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.

  • Pantherina@feddit.de
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    8 months ago

    How the fuck is money gonna fix this?

    All prisons must go. Its inhumane to incarcerate people.

    • iAmTheTot@kbin.social
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      8 months ago

      That’s an interesting take. What do you recommend be done with criminals? Especially violent ones?

        • Primarily0617@kbin.social
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          8 months ago

          its a long article and i cant read

          what do you do about cases where the victim doesnt want to engage in a dialogue with the offender?

          • Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            If you can’t read, here’s an online article reader you can use. Just select the entire content of the article and paste it as plain text on that site

          • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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            8 months ago

            The short answer to your question is that it’s complicated - in the systems where restorative justice has the most potential to change things, it’s still quite a radical approach and there’s a lot to be figured out.

            One way of addressing the problem you raise is that sometimes “surrogate victims” are used - people who have been victims of the same or similar crime. Apparently this has been quite effective in some instances, but ideally usage of this should be limited - one of the ongoing challenges is ensuring that the rehabilitation of offenders doesn’t take precedence over the kind of two way healing that restorative justice is meant for

        • yggstyle@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          So mars will become Australia 2.0

          I wonder if space Australia will have space dingos and space kangaroos…

          • admiralteal@kbin.social
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            8 months ago

            Don’t worry. It has no magnetosphere. Even in environmentally-enclosed shelters, you’d still see horrific rates of cancer and other such radiation-induced disease rapidly wiping out complex life like humans.

            • Pantherina@feddit.de
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              8 months ago

              This gives some people moral superiority over others. It means some randos that are also very flawed and, living in a western society, for sure contribute to climate change, the killing of animals and indirectly humans, can say “this person did something bad”.

              You just cant do that. Court is not a place for justice, it is often biased, emotionally and ideologically tinted, and no judge is objective.

              • Primarily0617@kbin.social
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                8 months ago

                if that’s the argument you’re using against prisons, can’t i, a dastardly doer of crimes, simply reject any form of consequence for my actions, since you’re still going about contributing to global warming through your addiction to being alive and existing in society?

                  • Primarily0617@kbin.social
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                    8 months ago

                    Right, but if we’re going down that route, how do you enact any form of consequence when I decide to go about crime-ing people? Anything you try to force on me I can refuse with “nobody is perfect enough to reasonably judge other people”.