How much is a person’s innocence worth?

As it turns out, innocence can be worth quite a lot.

Take the notorious Central Park Jogger Case.

Five men of color who were wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in the park 25 years ago recently settled their claims against New York police and prosecutors for a whopping $41 million — or $1 million for each year each served in prison.

Those men, who were ages 14 and 16 at the time, went through hell and now taxpayers are being hit in the wallet because agents of the government screwed up — deliberately it appears in this situation.

It was a high-profile, racially charged case that attracted national attention, the kind of case that makes reputations and results in awards and promotions.

More than a decade after their trial, the truth came out.

The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office took a fresh look and found DNA and other evidence proved that the youths were innocent. The evidence tied the attack to one man, Matias Reyes, already convicted on another charge. And he confessed after he was confronted with the evidence.

The convictions of the five were vacated in 2002 and the men released. But there were no serious apologies. For nearly 12 years, the five fought to get authorities to admit that evidence had been deliberately suppressed to ensure their conviction.

We did nothing wrong, was the counter claim of police and prosecutors, who also added that any mistakes were not serious enough for them to be held liable.

Fortunately, a new administration saw this case differently. Mayor Bill de Blasio, who took office in January, moved quickly to settle this egregious case of willful misconduct.

Miscarriages of justice like this one, fortunately, seem to be rare.

However, the five now wealthy men are hardly alone in facing wrongful conviction.

According to data from The Innocence Project, a national litigation and public policy organization, 316 people convicted of murder have been exonerated since 2002 as the result of DNA advances.

That includes 18 people who were sentenced to death until DNA proved their innocence. On average, those exonerated served 14 years before DNA cleared them.

Not surprisingly, 70 percent of those exonerated are people of color.

Will the authorities learn from past mistakes? We can only hope.

Some prosecutors of conscience are willing to at least contemplate that a few people are serving time for crimes they did not commit.

One example is Brooklyn, N.Y. There, District Attorney Kenneth Thompson is continuing a special unit his predecessor created that has secured the release of six prisoners who were serving time for someone else’s crime.

That’s a model that others should copy.

LEE A. DANIELS

New York

The writer is a freelance journalist.