TIGHTWAD FLORIDA

Alan Crotzer went to prison in 1982 for the kind of crime that could make a pacifist want to draw blood. He was convicted of being one of three armed black men who a year earlier had robbed five white occupants of an apartment in Tampa, and kidnapped and raped two of them - a woman, 38, and a 12-year-old girl. After the sexual assault, these bottom-dwellers left their victims tied to a tree.

Crotzer was arrested after the woman picked his picture from a group of photos shown to her by investigators. (He previously had been arrested as a teenager for stealing beer.) While in incarceration awaiting trial, Crotzer said, he was attacked by a white prisoner who slashed his face with an improvised knife while calling him a "raping ass nigger."

After a brief trial, a jury convicted Crotzer, who was sentenced to 130 years in prison. If you think he got what he deserved, consider this: Last year, Crotzer was released after DNA testing proved him innocent. "I did 24 years, seven months, 13 days and 4 hours," he told me of his time behind bars. Half a life

Now 45, Crotzer spent more than half of his life in prisons, where he says rape and violent attacks, sometimes at the hands of guards, occurred on a regular basis. Crotzer worried that he'd never get out alive. It was his mother's belief that he'd be freed that kept him going. "She used to tell me, 'Baby, don't give up 'cause God's gonna fix it. And when He fixes it, He's going to fix it right,' " he recalls her saying. Crotzer's mother died while he was in prison, a loss that was all the more crushing because he wasn't allowed to attend her funeral.

If all of this isn't bad enough, for the second time in as many years Florida's Legislature has failed to pass a bill that would give Crotzer financial compensation for his wrongful conviction - for the nearly quarter century that the state's criminal justice system mistakenly forced him to spend in prison. Though the House passed a measure that would have given Crotzer $1.25 million, the state senate didn't act on the bill in the recently ended legislative session.

'What's fair and not fair'

"I'm not going to give an opinion on what's fair and not fair. The Senate is not going to be put in a position where we're doing it at the last minute," Senate President Ken Pruitt said of the legislation, according to The Miami Herald. "Nothing good ever happens whenever you're rushed or you work late."

That's outrageous. Florida is one of 29 states that does not have a law prescribing how wrongfully convicted persons should be compensated for lost freedom, according to the Innocence Project, a national organization that promotes DNA testing to exonerate innocent people. The state deals with these matters on a case-by-case basis - and in Crotzer's case it has dealt with him badly.

"There has to be a process through the Legislature to pay people for the time they spend in prison for crimes they didn't do. The money and an apology are critical for their healing," says Jenny Greenberg, executive director of the Innocence Project of Florida.

That idea shouldn't be a hard sell. Crotzer was robbed of what could well have been the most productive years of his life by a wrongful conviction. And in the 15 months since his release, he has struggled - without any useful job skills - to put his life back in order. How long will he be forced to wait for Florida to pay the debt it owes him?

What is it going to take to get Florida and the other states that don't have them to enact a compensation statute? DNA testing has made it possible for some people who have been imprisoned by mistake to go free. Now we've got to find a way to get state lawmakers such as Pruitt to move expeditiously - and predictably - to help make these victims whole.

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(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today)