Trust in the justice system revolves around the idea that courts uphold our laws, convict the guilty, and protect the innocent. When the people running the court, are more corrupt than the people being tried, what becomes of the court? This question comes to mind while viewing the documentary The Thin Blue Line. This film successfully argues that a man was wrongly convicted for killing a police officer by a corrupt justice system in Dallas County, Texas. It presents the evidence the police used, who were under extreme pressure to clear the case, in order to build on a point that the circumstantial evidence was very flimsy. The innocence of Randall Adams in the murder of Robert Wood was further proved by “The Five Key Witnesses Against Randall
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Some would argue that “the single greatest cause of wrongful conviction is erroneous eyewitness testimony,” this is due to procedures such as suggestive pretrial identification procedures, like in the rape case of Jennifer Thompson versus Ronald Cotton, who said she “knew that she was right because, during the rape, she had studied his eyes, his voice, his height, and even the .shape of his ears. She was determined to identify him later if she survived. Thompson's repeated strong and confident identification of Cotton during pretrial proceedings and at trial led to his 1985 conviction and sentence of life imprisonment plus 50 years.” In the year 1995, DNA evidence proved Jennifer's identification to be wrong. This could be because her memory of the rapist was skewed by the aforementioned suggestive pretrial identification procedures: working with police on a composite sketch of the suspect that matched Cotton's mug shot, which resembled her assailant; selecting his mug shot primed her to pick him out of a line-up; and picking him out of the line-up led her to identify him with absolute certainly at trial. The investigators' support to her repeated identification of Cotton, further reinforced Thompson's misguided certainty that he was her rapist. The Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson story is far from isolation in its tale of …show more content…
2006). The Innocence Project (2010) reports that, of the 239 cases that were overturned through DNA evidence leading to exonerations, 175 were due to cases of eyewitness misidentification. Furthermore, seventeen of these cases involved death sentences, and the average sentence these exonerees served was 13 years. Contrary to what the general population is inclined to believe, eyewitness identification is a complex task involving many factors which can impact whether individuals make an accurate identification (Wells and Turtle 1987).” Memory is not the same as a video tape or image, it can not simply be shown to produce a precise account of an event. Instead, the witness must reconstruct the event from memory, which allows the possibility of inaccuracy, even without law enforcement involvement. Despite evidence of flawed traditional eyewitness identifications, eyewitnesses are still used regularly for law enforcement as thousands of suspects are targeted each year based on eyewitness reports. As the U.S. Supreme Court has noted, "There is almost nothing more convincing than a live human being who takes the stand, points a finger at the defendant and says, 'That's the
Some would argue that “the single greatest cause of wrongful conviction is erroneous eyewitness testimony,” this is due to procedures such as suggestive pretrial identification procedures, like in the rape case of Jennifer Thompson versus Ronald Cotton, who said she “knew that she was right because, during the rape, she had studied his eyes, his voice, his height, and even the .shape of his ears. She was determined to identify him later if she survived. Thompson's repeated strong and confident identification of Cotton during pretrial proceedings and at trial led to his 1985 conviction and sentence of life imprisonment plus 50 years.” In the year 1995, DNA evidence proved Jennifer's identification to be wrong. This could be because her memory of the rapist was skewed by the aforementioned suggestive pretrial identification procedures: working with police on a composite sketch of the suspect that matched Cotton's mug shot, which resembled her assailant; selecting his mug shot primed her to pick him out of a line-up; and picking him out of the line-up led her to identify him with absolute certainly at trial. The investigators' support to her repeated identification of Cotton, further reinforced Thompson's misguided certainty that he was her rapist. The Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson story is far from isolation in its tale of …show more content…
2006). The Innocence Project (2010) reports that, of the 239 cases that were overturned through DNA evidence leading to exonerations, 175 were due to cases of eyewitness misidentification. Furthermore, seventeen of these cases involved death sentences, and the average sentence these exonerees served was 13 years. Contrary to what the general population is inclined to believe, eyewitness identification is a complex task involving many factors which can impact whether individuals make an accurate identification (Wells and Turtle 1987).” Memory is not the same as a video tape or image, it can not simply be shown to produce a precise account of an event. Instead, the witness must reconstruct the event from memory, which allows the possibility of inaccuracy, even without law enforcement involvement. Despite evidence of flawed traditional eyewitness identifications, eyewitnesses are still used regularly for law enforcement as thousands of suspects are targeted each year based on eyewitness reports. As the U.S. Supreme Court has noted, "There is almost nothing more convincing than a live human being who takes the stand, points a finger at the defendant and says, 'That's the