Baldwin, J. (1993) ‘Police Interview Techniques: Establishing Truth or Proof?’ British Journal of Criminology 33(3), 325-352 Blair, J. P. (2005) ‘A test of the unusual false confession perspective using cases of proven false confessions’. Criminal Law Bulletin 41, 127-144 Davies, S. L. (2005) ‘Reality of False Confessions-Lessons of the Central Park Jogger Case’, The. NYU Rev. L. & Soc. Change 30, 209 Findley, K. A., & Scott, M. S. (2006).…
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.…
Normally, when you hear of someone convicted guilty and sentenced to prison, you don’t really think much past it. Or at least I didn’t. The justice system is responsible to do everything in its power to conduct fair trials and base convictions not on opinion but solely on evidence. However, this is far from the truth. Specifically, Tulia, a small town in Northwest Texas, is a prime example of a town who suffered from this courtroom injustice.…
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.…
As Holloway pointed out, eyewitness testimony plays a significant role in sending innocent people to prison (Holloway, 2015). Yet, I feel that she only vaguely covered the topic. Because eyewitness testimony is a major component of the American criminal justice system, Holloway should have better emphasized the faultiness of eyewitness…
There are many faults to the United States criminal justice system. Weaknesses in today’s judicial system fail to uphold our nation’s values and protect society’s most vulnerable members. Many of these weaknesses can be mistakes found in the way people think or the psychology behind many cognitive forces. One of these flawed psychological processes frame the way we see victims of crime. The book, Unfair, written by Adam Benforado points out how labeling victims can influence exactly how a case is handled.…
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 chapter 10 of Examining Wrongful Convictions: Stepping Back, Moving Forward our authors Take a look into our plea-bargaining systems role into wrongful convictions. According to our authors plea- bargaining dispose of roughly 95 % of adjudicated criminal cases (Maguire, Tbls. 5.24.2008, 5.46.2006). Over my years of taking criminal justice course I have learned to so many innocent people actually plead guilty to crimes they did not commit. DNA evidence which lead to an exoneration is evidence of just that. Wrongful convictions produce out of our Plea Bargaining are much less likely to result in an exoneration due to the defendants own admittance.…
Wrongful Convictions Blog. Ed. Nancy Petro. N.p., 20 Feb. 2013. Web.…
Without full information an attorney cannot do their job in full. Evidence: Eye witness identification: Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in nearly 75% of convictions overturned through DNA testing. While eyewitness testimony can be persuasive evidence before a judge or jury, 30 years of strong…
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.…
Bedsheeting in the criminal justice system is a tactic used by law enforcement officials, where they charge an accused person of every possible crime the individual may have committed during a single incident (Karmen, 2016). Overcharging in the criminal justice system is a practice used by prosecutors that involves them adding additional charges they cannot prove a defendant to be guilty of. Both tactics are used to put prosecutors in a better position to obtain a plea bargain from defendants and to help move a large volume of cases through the system (Karmen, 2016). When it comes to my opinion, I feel as though these practices are not appropriate but they are needed. To me bedsheeting and overcharging are not appropriate because generally there is no evidence to prove the defendant committed the additional offenses charged against them (Graham, 2014).…
In conclusion, both an eyewitness and the reasonable person provide standards in the court of law that are used in determining whether to convict a suspect, as demonstrated by the eyewitness in the State v. Hendersen (2011) case. Unfortunately, both standards are based upon subjective perception. For example, human error in memory processing may decrease the accuracy in an eyewitness testimony. Research should be done on individual interpretation as it relates to an eyewitness or the reasonable person in order to prevent any wrongful…
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.…
In a study done by Steven D. Penrod and Brian L. Cutler, eyewitness identification was tested to find the most reliable effects on eyewitness performance. The studies that they performed indicated that jurors ' evaluations of identification evidence are heavily influenced by the confidence of the eyewitness. Unfortunately, in this case and in many other cases, the confidence of the eyewitness did not matter because he still identified the wrong man. The correlation between confidence and accurate eyewitness identification is weak (Penrod & Cutler, 1989). Because the victim’s husband was so confident in his identification, the cops did not feel obligated to find all of the evidence that they needed to prosecute Brenton.…