Robbing the Wrongly Convicted….

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by

Dave Mann

….to pay the lawyers.

So, the State of Texas ups the compensation to the wrongly convicted, and now some attorneys want a big cut of that money.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has the story:

A man freed from prison by DNA evidence has asked a judge to stop his former lawyer from taking more than $1 million in fees out of his expected $4 million in state compensation.Lawyers for Steven C. Phillips, 51, filed a petition in state district court in Dallas asking the judge to declare an agreement with his former lawyer “unconscionable and thus unenforceable.”That contract with his former lawyer obligated Phillips to give up one-fourth of his award from the state for the 24 years he spent incarcerated for a string of sexual assaults the courts now say he did not commit.”

I’m not going to begrudge the lawyers some compensation for their work. But $1 million?

has been with the Observer since 2003. Before that, he worked as a reporter in Fort Worth and Washington, D.C. He was born and raised in Philadelphia. He thinks border collies are the world’s greatest dogs, and believes in the nourishing powers of pickup basketball.

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