========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 10:55:49 +0100 Reply-To: "Hedley, Steve" Sender: Enrichment - Restitution & Unjust Enrichment Legal Issues From: "Hedley, Steve" Subject: The benefits of life in prison MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Some will recall a discussion last March of a rather extraordinary claim by the British government that a prisoner, subsequently found to have been wrongly convicted, was nonetheless to be treated as having received a benefit through his incarceration, on the ground that he was saved living expenses. (This was not a direct claim against the former prisoner, but an argument to reduce the amount he was to be paid by way of compensation for the miscarriage of justice). The Court of Appeal have now held that this deduction was perfectly proper, so long as it is merely a deduction from the claim for wages lost while in prison and does not cut into the pain-and-suffering award. I will get the judgment up on the restitution site as soon as I can. The relevant passage is in para 103: "As to Mr Blake's argument that an Independent Assessor should not regard prison accommodation and keep wrongly imposed on a claimant as a benefit to be deducted, it should be remembered that the deduction is from his claim for pecuniary loss in the form of loss of earnings. It has no impact on the award that he is entitled to receive for his non-pecuniary suffering for his enforced incarceration and its conditions. All the unpleasant aspects of involuntary incarceration are, or should be, taken into account in that part of the award. And the deduction should be on the premise, as is the award for loss of earnings, of a conventional life style in which the claimant would have had to pay for his own living expenses out of those earnings, unless there is evidence to the contrary. If, factually, there was no such basis for the deduction, that argument should have been addressed to [the assessor] ...." Steve Hedley Faculty of Law, University College, Cork ____________________________________________________________________ This message was delivered through the Restitution Discussion Group, an international internet LISTSERV devoted to all aspects of the law of unjust enrichment. To subscribe, send "subscribe enrichment" in the body of a message to . To unsubscribe, send "signoff enrichment" to the same address. To make a posting to all group members, send to . The list is run by Lionel Smith of McGill University, tel. (+1) 514 398 4670, email . ========================================================================= Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 11:31:50 +0100 Reply-To: Benedict White Sender: Enrichment - Restitution & Unjust Enrichment Legal Issues From: Benedict White Subject: Re: The benefits of life in prison In-Reply-To: <9FBB394A25826C46B2C6F0EBDAD4275506258897@xch2.ucc.ie> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-transfer-encoding: Quoted-printable I happen to think that the whole argument is spurious and takes our own ve= rsion of the compensation culture to a new level, that is the idea that one should = only be compensated for ones loss. How much someone would have earned if they had not been encarcerated is hi= ghly speculative. They could for example have decided to found there own busine= ss, gone bankrupt, been run over by a car. However the court does have to spec= ulate here. How much a person would have spent on living expenses is highly speculativ= e also. They may have moved back with parents, won the lottery and bought a house,= got a job which was live in. The possibilites are endless, so any figure would h= ave to be speculative, and it is not a speculation the courts should have entertaine= d. It is also an affront to my own personal sense of justice, akin to sating = to an RTA victim that their compensation could be cut by =A3100 per year as they no = longer needed shoes as their legs had been cut off in the accident. Just my 2p worth. Kind regards Benedict White ____________________________________________________________________ This message was delivered through the Restitution Discussion Group, an international internet LISTSERV devoted to all aspects of the law of unjust enrichment. To subscribe, send "subscribe enrichment" in the body of a message to . To unsubscribe, send "signoff enrichment" to the same address. To make a posting to all group members, send to . The list is run by Lionel Smith of McGill University, tel. (+1) 514 398 4670, email .