Analysis Of Ordinary Injustice By Amy Bach

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. Prosecutor Breen, tried the teenagers and put them …show more content…
The facts she gave ended up being all false and she admitted to it on stand after being questioned during a retrial. It was thought Judy gave a false witness statement because she was intimately interested in Michael and he did not reciprocate the feelings. Based off a false statement, two men were almost had their entire life taken away from them and were going to have to rote in jail forever. The article “A Shot to the Heart” explains a case similar to this case, in the sense that a person was wrongfully convicted off the statement of another person. The men in Lisa’s rape and murder case were convicted because a witness claimed to have saw those two men with her at the time of the rape, when in reality they were not. The case in the “A Shot to the Heart” article, explains a man being convicted because he was picked by a witness in a line-up to have been seen involved in the crime. In reality the man who was picked looked identical to the actual man involved, but it was not him, both of these cases are unfair because neither of them give physical evidence indicating it was them who did the …show more content…
The cases used, which showed innocent people serving time because of false statements, were extremely helpful. They gave a clear story line from the beginning, middle, and end of the case explaining the reasoning behind why the defendant was convicted and ending on why the conviction was incorrect. These cases made me realize the amount of power one person can have over another. Depending on how hard a prosecutor and defense attorney wants to work to either convict or defend a person will show in the outcome of a case. The chapter exposed the lack of effort prosecutors put in once a person is wrongfully convicted, to help them get out of