Spend a year in the Florida clink wrongfully, get $50K

Florida Governor Charlie Crist (R) signed Senate Bill 756 into law last week, which creates a process to pay wrongfully convicted persons $50,000 for each year they spent in prison. The new statute, however, denies payments to anyone who has previously been convicted of a felony. That state becomes the 25th state to have a law automatically compensating the wrongfully imprisoned. Here's more from the Associated Press.

Is $50,000 sufficient? Too much? Should it be determined on a case-by-case basis? I always hate putting a monetary figure into a statute, because after 30 or 40 years of not being revised, it starts to look like a pittance. We've had some pretty significant offenses be punished by a $50 fine in our own code until recent legislation making most penalties outside of the normal classifications uniform.