IN NOVEMBER 1999, a 25-year-old Kansan named Tom Bledsoe confessed to the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl. Just days later, however, Mr Bledsoe recanted, pinning the crime instead on his younger brother, Floyd. When the jury gave its verdict in April 2000, it was Floyd, not Tom, who was sent to prison, a wrongful conviction that would cost him more than 15 years of his life before he was exonerated in December 2015. With cases like this in mind, Kansas legislators are considering introducing a law that would give wrongfully convicted Kansans $80,000 for each year spent in prison. At the moment, as in some other states, Floyd is entitled to nothing.

Had he been convicted in neighbouring Colorado, which passed a law in 2013 giving those exonerated $70,000 for each year they are locked up, Mr Bledsoe would have received $1.1m. Today, 31 states and the District of Columbia provide compensation in such cases. Payments vary considerably by state. In Texas, which accounted for a third of all exonerations in 2016, individuals are awarded $80,000 for every year of prison. In California, they receive $100 per day, or $36,500 per year. In Wisconsin, one of the least-generous states, exonerated individuals are entitled to just $5,000 for every year spent behind bars.

Mistakes by the criminal-justice system are not uncommon. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, at University of Michigan Law School, courts overturned 165 wrongful convictions in 2016, or more than three a week. Since 1989 it has recorded a total of 1,991. Those exonerated in Kansas and the 18 other states without compensation laws must instead seek payment through civil litigation, or by convincing lawmakers to pass separate bills on their behalf. This can yield generous payouts but is expensive, time-consuming and often unsuccessful. Adele Bernhard at New York Law School has likened it to a lottery.

Yet compensation statutes remain controversial. Some lawmakers believe that, since wrongful convictions are rare, a formal process for correcting them is a solution in search of a problem. Others argue that money would be better spent on victims of crime. Another worry is that statutes written carelessly could reward guilty individuals. These concerns have slowed the passage of legislation. Between 2000 and 2009, more than a dozen states passed compensation statutes. Since then, just four states—Washington, Colorado, Minnesota and Michigan—have passed such laws. Several others including Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona have tried and failed.

The Kansas bill, which would introduce a scheme like Texas’s, faces opposition too. At a hearing on February 14th a Republican state senator asked whether the proposed law would allow someone to engineer their own wrongful conviction, serve time in prison and then prove their innocence, swindling the state out of a big payout. “With all due respect,” Mr Bledsoe told the committee, “no one in their right mind would do that.”