Robert DuBoise, sentenced over a 1983 rape and murder he did not commit, says he hopes others in his position now ‘get justice’
A Tampa, Florida, man who has been authorized to receive $14m for spending nearly four decades in prison over a rape and murder which he did not commit says he hopes his case makes it easier for the unjustly convicted to achieve justice before it’s too late for them.
“I’m just grateful,” Robert DuBoise told the New York Times of the compensation that Tampa’s city council voted to pay him to settle a lawsuit over his wrongful conviction. He said he hoped others in his position now “get justice and can move on without having to spend the rest of their life fighting the system that has already wronged them”.
DuBoise was 18 at the time that 19-year-old Barbara Grams was raped and beaten to death as she walked home from her Tampa restaurant job in August 1983. A medical examiner determined that someone had bitten Grams on one of her cheeks, prompting investigators to take bite samples from multiple men, including DuBoise.
$14m seems far too low:
- 40 years at $350,000 per year
- 480 months at $29,170 per month
- 14,600 days at $960 per day
Those don’t sound too bad until you get to:
- 350,400 hours at $40 per hour.
$40 an hour in exchange for losing most of your life - and the vast majority of your best years - is a fucking disgrace.
not to mention the need for psychological damage compensation. The guy lived 40 years with people around him, his friends and maybe relatives thinking that he brutally raped and murdered a young girl. I would have gone crazy probably, and die of stomach cancer or sth.
Is the 14m taxable?
It should be total FU money. The state should give him free healthcare, free public transportation, free legal services, free public utilities, and free internet.
I agree he should receive a higher compensation, but have no idea what that should be. I can’t look at it in terms of dollars per hour and think of an appropriate amount worth giving up 40 years of life. If I was in that position I don’t think 1billion would be fair.
I saw it differently, I was pleasantly surprised to see an amount that high because now he has the remainder of his life, maybe 30 to 40 years, to spend 14 Million USD. He could buy a home and car and still have enough for a modest retirement, if he chooses to.
If he invests the remainder into VYM then the dividends alone would be more than my annual salary.
No amount of money is worth 40 years
Agreed, but if a person were given a sum of money then that amount would seem about appropriate to me. Minimum 8M depending on legal fees, but preferably closer to 40M if we want him to be extra well off. We cannot undo the past.
Is your salary worth 40 hours a week?
-8 to 9 hours per day for sleep then.
If you cannot go home for you ‘job’ then they best be paying you.
This man didn’t go home for 40 years straight.
In his dreams he is free
“Mark Zuckerberg made more than $28 billion this morning after Meta stock makes record surge” https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/02/business/meta-stock-surge-mark-zuckerberg/index.html
seems fair.
…your poster child for trickle-down economics. /s
He didn’t make money, his net worth went up.
Also, how is that related to this in ANY way
Zuckerberg made 2,000 times more in one morning for doing basically nothing, vs. what DuBoise made in almost four decades in a settlement for a wrongful conviction and imprisonment.
It’s pretty easy to grasp if you don’t overthink it.
He built a successful company, that’s what he did :)
But still, it doesn’t matter, sucks that it happened to the lad, but comparing him to Zuckerberg doesn’t do absolutely anything for him, it’s completely unrelated to his case.
comparing him to Zuckerberg doesn’t do absolutely anything for him, it’s completely unrelated to his case.
Again, it doesn’t do him any favors.
If you want to push your agenda, that’s fine, but piggybacking off of a ruined life (in quite exceptional circumstances all things considered) doesn’t do absolutely anything.
What’s the point? Should the guy have gotten more? He can live like a king without a care for the rest of his life. If he has children, those can, too.
Or is it that Zuckerberg shouldn’t be “allowed” to own his own company, which coincidentally is pretty successful?
Because if it’s the latter, it’s unrelated to this specific person, you could post it under a cute kitty vid and it’d have the same value.
Is he actually gonna get it or is there gonna be an appeal where he’s dragged through the courts again for years and only awarded $500k after being forced to pay $10 million in legal fees?
It’s a settlement, which means the city agreed to pay the $14,000,000 instead of going to trial and risk a verdict of a much higher amount. So no there won’t be any appeals and he should see the money.
Just a forty year whoopsie daisy.
This story is like male disposability meets eminent domain.
“Meh, he was compensated for his time”
says he hopes others in his position now ‘get justice’
Hopefully this includes Tommy Zeigler.
Your tax dollars at work /s
Not to mention the tax dollars spent to house and feed an innocent man. And the salaries of the lawyers and cops involved to get him there.
How the fuck is money gonna fix this?
All prisons must go. Its inhumane to incarcerate people.
That’s an interesting take. What do you recommend be done with criminals? Especially violent ones?
have you heard of restorative justice? it’s a studied method that’s proven more effective than prisons to rehabilitate offenders and heal the harm they’ve caused
And when people are repeat offenders and enjoy killing people? Then what…
Then you lock them together with the people who did lesser crimes and can be rehabilitated to ensure they too will end up more likely to do crimes, maybe even bigger ones, when eventually released.
You seem to be intentionally obtuse.
It’s a legitimate question, though. There are many people who genuinely enjoy harming others. There really is no “rehabilitation” for someone who is disinterested in modifying their harmful behavior. Segregating those people from society is a safety issue.
Rehabilitation for other people is excellent, but we still need a solution for those who cannot be rehabilitated.
Well, considering we don’t actually have any rehabilitation in the United States…… you’re basically arguing that we should continue to trample on the human rights of prisoners because you believe that there are people who can not be rehabilitated.
I’m not arguing against rehab or prison reform. You are right that we desperately need it. I’m arguing against the total abolishment of some kind of prison system because there are some who simply should not be allowed near the public. Porque no los dos?
Please provide your evidence of “many people” who deserve your version of justice.
Please provide your evidence of “many people”
even if only one person proved utterly disinterested in rehabilitating themselves, you’d still need some kind of escape hatch built into the system to handle them
getting bogged down in specific frequencies is kind of missing the point