To research wrongful convictions is to delve into the Innocence Project, a non-profit organization founded in 1992. Their goal is to free and exonerate wrongfully convicted individuals…
Introduction There are many people who have been accused of crimes they have not committed. Youngblood and African American male. He was wrongfully convicted of sexual assault, kidnapping, and child molestation of the young Latino boy name David Leon. At the time of the crime Larry was 30 years old. And the incident happened in the state of Arizona, on October 29th, 1983.…
Wrongful conviction has become a notable issue, part of the problem is caused by false confessions. A confession is an acknowledging guilt in writing or by speech. In the courtroom a confession is a powerful form of evidence. There are many cases known to be false confessions to a crime not committed by the person due to mental impairment, the threat of a harsh sentence, and because of coercion. False confessions can be caused by mental impairment an individual to believe that he commit the crime.…
Wrongful Conviction On the morning of August 10, 1984, Deborah Sykes was brutally stabbed, sexually assaulted, and eventually killed in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The man convicted for her murder was Darryl Hunt, a 19 year old boy that would go on to spend 20 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Hunt was convicted based on eye-witness testimony and informants, but was later exonerated based on DNA evidence that matched a man that was caught just a few months after the murder took place. This case is an exemplar of the strength of DNA evidence and the fragility of eyewitness testimony.…
Over the course of the years, many have been wrongfully convicted and accused of crimes they did not commit. The mission of the judicial system is to prove your guilt and if they can successfully do so beyond a reasonable doubt, then you will be convicted of that crime. Everyone walks into the court innocent until proven guilty, but unfortunately some proven guilty people are still very much innocent. In one case where this so happened to be true was during the case of Brenton Butler. Brenton Butler was accused of allegedly robbing and murdering an elderly woman at a nearby hotel in his hometown Jacksonville, Florida.…
Donohue (2014) analyzed these five reasons explaining why some are being convicted for capital crimes. Donohue(2014) findings were helped by attorney’s that handled these categories of crime in outgoing cases that used these factors, which determined that race has nothing to do with the conviction. Through the two hundred and five cases they incorporated victims’ pain from the crime, victim’s identity, crimes were planned or had intent and whether there was various victim’s involved in the crime. Various states have started moving away from capital punishment.…
Jon B. Gould, J.D., Ph.D., a professor and the director of the Washington Institute for Public and International Affairs Research at American University and his team of researchers conducted a three year, first of its kind, large-scale empirical study Predicting Erroneous Convictions: A Social Science Approach to Miscarriages of Justice employing social scientific methods. It was funded by NIJ, and an NIJ video features Gould discussing wrongful convictions. After identifying 460 cases employing sophisticated analytical methods matched with a qualitative review of the cases from a panel of experts, 10 statistically significant factors were identified that distinguish a wrongful conviction from a “near miss” (a case in which an innocent defendant was acquitted or had charges dismissed before trial) NIJ…
In Illusory Causation in the Courtroom, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, G. Daniel Lassiter explores illusory causation in terms of the role it plays in courtrooms. This is the possibility of the effect that camera perspective has on jurors’ judgements on the suspect’s guilt, whether it was a voluntary confession and sentence recommendations. The Death Penalty Information Center had documented cases in which death row inmates were released due to new evidence and in many cases, the cause of wrongful convictions can be traced back to the interrogation phase in which false confessions are extracted. Many experts believe that the solution to suspects being coerced into wrongful confessions are videotaping confessions.…
If the goals of the Innocence Movement are to identify innocent defendants and prevent future wrongful convictions, political dissidence must be considered as a separate cause. The reality is that defendants, known to actively oppose social injustice, are indicted, convicted, and given extremely asinine sentences for crimes based on lack luster evidence. The highlighted case studies confirm that factually innocent defendants are at risk of wrongful convictions because of their political affiliations. Political dissidence was a participatory factor prior to, during, and after their trials.…
Furthermore, Henkel, Coffman and Dailey also conducted a study in regards to false confessions but more focused on the people’s attitudes and beliefs about such issue. The purpose of the study was to examine the ability of jurors in regards of false confessions and their potential biases in the matter. Henkel, Coffman and Dailey conducted their study by administering two different surveys, each survey took approximately 10-15 minutes. One survey was to measure the knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes about false confessions in regards to issues in the criminal justice system, the second survey was just a continuation of the first one regarding aspects of the criminal justice and false confessions as a strong indicator of guilt. One half of the…
At Kidwell & Gallagher, potential clients for wrongful death cases can speak to accident lawyers with years of experience. Attorneys Craig W. Kidwell and Barbara Gallagher Esq. of Elko, Nevada encourage individuals to learn more about how to receive fair financial compensation in the proper jurisdictions. Wrongful death cases are cases that may be brought through the courts against a business or another person when someone dies. The survivors bring forth a wrongful death suit during which they seek financial compensation for the loss of the deceased which may include funeral expenses, medical expenses, and lost wages to help in protecting the family members of the individual who was affected due to an intentional act or negligence.…
The power of juries has proven to play a large factor in wrongful convictions, although the jury selection process is meant to select people who won’t nullify or wrongfully convict it still…
In the book “Ordinary Injustice” by Amy Bach, chapter four titled “Show Trial”, describes a number of different cases showing wrongful convictions being processed through the criminal justice system based off of false confessions. In Chicago, there was a nine-year-old girl named Lisa Cabassa was found raped and killed in the back of an alley a couple miles from her home. Two months after the rape and murder of Lisa, a witness named Judy called the police to give her testimony on the crime. Her statement consisted of her telling the police the people involved with the crime were named Michael Evans and Paul Terry, whom were teenagers from the neighborhood. She spotted them with Lisa that night.…
Confirmation Bias When an investigation for a case begins, the law enforcement is trying to gather the most evidence that will help in solving the case. This could include many things such as physical evidence or eyewitness testimonies. Sometimes making the legal system unfavorable at times for many reasons such as, evidence getting lost or destroyed or the eye witnesses not being able to remeber correctly. The public and the law enforcers are constantly looking for new ways to improve the criminal justice system as times goes on and change. This paper will help to understand some changes that can happen to improve confirmation bias and how to implement these changes into the criminal justice system.…
State why it is a problem. Wrongful convictions are a problem. Innocent individuals lose their freedom, their family and friends, their careers and their entire life in general, as they know it. Many, become depressed and are susceptible to suicide. The wrongful conviction problem is the result from several other problems that caused these individuals to be convicted to begin with.…