In the mother of all understatements Mr Ford says he is “very pleased”. He does harbour some resentment though, as you may well expect: “Thirty years, 30 years of my life if not all of it. I can’t go back and do anything that I should’ve been doing when I was 35, 38 and 40 – stuff like that. My son when I left was a baby, now they’re grown men with babies”.
What would you do first if you got out of prison after so long? I’d probably go straight to McDonalds. Mr Ford said “My mind is going in all kinds of directions but it feels good”.
Louisiana state law entitles some financial pay back for those incarcerated wrongly. On the one hand, no kind of money is going to give you back what you lost and on the other, he’s pretty unemployable now so he needs something.
The law states you get $25,000 (£15,000) for each year up to a max of $250,000 (£150,000), so he should get the top amount, plus up to $80,000 (£48,000) for loss of “life opportunities” which I assume he’ll get too.
Of course, Mr Ford isn’t the first wrongly accused man of all time and not all of those wrongly accused were lucky enough to escape with their lives. The Death Penalty Information Center (U.S.) has published a list of 10 inmates “executed but possibly innocent”. And that is unlikely to be exhaustive.
The birth of the DNA era has meant that previously closed cases can now be crow barred open and inspected. Kirk Bloodsworth was the first American to be freed from death row as a result of DNA fingerprinting and Ray Krone was the 100th American to have been sentenced to death and then later exonerated.
DNA can’t be used in the majority of cases, so the fact that there have been 100 wrong convictions on death row that we know of is an argument in itself against the death penalty. People are inherently dumb and not a single human on earth is infallible.
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