PrimeTime: Compensating the Wrongly Convicted

April 12 -- When Michael Graham walked off Louisiana's Death Row after 14 years — cleared of two murders he always said he did not commit — he got the same thing the guilty departing prisoners got: 10 bucks and a coat.

"Talk about a crime? That's a crime," says John Holdridge, the lawyer who saved Graham's life by proving his innocence.

Graham was convicted of the two murders when he was barely out of his teens. Fourteen years later, his lawyers proved that prosecutors relied on witnesses they had every reason to know were untruthful. Now, Holdridge is trying to help Graham get a lot more than $10 for those years. He thinks the state of Louisiana owes Graham not only money, but a another look at the death penalty.

In Texas, attorney Randy Schaeffer is fighting a similar battle for Anthony Robinson, who served 10 years in prison after he was wrongfully convicted of rape.

"Sometimes I'll wake up in the middle of the night and I have to get up and walk around to make sure I'm not still in the cage," says Robinson, who had never been in trouble with the law before.

"I had worked very hard to escape the confines of being raised in the ghetto," says Robinson, who graduated from a top college and served in the military. "You finally get out and you say, 'OK, I made it through' and then all of a sudden someone says, 'No you didn't.'"

Wrongly identified as a rapist by a white woman in 1986, his dreams vanished. It wasn't until after he had served 10 years in prison and was released that Robinson was able to prove with DNA testing that he was innocent.

Compensation Programs: How Much Is Enough?

Graham, Robinson and hundreds of others wrongly imprisoned say society has to at least try to make up the years to them — not just the years spent in a locked cell, but also the years they missed with their families, once-in-a-lifetime events that can never be recaptured.

How much were those years worth? And after so many years behind bars, their lives forever changed, should they be compensated monetarily?