Compensation Culture
BBC NEWS | UK | Crime appeal pay-outs to be cut
Plans to reduce the compensation paid to those wrongly convicted of crimes are to be announced.
Those who win their appeals at the first attempt will get no compensation. Others who have spent years in prison will see any pay-outs capped.
If the plans went ahead, people who appealed within the time limit set by the court would no longer be entitled to any compensation if they won.
Instead it would be regarded as the legal process taking its course.
This would rule out damages being awarded to someone like Angela Cannings, who was wrongly convicted of killing two of her sons.
She served 20 months in prison for murder before her convictions were overturned on her first appeal.
Her solicitor Bill Bache told BBC News the proposals did not recognise the impact of miscarriages of justice on people's lives.
"In the case of people who have had their lives quite needlessly ruined, why should they not be regarded just as much as victims as people who have been mugged in the street or something of that kind?
"Simply because the perpetrator of the injustice against one group of people is the state as opposed to say a criminal in the street or something of that kind, why should there be a distinction between those two?"
Of course if you are a poor homeless blind man you deserve £18,000 compensation if you have to leave your job, and you get to keep all the perks (tax-free) and you get your job back in a few months anyway - but have your life ruined with the most grotesque smear and incompetent expert imaginable and endure a spell in prison as a "child-killer" well that is just tough luck.