However, when the situation involves authority figures, false imprisonment also causes harm to your constitutional and civil rights. As such, you may have a cause of action and can sue for false imprisonment by police officers, governmental employee, or other official acting under the guise of authority.
You may be entitled to monetary damages if you can prove the essential elements as described below. In a false imprisonment case, you must establish:. If successful in proving these facts, you may be entitled to compensation for medical bills, emotional distress, pain, suffering, and related losses.
Based on the essential elements of false imprisonment, it may be helpful to review some examples that may allow you to file a civil lawsuit. You may have a claim if you were:.
A real-life case involving false imprisonment may also serve as a helpful example. They were convicted in , but the charges were later dropped due to egregious errors and police mishandling of the case. Still, the five had already spent much of their formative years behind bars.
These individuals sued New York City on several grounds, including false imprisonment. To learn more about your rights and legal remedies, please contact Kreizer Law. Some even go further, mandating vocational programs and other services. Contact him today for free to discuss your case and the possibility of obtaining compensation. Chokshi, N. Get your free case evaluation now! Reliable statistics on the breakdown of payments are available only for the past two years. Since 1 March , the Secretary of State for the Home Department has authorised the payment of compensation for wrongful conviction or charge to 76 applicants.
These, together with the remaining 22 cases, await the submission of their final claims. The recent spate of well publicised wrongful convictions, such as the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, has drawn considerable attention to the ability of the criminal justice system to more quickly recognise and rectify its mistakes.
However, for the individuals involved the overturning of a wrongful conviction is often the beginning of a long and arduous struggle to piece their lives back together again. But on the other hand such recompense does not arrive quickly and neither can it compensate for the horrors that have been endured by defendants and their families.
This article will look at the systems which exist to provide compensation for wrongful conviction. Currently there are two compensation schemes in operation. The first involves compensation payments, wholly within the discretion of the Home Secretary. In certain instances an ex gratia payment will be offered if the case involves negligence on the part of the police or some other public authority.
A second scheme was therefore established by the Criminal Justice Act The ex gratia scheme continues to operate in those cases which may fall outside the Act. A positive application for compensation must be made to the Home Office who then consider the question of whether or not there is a right to compensation in a particular case.
Compensation payments under the statutory scheme are calculated in a way that is the same as the calculation of damages for civil wrongs. Complex calculations involving such things as loss of pension rights may also mean that securing the services of a forensic accountant could prove invaluable. Other non-financial losses may also be claimed although by their very nature they are extremely difficult to quantify, especially those caused by emotional distress.
In many miscarriages of justice the victim may very well have been subjected to severe character assassination by prosecuting authorities seeking to justify their actions. Ingman, Statutory compensation payments do not, however, appear to entitle the family of an applicant to claim for their own losses beyond their travel expenses. In many respects the hardship caused to the parents, spouses and children of the applicant can be as grievous as that suffered by the applicant.
There have been few full and final settlements to date. Members of the Birmingham Six, however, were said to be insulted at similar offers following their sixteen years in prison. Such offers do not appear to compare favourably with the available guidance as to the appropriate level of compensation taken from awards of damages made in cases of false imprisonment.
In Hsu v Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis, New Law Journal, Lord Woolf spoke of guidance to be given to a jury to assist them in assessing the damages to be awarded in cases involving unlawful conduct by the police towards the public. Though the Home Office does not accept any liability when making compensation payments a parallel can still be drawn with such cases when seeking an appropriate sum for compensation.
Rather than seeking to achieve the minimum international standards the Home Office ought to attempt to satisfy their own rationale of seeking to compensate for the hardship caused by the wrongful conviction. The current position virtually demands proof of innocence before a claim is successful.
This is clearly unfair. Though no-one would wish to see payments made to those who have been cleared purely on legal technicalities, the balance should be in favour of compensating rather than not. The wrongfully convicted continue to carry the burden and stigma of conviction which is no doubt exacerbated but the lack of any form of rehabilitation program. This treatment contrasts with that of prisoners who have rightly served long sentences.
They have, for example re-training schemes to help them find employment, somewhere to live and generally re-adjust into society.
0コメント