Criminal Convictions In America

Do you know someone who is serving time for s crime they did not commit? Have you wondered how a system has failed the very people it was designed to serve and protect? The American judicial system has a prolonged record of wrongful conviction dating back centuries ago. Wrongful convictions is when a person, who in actuality is innocent yet have been sentenced by a jury or other official courtroom. This misguided thinking by the system brought about individuals being executed by deadly injection. African Americans are more likely to be wrongfully convicted than Caucasians in murder, sexual assault and drug related cases. Dating back from 1989 to mid-October of 2016 of the 1,900 wrongful convictions documented, 47% involved in the exoneration

Wrongful convictions are common in the court-system. In fact, wrongful convictions are not the rare events that you see or hear on televisions shows, but are very common. They stem from some sort of systematic defect that lead to wrongful convictions such as, eyewitness misidentification testimony, unvalidated or improper forensic science, false confessions and incriminating statements, DNA lab errors, false confessions, and informants (2014). Bringing awareness to all these systematic defects, which result in wrongful, is important because it will better adjust the system to avoid making the same mistakes with future cases. However, false confession is not a systematic defect. It does not occur because files were misplaced or a lab technician put one too many drops. False confessions occur because of some of psychological attempt to protect oneself and their family. Thus, the courts responsibility should be to reduce these false confessions.

In order to properly discuss this topic, the paper has been separated into three main parts which include: DNA evidence, death row, and the Innocence Project. The section regarding DNA evidence starts out with what exactly is DNA and why it is so important to science, forensic science, and then gets further into detail of how it became completely admissible in court cases. The second section being discussed is the death penalty in the United States and has one subsection. It begins with basic information on the death penalty and statistics of conviction, wrongful and not, and what causes people to be wrongfully convicted. The subsection for the death penalty section discusses just a few wrongful conviction cases; what went wrong that these people were wrongly convicted and did they ever get a chance to plead for their innocence after being sent away to death row. The third and final portion discusses the newer and very important program called the Innocence project, explaining what it is they do and how it has helped people.

The difficulties in providing for a fair system under the overarching theme of justice, where there are communication barriers between cultures that do not share similar values and experiences is a most challenging exercise. These difficulties lead to dire consequences when these barriers to communication arise in the criminal justice system; the innocent is sentenced and witnesses manipulated.

The United States criminal justice system has failed to rehabilitate criminals. Even after being punished for their crimes, convicts continue their wrongdoings without having gained valuable lessons from being incarcerated and are sent back to prison. Jails are supposed to aid those imprisoned by helping them gain skills that will reduce future occurrences and enable them to act morally in society. Punishing criminals is not as productive as it is thought to be, shown by the increased incarceration rate from 250,000 in 1976 to almost 2 million by 2003 (Lynch 26, 49). Instead of learning how to work towards managing their problems, prisoners are expected to learn from their mistakes by being

The effect of this cause is that the cons are still out there on the streets, however; the evidence is

The U.S. Department of Justice is responsible for enforcing federal laws and administrating justice systems in the United States. However, the U.S. Department of Justice has a criminal justice system that is not fair for everyone in the country, specifically for those who are mentally ill, or poor. Over the past couple of years in the United States, there have been many innocent people wrongfully convicted and put on death row due to the corruption of the government. The main factor that has been identify as the cause of wrongful convictions is eyewitness misidentification. The Bedau and Radelet’s study demostrates that there are around 350 wrongful convictions in capital cases. Many abolitionists have arisen against capital punishments, since the exponential increase of exonerations based on DNA or non-DNA evidence. Their goal is to improve the current methods performed by our criminal justice system. The U.S. Department of Justice has acknowledged that its current criminal justice system is not being very effective in punishing the guilty. Since there have been many cases of wrongful convictions, many people are starting to question what has been the improvements that the U.S. Department of Justice has make in order to prevent false imprisonment and death penalty of innocent people. The Department of Justice has tried to decrease the number of inmates who were wrongly put on death row by improving prosecutorial accountability, by researching past criminal cases, and by

Across the United States, city and county governments seek to gain revenue through the illegitimate jailing of indigent defendants who cannot afford to pay the large and cumbersome fines that accompany committing (seemingly petty) crimes— such as missing court dates, a requirement for classes such as anger management, the list goes on. Indeed, the practice of debtor’s prison has long been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court within the United States, yet a contemporary form of debtor’s prison has begun to take form which targets vulnerable populations. When an individual commits a crime, they are to be justly punished. If this punishment consists of a fine, that fine is expected to be paid accordingly; if the fined individual simply does not have the time or money to pay these steep fines, however, they are sent to jail indefinitely. This rise of financial burden imposed upon the liberty of low income citizens through the fining, issuing of fees, and jail time sanctioned by the criminal justice system has resulted in new, illegitimate, and ostensibly unconstitutional forms of debtor’s prisons that permeate contemporary U.S. society. Jeopardizing the liberty of vulnerable populations, based upon material inequality and extraction of necessary resources, only does one thing within a society: continue the cycle of poverty and increase the poor’s dependence upon the rich for their liberty, equality and most importantly, survival.

The American Justice system has long been described as broken from its alleged corruption to racial bias in its courts. There is irrefutable evidence about its failure to deliver justice to victims and the convicted. However, one aspect rarely discussed is the purpose of punishment, which is the very foundation of every justice system. Retribution, restitution and rehabilitation serve as the three main pillars in the purpose of punishment. America's approach at achieving them is traditionalist but ineffective, making it their greatest downfall. In contrast, Sweden's world renowned justice system has a unique and innovative perspective in the purpose of punishment allowing for much greater success. The Swedish justice system’s approach at retribution,

The conviction of innocent people is perhaps the worst nightmare of a criminal justice system. sending someone to jail for a crime that he has not committed, without the system having been able to discriminate effectively against the author, is one of the main mistakes that can be committed and with very serious consequences for the life of the affected person and their environment, which can hardly be repaired with subsequent economic compensation. Unfortunately, comparative experience shows us that there is no criminal justice system immune to the possibility of making mistakes of this kind. On the contrary, in recent years, investigations have been carried out in several countries that show the enormous fallibility of criminal justice systems.

The United States is one of the most developed countries in the world, if not the most developed, yet the U.S. has the largest prison population in the entire world by far. For most of my life I have always believed that the American justice system worked. When people do wrong they need to be punished and pay for their crimes. That is what our justice system is here for so how could is possibly go wrong? Unfortunetly it is not as simple as it sounds and all it takes is a little research to discover why. Before researching the U.S. criminal justice system, I would never have considered the fact that the U.S. has the worst prison population in the world. The more I reasearched, the more I realized that my own belief's of the justice

The Criminal Justice Systems have various objectives to achieve, one of them being reduction of crime levels. Another core objective is practicing justice. These two objectives can be achieved in various ways. Evidence has been presented by the authors that the judicial systems sometimes play unfair in solving crime cases.

The United States’s criminal justice system brings together laws and punishments that had been previously used in Europe for hundreds of years, as well as adding new ones that were appropriate for the new way of life experienced in the colonies and today. Certain practices and punishments, such as capital punishment, law enforcement, and interrogation practices, used today have evolved from the first time they were introduced to the criminal justice system of America. The criminal justice system of America is more organized now and so practices and punishments can be used more efficiently, but not necessarily effectively. This is seen with the origins and problems and solutions caused by using capital punishment, certain interrogation techniques, and having law enforcement.

According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights article 11, “Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defense” (Claiming Human Rights). This right to the presumption of innocence is a basic human right, which everyone is entitled to because a human right is a right one has because one is human. However, in some cases people do not presume ‘innocent until proven guilty’ perspective, rather their thinking is the opposite, ‘guilty until proven innocent’. This is illustrated in the case of Denice Haraway, who one day disappeared from her job at a convenience store in Ada, Oklahoma. The police took off on a relentless mission to capture the person(s) responsible for this heinous act and, they did everything in their power to bring someone or anyone to justice, which they did when they arrested Tommy Ward and Karl Fontenot. Even though they repeatedly said they were innocent, but everyone including the police believed them to be responsible because they ‘confessed’ to committing the crime, a confession based on a dream. This paper will illustrate the reasons that are relevant to the innocence of these two men. The one factor that is persisted throughout this case is the incompetent efforts of the law enforcement such as inadequate efforts on the crimes scenes leading to lost of evidence, not following proper protocol in