“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

— A queen, in “Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There,” by Lewis Carroll.



A court notice made public this week provides the following information: Everton Wagstaffe and Reginald Connor, who spent years in prison wrongly convicted of a kidnapping, will be paid a total of $25.578 million by the city and the state.

Mr. Wagstaffe, who served close to 23 years, is to be paid a total of $14.578 million, and Mr. Connor, who did more than 15 years, $11 million. The state’s share is about $6 million; the rest comes from the city, according to the men’s lawyers, Jonathan Moore and Nick Brustin.

The city will not make any admission of wrongdoing, officials say.

Which may come as a relief, or a surprise, to the public, who might have naïvely assumed that the payment of more than $25 million to two men sent to prison for a crime they did not commit was, in some small way, a sign that something had been seriously screwed up.