Bizarre, Constitutional Law, Criminal law, Politics, Society

Wisconsin Man Given Only $25,000 For 23 Years in Jail for Murder That He Did Not Commit

The Innocence Project is reporting that Robert Stinson is eligible for only $25,000 of compensation in Wisconsin after serving 23 years in prison for a crime that he did not commit. The outrageously low compensation is the result of a statutory compensation level that has not been changed since 1913.

The legislature in 1913 set $5000 a year for compensation — a figure that the IP notes would be $100,000 today if adjusted.

The Wisconsin Claims Board has agreed to ask for an additional $90,000. That would still, in my view, be remarkably low compensation for a man denied the best years of his life. If the state runs over a man with a state truck, he can recover hundreds of thousands in damages. However, if prosecutors and police wrongly deny a man a full life, he is given only $5000 a year?

Let’s do the math. With 23 years in jail, Stinson has a right for compensation for roughly 8395 days. At $25,000, he will receive $2.90 per day. Even at $100,000, that would amount to roughly $12 a day to sit in prison for the majority of his life.

IP reports that “[o]f the 27 states with compensation laws, Wisconsin’s compensation law has the second-lowest maximum dollar amount. New Hampshire caps compensation at $20,000.”

The result that there is little financial or political deterrent to unjust convictions. Part of the value of these awards is that the public takes note of these cases and asks for an accounting. Some prosecutors have been accused of exercising little discretion or judgment in weak cases — simply leaving it to jurors and minimizing their own role. This is not to disparage most police and prosecutors who work hard to “make the case” and do justice. However, putting aside the obvious obligation to pay someone for a wrong committed against them, the compensation for false convictions is one of the few deterrents in this area. It forces the public to internalize — and recognize — part of the cost of wrongful convictions.

Ione F. Cyshosz was found the morning after disappearing from a Bingo event. She had been beaten and her corpse showed bite marks on the torso. Stinson was arrested in the area after saying the teeth of the then-21-year-old matched the bite marks.

The conviction was heralded at the time as the first “bite mark” case to go to verdict in the state — a controversial basis for conviction that has been discredited in past cases. The conviction was secured by Dr. L. Thomas Johnson, a forensic odontologist and prosecutor (and now law professor) Daniel Blinka. Blinka, shown right, now teaches The Constitution and Criminal Investigations at Marquette Law School. Despite DNA evidence disproving bite mark evidence (which was the only direct evidence used for conviction), Blinka and Johnson insist that they still have no doubt about his guilt.

The prosecutors also insist that Stinson was given a fair trial and now have six-months to decide whether to recharge and retry Stinson.

Jonathan Turley

61 thoughts on “Wisconsin Man Given Only $25,000 For 23 Years in Jail for Murder That He Did Not Commit”

  1. And for some among us:

    Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
    -Plato.

  2. @Lottakatz

    I think that the government should self insure for wrongful imprisonment and that if a claim is recognized the prosecutor should have to contribute. Not enough to make them bankrupt but enough to make them think. Like a medical services co payment.

    I think that habeas petition processing should be much more rigorous with a review by a totally different set of people and with a right to counsel and no time limit either.

    I think that prisoners should be encouraged to study law and provided with all the legal authorities they could possibly want or need and with computer access.

    They should have prisoner ECF.

    Prisoners should be allowed to defend themselves by filing documents they researched and wrote in addition to filings by their attorneys.

    All prisoners should have a lawyer available to them even after the beginning of their imprisonment or sentence.

    Parolees should also have a lawyer available to them.

  4. Anon Nurse

    Thank you for the encouragement. I did see that a Richard Horn sued the government for 14 years and then they settled with him. I am only 56 now.

  5. Michelle

    Brian didn’t prove your point. What is your graduate level education?

    Let’s talk about these two issues then:

    1.) Could Robert Stinson get through a motion to dismiss if he sues for damages?

    2.) Is DOJ liable to me under 5 USC 552a e(7) and g(4)?

  6. Kay,

    You’re right about the lives that are destroyed by the great evil that walks among us… Many good people have suffered in the pursuit of justice — often justice that is never attained. The best option, in my opinion, is to keep struggling and fighting, as long as one is able to keep going. And while it’s possible, and even likely, that one may not succeed, once in awhile, justice does prevail… If one quits, one will never know how the story might have ended.

    -D

    “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” -Theodore Parker

  7. Thank you Brian for proving my points about how some people that lack enough specific graduate-level education are just too time consuming to help them too much on a blog that is clearly “way over their own personal capacities.” No charge either. 🙂

  8. Dear Brian

    Thanks for your posting.

    So were you imprisoned?

    Are you aware of another person who had an experience like I did of being imprisoned by the U.S. government without a criminal charge?

    I don’t believe that “the law” is impossible to understand. To me, many or most of the laws seem perfectly straightforward and clear.

    Do you want to discuss a few of them?

    I’d like to communicate about Privacy Act 5 USC section 552a subsection e(7) and g (4).

    DOJ filed in Court an affidavit that I “sued the Colorado Bar Association (D. Colo., Civil Action No.02-CV-1950-
    EWN). She was taken into custody by order of Judge Nottingham on September 2, 2005, under a civil contempt violation until “she purges herself of the contempt of court by agreeing to voluntarily to dismiss the lawsuits.”

    Do you think DOJ is liable for damages to me under the Privacy Act based on that statement?

  9. Please forgive me. I have no way to discern in advance of putting out the words I have not yet found, yet seek, whether the words will work decently. Within myself, I find no fault with anyone or anything, and also recognize problems and predicaments within human society which appear to me to be worthy of human effort in learning if, and if, how, such problems can be decently resolved.

    michellefrommadison: I studied psychology in college, got straight A grades, and applied the undergraduate-level work along with with my own research in putting together a model of the verifiable causes and plausible prevention of what I observe to be a tragically long litany of human harm done as though by intention. The problem I have with what Kay writes is that she is already over-simplifying it, in the sort of effort you seem to me to advocate, of reducing a complex concern to a level of simplicity which, while being easy to understand, totally omits the concern at hand.

    I have a deep sense of the struggle Kay which has caused what I deem to have been great damage to Kay and her family. I am well-acquainted with such struggles and such damage. They comprise the core of my personal encounter with the norms (folkways, mores, traditions of shaming and punishment as reinforcement of the biological delusion of personal guilt, and the list is dreadfully long).

    I have almost routinely been falsely accused, labeled guilty, and been subjected to punishment all the way to shattering stark terror which I survived only by massively dissociating into the “cast of thousands” variation of “dissociative identity disorder” (more accurately, I find, named multiple personalities) as a way to divide up the damage done to me in second grade into survivable tidbits.

    I take inviolable exception to the medical-model-absurdly-atrocious-utterly-dastardly-fiction that dissociation used to survive otherwise-unsurvivably-lethal trauma is a mental disorder of any category, classification, type, or sort, whatsoever.

    I expect no person to do other than as the person’s individual situation and circumstances both allow and require; therefore, I find all persons, from a brain biology perspective, perfectly innocent regardless of the person’s conduct.

    If a person’s conduct is not an expression of brain biology, of what is it an expression? The surgical procedure of a very famous French physician, from all I have read or otherwise learned, so profoundly affects a person’s conduct as to rule out for me, as a biologist-engineer-scientist, that the human brain is other than the biological source of very nearly all non-reflexive human conduct.

    To me, therefore, the structure of the human activity, “the rule of law,” cannot be other than a biological process at its physical source. Someone wrote, if I recall correctly, in response to some of my earlier words, to the effect that the law is not biological. Biology, for me, goes far beyond merely dissecting a cadaver. Biology, to me, includes not only that deemed alive or dead, but also the substrate of all deemed dead or alive, and all the actions of that deemed alive or dead and the substrate thereof.

    Were I asked, and I ask to not be so asked, I would offer the thought that Kay is too far ahead, and not at all too far behind…

    Within what I have read that Kay has written, I experience an inner sense of horror for which human society has as yet no observable resources to fully acknowledge.

    So:

    From Otteray Scribe, December 30, 2010 at 9:04 am:

    “Point is, justice is getting harder to come by in our current toxic atmosphere.”

    If the traditional notions of justice are, in terms of human brain biological function, of grave error grounded in the inescapable ignorance of early human society, and if, as I observe, those notions are only now, through recent work in scientific neuropsychology, coming to the surface of human awareness, then the harder such achieving justice becomes, the greater the opportunity may be for the “current toxic atmosphere” to poison the poison, thereby permitting the deception of deception to deceive itself into realizing that it actually cannot exist, other than as a form of human error, unavoidable until humans have made enough errors for the pattern of errors to become recognizable.

    For the philosophically inclined:

    What would be the observable properties of existence, if nothing exists outside existence to limit existence in any way or manner whatsoever?

    What would be the observable properties of existence, if nothing existed except existence from which existence can be made?

    What would be the observable properties of existence, if existence can only be observed from within itself?

    What would be the observable properties of existence, If existence includes itself as a proper subset?

    What would be the observable properties of existence, if the totality of existence, including but not limited to all possible and impossible universes, parallel universes, and trans-infinite sets of such universes?

    What would be the observable external dimensionalities of the existence of the super-set of all existences, possible, impossible, and otherwise?

    What would be the observable differences people could notice, which would be different than what we actually notice, if existence is am infinitely-nested set of dimensionless complex-variable singularities, all containing themselves and each other as proper subsets?

    My philosophical orientation and perspective may not be identically as yours are. This contrast may eventually allow learning from ourselves as individuals as we learn from one another as individuals within a group of individuals, each singular within the singularity of community.

    And also,

    I have devised demonstrations which appear impossible to refute, showing that “the law” as now structured in the U.S.A. is impossible for anyone to understand except as isolated fragments.

    The technique is simple, based on the strategic method of the game of chess fork gambit. Checkmate?

  10. Great name calling and character assassination from an anonymous blogger.

    To be “simplistic” please be specific.

    In the context of this article, how would Robert Stinson get around case law regarding prosecutorial immunity if he wanted to sue for damages, which you seem to think he should?

    Are you in fact a “lawyer” from Madison?

    Will we read that Robert Stinson is being represented by a lawyer named Michelle?

  11. You have demonstrated you are far too behind on these issues to deal with on this blog. Try to keep the issues simplistic instead Kay, that might assist you better.

  13. Kay, one has to understand both Law and Abnormal Psychology in order to fully understand this case. Sorry. 🙁

  14. Michelle

    How exactly do you think he will become a multi millionaire? I searched on his name and didn’t see anything referring to him having a new lawyer. I don’t think that the Innocence Project actually does tort lawsuits either.

    I don’t see how the doctrine of prosecutorial immunity can be evaded with his facts either. The prosecutors will say that they believed in bite mark evidence and built their case in good faith, as was affirmed by the jury. I don’t see that they withheld evidence from him.

    I think that what will happen is that he will have a miserable life and die in the gutter in a few years. I think no one will look out for his interests.

  15. No Kay, I was not referring to anything more than I stated. That guy will be a multi-millionaire by the time his upcoming attorney gets done with it, plus he has a free pass to teach those wrong-doers a lesson they will never forget in this lifetime too. Who knows, maybe the guy might even pay for the long hospital stays and rehabilitation they will all need after he gets done giving them their needed lessons. 🙂

  17. Why would he use the same attorney Kay? You know, here in the United States, a defendant has a right to change attorneys, just so ya know. 🙂

  18. ?????

    His defense attorney probably let him be convicted so that he would get more PD assignments. That’s why they call them public pretenders.

    To restate my comment, I was the victim of unprosecuted felonies but I believe that I would be convicted if I made any threats of violence. However, I can blog all day that they committed crimes against me using their names and linking to their websites and none of them will sue me.

  20. I was referring to the article that is the subject of the thread; not Kay’s comment

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