Minnesota Priced a Wrongly Taken Year of a Person's Life at $50,000 in 2014 and Has Not Changed the Number Since — and Even After You Win, the State Does Not Have to Pay You

Minnesota has a price list for a year of a person's life taken by mistake. It is written into the statute books, it has a floor and a set of caps, and it has been sitting at the same dollar figure since 2014.

Start with the name, because the Legislature keeps getting it wrong. Minn. Stat. § 611.368 reads: "Sections 611.362 to 611.368 shall be cited as the 'Incarceration and Exoneration Remedies Act.'" It was the Imprisonment and Exoneration Remedies Act from 2014 until the 2019 first special session struck that word and inserted "Incarceration" (Laws 2019, 1st Spec. Sess., ch. 5, art. 2, § 25). Every appropriation bill enacted since — five of them, through the one the governor signed this past May — still uses the repealed name. That is how much attention this corner of the law gets.

What the Act actually pays

Section 611.365, subdivision 2, does the arithmetic. First, reimbursement for "all restitution, assessments, fees, court costs, and other sums paid by the claimant as required by the judgment and sentence" — the state gives back what it collected from you for the conviction it got wrong. Then the floor: "the claimant is entitled to monetary damages of not less than $50,000 for each year of incarceration, and not less than $25,000 for each year served on supervised release or as a registered predatory offender, to be prorated for partial years served."

On top of that floor the panel shall consider six additional categories, and they are more generous than most people would guess: economic damages including lost wages and criminal-defense costs; medical and dental expenses past and future; noneconomic damages for physical and nonphysical injury; tuition and training up to the cost of a four-year degree at a public university; child support that came due and interest on arrearages that accrued while you were inside; and reintegration costs on release — housing, transportation, subsistence, health care. Attorney fees are not discretionary; paragraph (b) says the panel "shall award" them, both for the claim and for obtaining the eligibility order in the first place.

Subdivision 3 sets the limits, and its first sentence is the important one: "There is no limit on the aggregate amount of damages that may be awarded under this section." Four of the six categories — economic, education, child support, reintegration — are together capped at $100,000 per year of incarceration and $50,000 per year of supervised release. The per-year floor and the medical and noneconomic categories sit outside any cap.

Two provisions are genuinely well drafted. Subdivision 6 forbids offsetting the award by "any expenses incurred by the state or any political subdivision of the state, including expenses incurred to secure the claimant's custody or to feed, clothe, or provide medical services for the claimant" — the state cannot bill you for the cost of wrongly imprisoning you. And subdivision 7 makes the claim survive the claimant's death, so the state cannot simply outlast him.

The floor has not moved since 2014

$50,000, $25,000, $100,000, $50,000. Every one of those figures was enacted in Laws 2014, ch. 269, § 6. I read the 2019 amendment line by line against the original: it replaced "imprisonment" with "incarceration" in four places and added the word "additional" before "monetary damages." It changed no dollar amount. The section has not been touched since. I checked the Revisor's Table 2 — Minnesota Statutes New, Amended, or Repealed — for both the 2025 and the 2026 regular sessions; chapter 611 appears in the 2025 table at nine different sections, not one of them in the 611.36x range, and chapter 611 does not appear in the 2026 table at all.

So the number has been frozen for twelve years while prices have not been. Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' CPI-U for all urban consumers, all items, U.S. city average: the 2014 annual average index was 236.736 and the most recently published month, July 2026, was 333.918. That $50,000 floor, in 2014 purchasing power, would have to be $70,525.40 today to mean what the Legislature meant. Put the other way, today's $50,000 buys what $35,448 bought in 2014. The Legislature did not vote to cut the compensation of exonerated Minnesotans by 29 percent. It just never voted to keep it whole, which produces the same result and requires nobody to defend it.

Seventeen people in twelve years

Here is where the Act stops being theory. Because § 611.367 sends every award to the Legislature as an appropriation, a person paid under this Act should appear by name in a session law. I went looking for all of them. Since 2014, the phrase "sections 611.362 to 611.368" appears in nine chapters of Minnesota session law: the 2014 enacting act, the 2019 policy amendments, and seven appropriation chapters. Those seven are the entire payment record:

Seventeen people. $9,214,999.36 total. The median award is $240,000 and the range runs from $20,446.08 to $4,500,000 — and a single 2026 award accounts for 48.8 percent of everything the state has ever appropriated under this Act. Strip that one out and the other sixteen people share $4,714,999.36, a median of $232,500 apiece.

Read the left column and you will find five legislative sessions — 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020, and 2024 — in which no exoneration award was appropriated at all. And read the 2025 line carefully. The payee is the Vincent Beaulieu Estate. Subdivision 7's survival provision was not a hypothetical.

An award is not a check

A claimant who wins in front of the panel has not been paid. Section 611.367 provides: "The commissioner shall submit the amount of the award to the legislature for consideration as an appropriation." Consideration. Not payment.

The provision has moved twice, and the second move was backward. As enacted in 2014 the commissioner was to submit the final award "to the legislature for consideration during the next session of the legislature." Laws 2016, ch. 148, art. 1, § 1 added "as an appropriation," a fair clarification. Then Laws 2019, 1st Spec. Sess., ch. 5, art. 2, § 24 deleted "during the next session of the legislature." The only timing discipline on that step is gone. Nothing now tells the commissioner when to submit an award, and nothing tells the Legislature it must act on one.

Note also who is across the table. Section 611.362, subdivision 2, requires the claimant to name the state as respondent and provides that "legal representation for the state shall be provided by either the attorney general or legal counsel for the Department of Management and Budget." Defending the treasury is a legitimate function of that office and I would not have it otherwise. It does mean the exonerated person litigates damages against the state's lawyers and then waits on the state's legislature to fund the result.

Who is left out, and why most of those lines are drawn correctly

The eligibility gate is not in chapter 611. It sits in § 590.11, and it is narrow. A claim arises only after a court finds the person exonerated "on grounds consistent with innocence" — a pardon or commutation based on factual innocence, or a vacatur, reversal, or new trial where "there is any evidence of factual innocence." Subdivision 5 then adds four elements: the person was "convicted of a felony and served any part of the imposed sentence"; if several charges arose from one behavioral incident, the person was exonerated on all of them; the person did not commit or induce perjury or fabricate evidence to bring about the conviction; and the person was not serving another sentence at the same time, subject to two narrow exceptions.

So here is who cannot claim. Anyone wrongly convicted of a misdemeanor or gross misdemeanor, however many months they sat in a county jail — the Act reaches felonies only. Anyone whose conviction fell to a bad search, a coerced statement, a defective jury instruction, or a lawyer who did not do the job, where the record holds no evidence of factual innocence; a reversal is not an exoneration under this statute. Anyone cleared on the count that sent them to prison but not on a companion count from the same incident. Anyone serving a concurrent sentence, for all but the added time. And, by express statutory command, everyone released under Minnesota's 2023 retroactive felony-murder reform: Laws 2023, ch. 52, art. 4, § 24, subd. 7 provides that "Relief granted under this section shall not be treated as an exoneration for purposes of the Incarceration and Exoneration Remedies Act." That subdivision has been reopened and amended twice since — Laws 2024, ch. 123, art. 4, § 20, and Laws 2025, ch. 35, art. 4, § 15 — and the exclusion was carried forward both times. It is not an oversight.

Now the part that costs me, because most of those lines are drawn right. A state cannot write a six-figure check to every person whose conviction was reversed. A suppression ruling says the police broke the rules; it says nothing about whether the defendant did it. The felony-murder carve-out runs on the same principle — those petitioners are resentenced on a remaining predicate felony, not declared innocent. Drawing the line at factual innocence is defensible, and the alternative has costs a legislator is entitled to weigh. The Legislature also did the humane thing where it counted most: subdivision 5, paragraph (c), provides that "a confession or admission later found to be false or a guilty plea to a crime the claimant did not commit does not constitute bringing about the claimant's conviction for purposes of paragraph (a), clause (3)." A false confession will not be held against the person who gave it. That is good policy and I will say so.

The panel objection cuts both ways too. Under § 611.363 the chief justice appoints three attorneys or judges who "must have experience in legal issues involving the settlement of tort claims and the determination of damages," paid $55 a day under § 15.0575, subdivision 3. That is not a jury of the claimant's peers, and review under §§ 14.63 to 14.69 is the deferential administrative standard rather than a new trial. My own view is that a standing panel of damages lawyers produces faster and more consistent awards than a jury would, at a fraction of the cost, for someone who has already spent years in court — but that is my judgment, not a number I can hand you, because the state does not publish the outcomes that would test it. The panel is not the weak point in this statute. The appropriation is.

What we can do

Index the floor and the caps. Tie the $50,000, the $25,000, and both per-year caps in § 611.365 to the CPI-U, adjusted annually. It is a one-sentence amendment, it costs nothing this year, and it stops the silent 29 percent cut from compounding.

Make payment automatic. Amend § 611.367 into a standing appropriation from the general fund for awards under § 611.365, the way the state already funds other obligations it has conceded. A person the state wrongly imprisoned should not have to be somebody's bill.

At minimum, put the deadline back. If a standing appropriation is a bridge too far, restore the words the 2019 act deleted — submission "during the next session of the legislature" — and add a date certain for legislative action. That language was in the original bill and nobody has explained why it left.

Publish the ledger. I had to reverse-engineer the table above out of seven appropriation chapters spread across twelve years. Management and Budget should post annually: claims filed, panel awards entered, dollars appropriated, days elapsed between award and payment. If the system works, the numbers will say so.

Decide about the misdemeanant out loud. Someone wrongly convicted of a gross misdemeanor who served ten months in a county jail gets nothing here. That may be the right call on cost. It should be a decision somebody makes on the record, not a gap nobody looks at.

Minnesota already made the hard decision — that a wrongful conviction creates a debt and that the state owes it. The rest is bookkeeping the state has not bothered to do. A debt you have acknowledged and left unindexed for twelve years is not a promise. It is an IOU that shrinks every year you fail to look at it.

First the facts. Then the fix.

Sources

Every statutory quotation in this piece came from raw HTML pulled from the Revisor of Statutes at revisor.mn.gov (2025 Minnesota Statutes edition) on September 7, 2026, not from a summary. Minn. Stat. § 611.368 supplies the short title, quoted in full. Minn. Stat. § 611.365 supplies the damages formula: subdivision 2, paragraph (a), for the reimbursement provision, the $50,000 and $25,000 per-year floors, and the six additional damage categories; paragraph (b) for mandatory attorney fees; subdivision 3 for the no-aggregate-limit sentence and the $100,000 and $50,000 per-year internal caps on clauses (1) and (4) to (6); subdivision 6 for the bar on offsetting the state's cost of custody; subdivision 7 for survival of the claim. Minn. Stat. § 611.362 supplies the filing mechanics, including subdivision 2's requirement that the state be named as respondent and represented by the attorney general or Department of Management and Budget counsel. Minn. Stat. § 611.363 supplies the compensation panel — three attorneys or judges appointed by the chief justice within 30 business days, with the tort-settlement experience requirement quoted — and Minn. Stat. § 15.0575, subdivision 3, paragraph (a), supplies the $55-a-day member compensation. Minn. Stat. § 611.366 supplies judicial review under §§ 14.63 to 14.69, and § 14.69 supplies the six grounds for reversal. Minn. Stat. § 611.367 supplies the appropriations-process sentence, quoted in full. Minn. Stat. § 590.11 supplies eligibility: subdivision 1, paragraphs (b) and (c), for "exonerated" and "on grounds consistent with innocence"; subdivision 5, paragraph (a), for the four elements including the felony requirement; paragraph (c) for the false-confession provision, quoted.

The amendment history was verified against the session laws themselves, also pulled raw. Laws 2014, ch. 269, §§ 1 and 6 through 10, is the enacting act; § 6 contains all four dollar figures as originally passed and § 10 appropriated $3,000 — the entire appropriation in the bill — for panel expenses. Laws 2016, ch. 148, art. 1, § 1, inserted "as an appropriation" into § 611.367. Laws 2019, 1st Spec. Sess., ch. 5, art. 2, §§ 22 through 25, is the amendment I read against the 2014 text word by word: it substituted "incarceration" for "imprisonment," added "additional," deleted "during the next session of the legislature" from § 611.367, and renamed the Act. It changed no dollar amount. That the sections have not been amended since was tested, not assumed: I read the Revisor's Table 2 (Minnesota Statutes New, Amended, or Repealed) for the 2025 and 2026 regular sessions in the printed PDF versions, confirmed the 2025 table lists nine chapter 611 sections — 611.24, .43, .45, .46, .49, .55, .56, .57, and .59 — none in the 611.36x range, and confirmed the 2026 table, which covers 297 chapters, contains no chapter 611 or chapter 590 entry at all.

The payment table is the complete set of exoneration appropriations, identified by searching the full text of Minnesota session laws four separate ways: for the phrase "sections 611.362 to 611.368" (nine chapters), for the bare citation "611.362" (the same nine), for "EXONERATION AWARDS" (six), and for "EXONERATION AWARD" (one). All four agree on the same seven appropriation chapters. I also read every other chapter that mentions "exoneration" without citing the Act — bail-bond exoneration, nonexoneration in transfer-on-death deeds, exoneration of a personal representative, and the expungement cross-references — to confirm none of them pays an award. Each of the seven appropriation chapters — Laws 2016, ch. 148, § 2; Laws 2018, ch. 131, § 1; Laws 2021, ch. 26, § 1; Laws 2022, ch. 88, § 1; Laws 2023, ch. 56, § 1; Laws 2025, ch. 26, § 1; and Laws 2026, ch. 105, § 1 — was then read in full, and every name and cent in the table is transcribed from that text. The count, sum, median, and range are my own arithmetic on those figures. The felony-murder exclusion is Laws 2023, ch. 52, art. 4, § 24, subd. 7, paragraph (h), quoted from the enacted text, carried forward through two later amendments to the same subdivision, Laws 2024, ch. 123, art. 4, § 20 (which renumbered it as paragraph (j)) and Laws 2025, ch. 35, art. 4, § 15; I read § 24 in full to confirm that its relief is vacatur plus resentencing on a predicate felony. The inflation figures are computed from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' own API, series CUUR0000SA0 (CPI-U, U.S. city average, all items, not seasonally adjusted): the 2014 annual average of 236.736, calculated from all twelve monthly values, and the July 2026 value of 333.918, the most recent month published.

This piece runs past the series' usual length because the payment ledger and the amendment history are both primary-source material I was not willing to cut. What it does not establish: whether each appropriated award has in fact been disbursed — the session laws appropriate money "for full payment" and set an availability date, and the 2026 appropriation runs through June 30, 2027, so payment on the three most recent awards may still be pending. I did not verify the underlying facts of any individual claimant's case — the years served, the charges, or how the conviction was set aside — and nothing here should be read as a characterization of any of them beyond the appropriation itself. No court decision was read for this piece; CourtListener was unavailable during the research window, and no case is cited or characterized as a result. I also could not determine from a primary source how many claims have been filed with the supreme court or denied by a compensation panel, as opposed to paid, so the seventeen figure is a count of people the Legislature has appropriated money for, not a count of everyone who has sought relief. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.