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Wrongful-imprisonment payouts get narrower in Michigan
The Michigan Court of Claims said Anthony Legion’s prison time was also covered by a separate concurrent sentence, so the state’s compensation law did not apply. His separate malicious-prosecution claim was left for another day.
Anthony Legion’s bid for wrongful-imprisonment compensation ended because another sentence covered the same prison time. The Michigan Court of Claims said that overlap put his claim outside the state’s compensation law, even though the convictions tied to that stretch of incarceration were later undone.
Why the claim failed
The court focused on what actually kept Legion in prison. It said his concurrent sentence, the one running at the same time as the wrongful convictions, was independent of those convictions and accounted for the full period of imprisonment at issue.
That mattered because Michigan’s compensation law does not pay when a separate sentence already explains the time served. In the court’s view, the statute’s language bars recovery when prison time cannot be traced only to the undone convictions.
What the ruling leaves open
The decision narrows who can use Michigan’s wrongful-imprisonment compensation law, especially people serving overlapping sentences. It does not decide Legion’s separate malicious-prosecution claim.