A man who may be awarded millions after being wrongfully imprisoned for 27 years is still waiting for a payout, living in a basement suite on old age security and a $49 per month pension cheque.
Ivan Henry's civil case has been plagued with delays and is now slated to be heard in September 2014, some five years after Henry, now 66, was let out of jail.
"They told us 2012, they told us 2013, and now we're going to 2014," said Tanya Olivares, one of Ivan Henry's daughters. "What's to say that it's not going to be 2017?"
Henry told CTV News that he’s not angry and hopes to put the episode behind him so he can catch up on a life he missed behind bars.
"Come clean, say, 'We're sorry and it's a mistake,' and I'll accept it," he said. "Get it over with. End it. The truth always comes out. Thirty-five, forty years, the truth always comes out."
B.C.'s Justice Minister Shirley Bond said she's trying to make the court system more efficient, but says there's little the Henry family can do but wait.
"The justice system isn't perfect and this is an example of it," she said. "There is a process under way and there is every intent to provide redress. There's a matter of working through a complicated legal process."
Henry spent 27 years of his life in prison, wrongfully convicted for a series of rapes in the early 1980s.
He was put in a headlock in a Vancouver police lineup, a strange photo that implied his guilt and may have contributed to misidentification by witnesses.
Officers investigating the missing women in the early 2000s reviewed his file and discovered that the crimes he had been convicted of had continued while Henry was in jail.
They concluded it was likely the work of another man.
Meanwhile, Henry had been representing himself, penning scores of letters and appeals from prison, which were ignored.
He was released from prison in 2009, at first with an ankle bracelet. When the B.C. Court of Appeal overturned his conviction, he was able to remove the bracelet. Henry is suing for compensation.
"He missed earnings, missing every single milestone that his children had," Olivares said.
Henry’s pension cheque is just $49 per month. He lives in his daughter's basement.
"My dad doesn't have any luxuries, not one of them," she said. "For my dad to go out for a meal, that's a big deal."
The length of Henry's imprisonment puts him in the same league as David Milgaard, who was sentenced to life in prison in 1970 for a Saskatoon murder before his conviction was set aside in 1992. Milgaard was given some $10-million in compensation.
Thomas Sophonow was cleared in 2000 for a 1981 murder in Winnepeg and recommended to receive $2.6 million.
There is no hard and fast rule for the amount of compensation, though the wrongfully convicted whose cases have been explored in public inquiries have had larger payouts, said Tamara Levy of the Innocence Project at UBC.
"They range from $1-million to approximately $10-million depending on the number of years in prison and a number of categories," Levy said.
She said it's ironic that guilty people who are let out of prison have access to a range of social programs, while innocent people are largely left to their own devices.