About one-third of them, like Mr. Ochoa, found ways to get a stable footing in the world. But about one-sixth of them, like Mr. Bibbins, found themselves back in prison or suffering from drug or alcohol addiction.  

About half, like Mr. Williams, had experiences somewhere between those extremes, drifting from job to job and leaning on their family, lawyers or friends for housing and other support.

This should come as no surprise.  What about 20 years in prison gives rise to the expectation of a sudden, miraculous transition back into society.  Innocent or guilty, it’s a tough road.  Bear in mind that many of the wrongly imprisoned weren’t Rhodes Scholars before they were accused, and aren’t likely to be much better situated on the way out the door.

Imagine what they put on the job application for experience.  It’s really not the sort of thing that makes a potential employer see your potential for future success.  Still, you would think that society would have some greater sympathy for people who suffered 20 years of imprisonment so that the rest of us could pretend that our system wasn’t totally full of crap.  After all, these are the people who fell on the sword (pushed may be a more appropriate description) so that the rest of us could sleep better at night.  

“It’s ridiculous,” said Vincent Moto, exonerated in 1996 of a rape conviction after serving almost nine years in Pennsylvania. “They have programs for drug dealers who get out of prison. They have programs for people who really do commit crimes. People get out and go in halfway houses and have all kinds of support. There are housing programs for them, job placement for them. But for the innocent, they have nothing.”

That’s not entirely accurate.  There is the money.  The imprisoned innocents receive a payment for the years they spent in jail because they system erred.  But while this may seem like a windfall to those who believe it could never happen to them, the compensation is not nearly as much of a given as many of us suppose.

Given the hodgepodge of state compensation laws, an exonerated prisoner’s chances of receiving any significant sum depend on the state where he was convicted and whether he can find a lawyer willing to litigate a difficult case. One man who served three years in California sued and won $7.9 million. Another, who had served 16 ½ years in Texas, filed a compensation claim and received $27,850.

If the outcome depends on the violation of civil rights, compensation may well not be in the cards.  The sad truth is that there was no civil rights abuse, overzealous prosecutors or police, concealment of evidence or conspiracy to deceive a jury.  The conviction was the product of an imprecise system, a system that is overly dependent on poor evidence such as eyewitness identification that produces poor results.  Who do you blame when a witness believes what he or she says, but is simply wrong?

All the speeches in the world about what a great legal system we have does nothing to bring comfort to the wrongly convicted.   It’s hard to imagine how a juror would feel knowing that he or she voted to put an innocent man in prison for 20 years, ignoring the defense pleas and going with the flow.  It seemed so right at the time, and everybody else agreed he was guilty too.  It’s so easy to be wrong when there are 11 other people agreeing with you.  No personal responsibility for the decision.

Yet, juries continue to be juries, assuming that the defendant must be guilty or the police wouldn’t have arrested him and the prosecutor wouldn’t have brought the case to trial. 

For those of us who have the pleasure of spending our days trying to persuade jurors that they should not convict our clients, we try not to think about what happens to the innocents who are convicted and imprisoned.  It would make our jobs impossible.  But I really want everyone else to think about them. 

If that’s not depressing enough, the ones in the Times article are the lucky ones.  They had DNA and the Innocence Project to free them.  What about the tens of thousand of others where there is no DNA to prove them innocent?  Just the same old mistake-fraught system that we pretend is the best there is.  We should send all of them a thank-you card for carrying sitting in prison so the rest of us can sleep at night, secure in the knowledge that justice has been done.