For a Stolen Life: $11 5,000

In 1925, Stephen Dennison, 16, a boy from a broken home, swiped $5 worth of candy from a roadside candy stand near Salem, N.Y. For that one act, the boy drew a ten-year burglary sentence-and was later buried alive for 34 years by an avalanche of injustice that matches the nightmare novels of Franz Kafka.

"Through a tragic error," ruled Judge Richard S. Heller for the New York Court of Claims last week, Prisoner Dennison was wrongly classified as a low-grade moron in 1927, declared criminally insane in 1936, and illegally confined without judicial review in a state asylum until 1960, when his half brother finally managed to win his release on a writ of habeas corpus. "Society labeled him as subhuman," declared Judge Heller, "placed him in a cage with genuine subhumans, drove him insane, and then used the insanity as an excuse for holding him indefinitely in an institution with few, if any, facilities for genuine treatment and rehabilitation of the mentally ill."

After having stolen 24 years of Den-nison's life, New York obeyed the letter of the law on his release in 1960.

The state duly returned his sole possession: the two pennies taken from him when he entered prison. Now a grey-haired, unemployed man of 57, Dennison understandably sued New York for $500,000 in damages. Last week the Court of Claims awarded him $115,000-freely admitting, in Judge' Heller's words, that "no sum of money would be adequate to compensate the claimant for the injuries he suffered and the scars which he obviously bears."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.