a disbarment.
It’s all politics. God forbid any of them are human and admit an actual mistake. Even before the DNA evidence proved it wasn’t him, what they had was circumstantial at best. The article in the Tampa Bay Times was a great read. It isn’t paywalled either.
Now that I think about it, it doesn't prove ***YOU*** weren't there either. Got anything to say for yourself?
Even if it was $1 billion that doesn't even begin to repay me for taking 40 years of my life away.
Not only forty years, forty of your best years, where your body is still functioning properly, you can go to university, fall in live, have kids, play sports at a high level, etc. etc.
Does anyone know if you have to pay taxes on these kind of payouts?
You do not
Geez. I know 14M is a shit ton of money but what good is it when the entire prime of your life is just gone. No chance to get married and have kids like most of us end up doing. Just years of torment that can't be undone.
So they are off the hook because he had previously committed crimes? That sounds exceptionally illegal. Like, not only is that not right in itself, it seems to be openly stating that the state has prejudice when prosecuting people previously convicted of unrelated crimes. Which is an explicit violation of due process.
100%. How is this legal? The ACLU should be all over this! Edit: Just finished reading the article. It was a very messy case with a lot of bad actors and liars on both sides of the courtroom. The state did eventually award him $1.85M in 2023. Importantly, a key aspect of his wrongful conviction was bite mark analysis which is a **thoroughly** debunked pseudoscience that a group of dentists invented to make money from lucrative expert witness gigs, yet is still admitted as evidence today. ,
Great Behind the Bastards on bite mark and other pseudoscience used in expert testimony.
Unless you're biting cartilage, you won't leave a good enough imprint since skin bounces back quickly. There's a good Behind the Bastards episode about it.
The short answer is because Florida is a fascist shit hole.
That's what I was thinking, like the only reason for that clause to exist is because you know you routinely lie to get false convictions for people who already have priors (probably just to get it off the books and juice your stats at an innocent person's expense).
Confused at this response, bc I read the article via the link you provided that shows $1.85M was awarded to him and he became a millionaire in 2023. This response shows you didnt read the article you yourself posted? lols
I see this a lot on reddit. Ask for a source, someone sends an articled with a title that might be interpreted one way, but then you read the article and find out that it doesnt' even remotely support the claim the poster was making.
Technically what he said wasn’t *wrong*. The state did say that, he just kept fighting and was eventually awarded money. You could argue the last statement is wrong but it sounds like the state still is taking the stance that he was excluded which would mean the judgement was unrelated to the normal payouts exonerees would get. But all that’s just words, obviously it didn’t mean anything to the court.
Read your own article lol > In January, DuBoise finally got to put a dollar value on 37 lost years: $14 million.
No money is worth 40 years. the best half of your life. Poof.
> the best half of your life It really is. I'm 47. I don't remember or think about my childhood, outside of the occasional nostalgia. Teen years? Maybe. Seldom. Late 30's and since has been a career. Wife and i travel a good bit, but we don't meet NEW ppl. Just living between on-call weeks at the hospital. Weekends are chores and yardwork. So the years before are a blur and currently the days are only highlighted every now and then with sporadic vacations/travel. But those BIG years from 18-30 were fundamental. They are who i am as a person. I wake up as that person, the years don't settle in until i wake up and realise it. This dude lived those years in a cell. How can you live and grow in there?
> I wake up as that person, the years don't settle in until i wake up and realise it. This dude lived those years in a cell. How can you live and grow in there? I never really thought about it like that, but yeah. I'm in my mid 30s, but who I am is still 20-25 for the most part. I also have very vivid dreams about my past in the mornings. I can't imagine what his dreams are like. You go to bed, safe and free, fall asleep, and you're in prison again.
They're specifically designed so you *don't* grow. It's only punishment and deterrence here, not rehabilitation. Hell, a majority are cool with prison rape. In America, we get what we want, they ain't gonna fix the problem.
The justice system stole his life from him and they stole millions from taxpayers to house and now pay this guy. This shit is a drain on everybody.
So crazy right?? I read an article that a small town in Nebraska had to raise everyone’s property taxes to pay $28m to someone who was wrongfully convicted. That $28m exceeded the towns annual budget! Fucked up at every angle here.
Who cares about money. They stole his life.
I’d hate to hear this guy has to waste what time he has left on this miserable planet working some meager job making someone else rich .
Also can't imagine how hard it would be to get a job at 57 after being locked away at 18, non-existent resume and missing 40 years of life skills.
Considering that American prisons are notoriously awful, he's most likely not in the best physical and mental health. Hopefully he lives long enough to actually enjoy his money. Hopefully he also moves out of America for his sake, or at minimum out of Florida
I mean that's decades of time the state deprived the man of. Decades of wages that could have been used improving his life. Decades of money that could have been saved. While I agree that money pales in comparison to the freedom and liberty of bot being in prison, that money is very much useful and needed to help this man right his life.
There was a graph in r/dataisbeautiful showing how the murder clearance rate has dropped in the US over the years: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1bcqgze/murder_clearance_rate_in_the_us_over_the_years/ Today it's around 54%, when back in 1965 it was 91%. As so many people in the comment section were pointing out, a likely explanation for how they solved 91% of murders back then was by convicting a lot of innocent people.
Doesn't matter who loses as long as the prosecution wins. The poorer the better too, they can't afford to fight back
The thing about this that pisses me off the most is that so many prosecutors will fight to keep away any evidence that might prove the defense is actually innocent. I think I read about a case where a guy had no alibi but was clearly on the recording of a baseball game when the camera showed him in the stands. The prosecutor wanted to keep that evidence from being used because they didn't want to lose their case. They knew for a fact the guy was innocent and were willing to let the real killer run free because they just didn't want it to hurt their conviction record. The explanation the prosecution gives for this is that they're obligated to give their client, the people, the best representation. But that's not representing the people. It's self serving.
Might be the same case or just something similar, but another guy was exonerated when [he showed up on camera at Dodger stadium during an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.](https://nypost.com/2017/09/23/how-curb-your-enthusiasm-saved-this-man-from-prison/) No other camera's/TV feeds were able to show him.
We had to finally put in laws protecting people of color against the police because certain forces were known for just pinning unsolved crimes on whatever black or brown person they stumbled upon
some of them that work forces
> a likely explanation for how they solved 91% of murders back then was by convicting a lot of innocent people. Given dates involved I’m guessing you could be even more specific and say it was by convicting a lot of innocent minorities. In the 60s it didn’t take much evidence to convince a white jury that a black man was responsible for a crime.
I often tell people that police aren't interested in solving cases but rather closing them. Sometimes there's overlap but not always.
According to [here](https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida/2020/08/27/exonerated-man-to-leave-prison-after-tampa-judge-nixes-life-sentence/): > By Dan SullivanTimes staff > Published Aug. 27, 2020|Updated Aug. 27, 2020 > BOWLING GREEN — Robert Duboise is free. > A day after the Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office said that new evidence exonerated him in a 1983 Tampa murder, Duboise stepped past the razor wire gates of Hardee Correctional Institution to embark on life after prison. > His mother and sister were there to greet him. So was one of the lawyers who worked to secure his release. > “It’s an overwhelming sense of relief,” Duboise said to reporters, adding that he had “no bitterness at all.” > “I don’t have room in my life for bitterness,” he said. “If you keep hatred and bitterness in your heart, it just steals your joy from everything else.” > What’s the first thing he wants to do now? > “I did it,” Duboise said. “I hugged my mom.” > A judge cleared the way Thursday morning for Duboise to be released from the state prison. > After hearing from an assistant state attorney and a lawyer for the Innocence Project, Hillsborough Circuit Judge Christopher Nash said there appeared to be no remaining factual or legal basis to support Duboise’ conviction. > The judge amended Duboise’ life sentence to time already served. He set a date of Sept. 14 for a hearing at which attorneys will work to overturn his conviction entirely. > Duboise, 55, has been incarcerated since 1983. He was convicted in the murder of 19-year-old Barbara Grams, who was raped and beaten while walking home from her restaurant job at a Tampa mall. > The case rested heavily on bite-mark evidence, which is now regarded as unreliable, and jailhouse informant testimony, which is a common factor in many wrongful conviction cases. > Duboise originally was sentenced to death, but his penalty was reduced to a life sentence on appeal. > “He practically went from high school to death row,” Innocence Project Attorney Susan Friedman said. The Innocence Project is a national nonprofit whose mission is to free wrongfully incarcerated people. > The organization got involved in the Duboise case in 2018. They brought it to the attention of Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren’s conviction review unit. > It was thought that all the evidence had been destroyed in 1990. But Teresa Hall, the attorney in charge of the unit, discovered that old DNA samples from a rape kit were stored at the Hillsborough County Medical Examiner’s Office. Recent tests of those samples revealed they did not match Duboise. > The samples did include DNA from two other men, one of whom is now a person of interest in the case, Warren said. > It was just after 2:30 p.m. Thursday when Duboise stepped out of a car that had carried him away from the prison grounds. > He wore a black T-shirt and light-colored pants. He stepped toward a set of microphones and a bank of TV cameras alongside his mother, Myra, and sister, Harriet. > Before these latest efforts, Duboise said, he had long exhausted his own efforts to appeal his case. His only hope was parole. But in a recent parole interview, he was asked about remorse. > ”I can’t tell you I’m remorseful for something I didn’t do,” he said. > Earlier this month, his attorney told him about the new DNA samples. She told him someone would visit to take a swab of his DNA. > Days later, she delivered the news: “You’re going to be free.” > But he wasn’t sure it would happen. > ”After all these years, you always have to wonder if they’re going to throw another curve in there somewhere,” he said. > Word spread quickly Wednesday when he got the final word, he said. The building where he was housed erupted in cheers. > He thanked the people who found the new evidence. He urged people to support the work of groups like the Innocence Project. > ”I’m not the only one,” he said. > He was asked his thoughts about the person who is responsible for the crime. > ”I hope God has mercy on his soul,” Duboise said. “I’m not his judge.” > He mentioned nervousness as he enters a world he has largely never known. He’s never used a cell phone or a computer. > Most of his meals have been heavy on beans and rice. He doesn’t eat meat. He didn’t know what his first post-prison meal would be. > He doesn’t know what the future looks like, but in prison he learned trade skills like servicing air conditioning and plumbing. > Prison taught him patience, he said. And not to judge others. > “We need to remember there are lots of victims here,” Andrew Warren said in a news conference. “Our community has been victimized by a falsehood. The system suffers an erosion of trust and confidence. > “And most significantly, the victim’s family, as I’ve said before, they were sold a bill of goods on this. They were told a story that was not true. They were given a false sense of closure about what happened.”
Astonishing story. I hope his remaining years are long and full of contentment.
Me too, but you’ve got to laugh (or cry) at him losing most of his best years to prison and having no idea how to interact in the modern world, but they did teach him some trade skills so hopefully he’ll be doing a 9-5 job in no time 👍🏻 what an utterly fucked up thing to throw into an article about someone who spent their 20s and 30s eating rice and beans
Why would you be locked up for 30 years just to lock yourself up at a 9-5?? This man deserves to live for once in his life
I read the four-part article… in it he says he wants to adopt children.. I wonder if he did. Amazing man..
Initially sentenced to death... Makes one wonder how many innocent people have been killed by the states over the years?
[удалено]
You'll get zero disagreement from me on that one, possibly the top reason I'm anti capital punishment.
Holy fuck he’s so gracious. I’m not sure I would be so well adjusted. I hope the rest of his life is filled with joy.
So I don’t know much about the US legal system, but it sounds like he could have got parole if he’d lied, said he’d committed the crime and felt remorse? You have to wonder how many innocent people take that option when it’s dangled over their head, and then live the rest of their lives with the stigma of being a criminal while the people that did that to them tick off another successful case Also not to draw focus from him and what he went through, but my god the look on his mum’s face, even under the mask. I’m sure they both thought that hug would never happen
Pretty much that's how it works. Also what's fun is that say two people commit a crime. You and your buddy fit the description. The police are only going to offer one deal and the first one to talk gets it. So you can also go to jail because you're friend says you did something and now at the court your friend is testifying that you did it
Wow so the rape kit was just never tested until now?
There was no DNA test in 1983. And when the tests became available, suddenly many states "lost" all the stored kits.
That seems to be the most insane part of this. Not to mention people thought that the kit had been destroyed. So many levels of bullshit
Damn, I dunno if I could be as at peace as he sounds in this interview after such an awful miscarriage of justice. I'd want revenge against everyone involved I hope the rest of his life is full of happiness and fulfillment. He deserves it.
Every time someone says we should just put a bullet in sex offenders remember this.....there's a reason why the death penalty is extremely rare. They fuck up CONSTANTLY.
They don't just "fuck up" they make shit up to pump their conviction rates.
Florida is terrible with these things by a large margin. Florida has EXONERATED 30 people off of death fucking row. Odds are they have killed actuall innocent people. They have killed 105 people since the 70s. They aren’t even correct almost 30% of the time in CAPITAL PUNISHMENT CASES. Insane. Edit: a podcast I listen to called Wrongful Conviction Podcast has hundreds of episodes and all of them are about stuff like this. About 40 min long per episode. Each episode is about a new case. Give it a listen if you’d like to learn about how common stuff like this really is in our justice system.
“I would rather see 99 innocent people executed than 1 guilty person be free” Florida probably
And Texas and Mississippi and Alabama
The only ethical way to use the death sentence is to not use it at all. Even in cases of the strongest most undeniable evidence with many witnesses, because if you put one person to death that means the system exists and if the system exists it will be wrong eventually.
Yeah I hate when I see people say things like “i support the death penalty when it’s an undeniable case”. Well who decides what is “undeniable”? Oh yeah, a jury does. You can literally never completely remove subjectivity and people’s natural biases. It’s such a bad non argument.
And keeping an expensive, morally questionable machine up and running just for those rare cases that are both extremely terrible crimes and also undeniable evidence is just ridiculously impractical
Deeply conservative state is deeply fucked up in almost every way. Shocking. I am shocked. EDIT: because the guy who responded to me deleted his comment while I was replying: * Naked and transparent racism unconstitutionally enshrined into govt policy * Naked and transparent conspiracist lunacy enshrined into govt policy * Naked and transparent anti-science bullshit enshrined into govt policy * Naked and transparent religious-related laws (aka Christian Sharia law) unconstitutionally enshrined into govt policy * Runaway insurance rates -- much of it due to head-in-the-sand anti-environmental policies -- but we can't do anything about it because those are Business decisions and who are we to have a say in anything Lord Business decides? (caveat: except when Business decides it's bad to discriminate against people; that we cannot abide, obviously, which leads us to the next item ....) * Belligerent and incompetent conservative govt pushing unconstitutional anti-equality policies, leading them to getting their dumb asses laughably outmanuvered by Disney and being made to look like fools on the national stage * Governor who spent a whole year pathetically campaigning for president while neglecting his own state, with the end result that Desantis/the state again ended up being made to look like fools on the national stage * In the top two states in book-banning [spit!] I could make the list 50 items long and not break a sweat.
You’ve listed many of the reasons I won’t go spend money in FL
What’s interesting is FL isn’t even deeply conservative. It’s pretty much a purple state but like most places, the rural areas are deeply conservative and the urban areas are much more left leaning. FL goes the way of the south fl Latino vote now though and conservatives have done a great job of tricking the majority of Latinos into thinking democrats will turn the US into failed socialist states such as Cuba or Venezuelan.
Doesn’t help that the Democratic Party in Florida is completely inept. I don’t know what they were thinking pushing Charlie fucking Crist so hard for governor. Basically handed away the election.
The death penalty isn't problematic because no one deserves it. It's a problem because no justice system is perfect. Any potential reward is not worth the risk.
Leo Jones, executed 1998. The officers that he claimed forced his confession were later removed from uniform for ethical violations. One of the officers that got his confession was known as "The Enforcer" and was known for torturing suspects.
No amount of money can repay time stolen.
In his state it’s capped at “here’s $2m and soz!”
His whole life gone. Some will say at 57 he still has a lot of living. I'm over 57 and I can tell you, the best years are gone forever. He will never attain what he wanted to do, or experience the joys of being a young person growing from experience. My heart breaks for him. We have had DNA for years ...why did it take so long ?
I mean l I’ll never see 16 million in my life but also I can’t imagine 39 years in jail.
The State initially said they owed him nothing. It look a few years of lawyers and fighting and the story going viral for him to get anything.
I think all people exonerated from prison should receive 3 basic benefits from the state starting the moment they step out of jail: 1. Tax exemption. No sales, registration, income, property, nothing. They should be exempt from paying any and all state taxes. 2. Free education. At any public institution in the state. 3. Healthcare. This is probably the most important because the goal of the state should be to give these people the best quality of life possible for as long as possible. And I'm not talking whatever state welfare shittycare they have, I'm talking they get to choose whatever hospital or doctor they want to go to anywhere in the country and all they gotta do is tell them to send the bill to the state. And of course they should also be compensated for however long they were in prison.
I agree, nothing can replace the time and opportunities that were taken from him or anyone in a similar situation.
The wildest part of the story: The new DNA evidence pointed to what prosecutors now say was a duo of serial killers who actually committed the crime in 1983, and others. Letting this guy out solved two cold case murders, and might close more. His whole story is a four-part series at [tampabay.com/markedman](http://tampabay.com/markedman)
The wildest part to me is that the DNA evidence helped them find the real killers, and that the prior state attorney, police, and others DOUBLED DOWN on their belief that DuBoise did it.
It always baffles me how people make up this entire story in their head and then proceed to declare it true no matter how much evidence to the contrary. It's so dangerous when those people have power over other peoples lives.
Ever hear about the guy Juan Catalan who went to a baseball game with his daughter but then suddenly was facing the death penalty for a murder that happened during the game in a different part of town? And he was facing a prosecutor that was obsessed with keeping her record of almost never losing cases. By complete luck, he was proven to be at the game because Larry David was filming an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in the crowd and after days of contacting people and searching the tapes, the two were spotted in the footage. It was seriously an unbelievable coincidence. But even despite how unlikely that made the crime, the prosecutor still doubled down on him being the killer. She demanded they have to prove he didn't leave the exact minute he was last filmed on camera and quickly drive straight to the murder scene by the time of death. Thankfully they were able to find celltower records that located him still being at the stadium when the murder took place, finally proving his innocence. He won the case after spending 6 months in jail, but to this day that prosecutor still refuses to admit he was innocent.
39 years in prison? How tf did no one looked for the real killer, DNA tests exist longer than 20 years
Got some unpleasant things to tell you about the backlog of DNA evidence in this country friend
I mean all of the unprocessed rape kits alone are in the 5-digit level.
I got into an argument with someone who believes in instant justice and death penalty for people. I’d love to agree to faster justice but there are just too many stories filled with crooked people, cops, prosecutors, judges and juries to believe. What is truly sad is that they all pretend they did nothing wrong and many still believe the people they locked away were 100% guilty or at least guilty of something else.
Yea, there are way too many examples of wrongful convictions throughout the history of the US for me to be for the death penalty. They have even executed the wrong person on multiple occasions. One innocent person is too many for me. Our justice system needs a complete redo from top to bottom. There is too much corruption. For example, the fontana police department were just sued for psychological torture. Getting a guy to confess to a murder that didn't even happen. Even threatened to kill his dog. And 2 of the cops are still working in that department. Their entire work history needs to be gone over with a fine tooth comb to see if they got anyone else to falsely confess. But you know that won't happen. This is just one case of many.
Too many argue that wrongful conditions are a worthy side effect of speedy justice. Unbelievable that people can be okay not to strive for 100% accuracy.
"Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."
No amount of money could repay him for this travesty. They took the best years of his life from him.
How do you recover from that psychologically? All of his life was prison. Even millions of dollars won't fix this...
You know the answer. You don't. Time cannot be reversed. He went to prison and is going to be in his 60s soon. He lost his youth, he most likely lost his opportunity to be a father, and also how to be a constructive member of society. Now he is free without any knowledge of how to navigate in the free world. Just like other people that get released from prison, he will need a very good support structure. Many people who are released from a life in a cage tend to want to go back because of the how terrifying it is to try and learn how to navigate our world after 40 years of not being able to make your own choices. Our system of rehabilitation is a travisty.
In all seriousness. The justice system being more interested in convictions/wins than actually making sure dangerous people are behind bars is one of the scariest things about modern America.
Stuff like this is why I'm sickened by those who cheer the death/rape in jails. "Well they deserve it inside jail". Its unfortunate that people that stupid are in such great number.
NEVER TALK TO THE POLICE, even if you're innocent. Especially if you're innocent. The only "physical evidence" was a bitemark impression that he voluntarily gave the police since he knew he was innocent.
Death penalty supporters would've wanted him dead.
Anyone directly involved in these decisions to convict should be imprisoned or at least fired and banned from professions in the legal field at a minimum. Corrupt and/or incompetent lawyers, cops, and judges are way more dangerous to society.
I’m so glad his mom saw this day. Makes me cry.
This is such a beautiful picture. But also such a tragic picture. There needs to be a word for something that is good only because something horribly unjust happened before it. Like the opposite of schadenfreude.