something that doesn't sit right with me

[RCT]

I was watching the news yesterday, and they were talking about letting people out of prison, because they have been proven innocent through DNA testing...which is wonderful isn't it really, I mean that must be awful to be imprisoned falsely.....they were released and some states would give them a certain amount of money...I think they would top it off at like $25,000 total, that was the high end, some states didn't give them a dime.....no matter how long you had been imprisoned....

Anyway I was remembering an article I had read in the doctors office recently saying that SOME, not all African Americans were considering suing the Government for $ because their relatives had been slaves, some were asking for 1 million dollars per house hold....

Doesn't this sound strange to you....these people were wrongly imprisoned....don't they deserve some kind of compensation?

As for the Slavery issue...Yes, it is horrible to think that someone could own another human being, And I truly feel for those who were enslaved.... but do the distant relatives of these people think that they are owed restitution ....I don't agree....JMHO....

[Lynda/WA]

I usually am against getting large settlements for anything. But in the case of wrongfull imprisonment I think you should. I remember one case were a mother was accused of killing her infant son. They accused her of feeding him anti-freeze. The boy had been taken away and placed in foster care. While visiting she fed him a bottle and based on that they convicted her. He wound up dying while she was in prision and she wasn't allowed to go to the funeral. Luckily for her, she was pregnant when she went to prison. Her husband believed her even though her mother in law testified against her. When the second child also began showing signs of anti-freeze poisoning it hit the media. Medical experts came forward and told them about a very rare disease that causes the body to break down food and release the glycol like in anti-freeze. The government didn't care. They said the second child having this rare disease that mimiced how the first child died could just have been a coincidence. Eventually she did get out of prision. I'm thinking it was on a pardon though. Not positive about that.

The reparations wouldn't only be to direct decendents of slaves but to all black people from what I heard. This was a hot topic on the radio talk shows awhile back. Someone took out ad space in college papers detailing 10 reasons why reparations are a bad idea. Some of the reasons included you would be penalizing the descendants of whites that fought to end slavery and you would benefit blacks that weren't descendents of slaves. It also stated that the lifestyle of the average African American today is dramatically better than the lifestyle of the average person in Africa today.

There are many laws and legal actions that bother me because of their inconsistancy. It seems to me everytime you make a new law it winds up becoming conviluted. It's used as a precident to create new law that has unexected results.