A midlevel court has upheld a judge's $250,000 award to a woman falsely implicated in four gruesome 1989 murders in central New York.

The Appellate Division panel declined to raise the award to 74-year-old Shirley Turner Kinge for malicious prosecution and negligent supervision of a State Police investigator who later admitted planting her fingerprints on a gas can. Kinge originally sued New York for $500 million.

The gas can was left at the house where the Harris family was shot and their bodies set on fire in Dryden, 40 miles south of Syracuse.

Kinge, who used Harris' credit cards afterward, spent 2 1/2 years in prison on arson and burglary convictions later overturned.

Her son Michael Kinge was shot dead when troopers tried to arrest him for the murders in 1990.