Andre Hatchett Murder Case

Charles Ray Hatcher lived in a small town city that went by the name of Mound City Missouri he was the youngest of four children Charles was often bullied by his classmates in school and would often cause pain to his classmates his father was a alcoholic and drug abuser and his father was also an ex convict i'm guessing his father never had gotten the help he needed for the problem that he had.

21). Initially the district attorney was hesitant to prosecute Williams, feeling the evidence that the FBI had collected was too weak to obtain a conviction, but after Williams failed three polygraph tests administered by the FBI and multiple eyewitnesses emerged that confirmed that Williams was seen with several of the victims prior to their disappearance, the district attorney decided to indict Williams on the murders of Jimmy Payne and Nathan Cater. (trutv 25) The prosecution’s main evidence were fibers and dog hairs collected from the bodies of the victims that matched samples taken from Williams’s home. Ultimately, Williams was found guilty for the murders of the two men (Bardsley & Bell, n.d., p. 32), and was also linked to ten other “pattern killings” that were part of the spree (Bardsley & Bell, n.d., p. 28). Although he still claims that he is innocent of the murders, the Atlanta Child Murders came to an end after he was stopped on that bridge.

Twenty years later information surfaced that suggested that the evidence in the two previous trials had been tampered with. The Assistant District Attorney, with the help of Evers's widow, began compiling a new case. (Elliot Jr., pg.1)

On October 3, 1974, Memphis Police Officers Hymon and Wright were dispatched to answer a "prowler inside call." When the police arrived at the scene, a neighbor gestured to the house where she had heard glass breaking and that someone was breaking into the house. While one of the officer radioed that they were on the scene, the other officer went to the rear of the house hearing a door slam and saw someone run across the backyard. The suspect, Edward Garner stopped at a 6-feet-high fence at the edge of the yard and proceeded to climb the fence as the police officer called out "police, halt." The police officer figured that if Garner made it over the fence he

On the morning of the murder, police arrested Brenton Butler based on the identification by the victim’s husband. For hours to come after that, Butler became the victim of police brutality, a false confession, and unlawful interrogation processes. After being identified as the shooter, Butler was brought into the 10 by 10 interrogation room to be well, interrogated.

Forcelli explains his displeasure of our broken criminal justice system when he states, “The sad part is that getting an innocent man out of jail is way, way, way harder than putting a guilty man in jail.” When detectives are constantly pressured to close cases and produce high conviction rates it can cause in accuracies in convictions. Garry’s case is a perfect example of how a case with minimal evidence can result in an innocent getting placed in prison. Garry has sat in prison for over 20 years waiting to appeal his case and plead his innocence. The ease of convicting an innocent man should be consistent with difficulty of exonerating an innocent man. In Garry’s case he awaits a decision from a judge where the judge has three options, to exonerate him, grant a retrial, or

In Manson v. Brathwaite, 432 U.S. 98 (1977), the Supreme Court elaborated on the standards to use in determining the procedure for a motion to suppress due to suggestive pre-trial identification. The Court held that “reliability is the linchpin” in determining the admissibility of identification testimony, and applied the “totality of the circumstances” standard of Stovall v. Denno, 388 U.S. 293 (1967).

Spohn, Beichner, and Davis-Frenzel do not conduct a field study as Frohmann does, instead they examined all sexual assault cases cleared by arrest in Miami Florida in 1997. They did however replicate Frohmann’s design of interviewing a sample of the prosecutors who handled the cases. By using this different method of research, Spohn, Beichner, and Davis-Frenzel’s are able to show the frequency in which prosecutors used discrepant accounts and ulterior motives to reject cases. This extends upon Frohmann’s research. Their findings that, “charging decisions primarily reflect the prosecutor’s assessment of the likelihood of conviction” (Spohn, et al. 2001, p. 206) is consistent with Frohmann 's Findings. They also agreed with Frohmann’s categories of typifications, however they found that a substantial amount of cases were rejected for reasons other than discrediting the victim such as, the victim’s failure to appear for a pretrial interview, refusal to cooperate in the prosecution of the case, or admission that the charges were fabricated (Spohn, et al. 2001).

The case Anthony Ray Hinton which reached is prolonged conclusion in 2015 demonstrates what harm can be caused by the inadequate performance of an attorney. Hinton was convicted for a two murders during armed robberies. The only evidence provided by the prosecution during his trial was a ballistic expertise which matched the bullets found at the scene of the crime and the gun of the defendant’s mother. Hinton’s defense attorney failed to provide the funding that was needed for expert witnesses which would have been able to rebut the prosecutions expertise. Anthony Ray Hinton was declared guilty and sentenced to

Facts:          On October 3, 1974, Memphis Police Officers Hymon and Wright were dispatched to answer a “prowler inside call.” When the police arrived at the scene, a neighbor gestured to the house where she had heard glass breaking and that someone was breaking into the house. While one of the officer radioed that they were on the scene, the other officer went to the rear of the house hearing a door slam and saw someone run across the backyard. The suspect, Edward Garner stopped at a 6-feet-high fence at the edge of the yard and proceeded to climb the fence as the police officer called out “police, halt.” The police officer figured that if Garner made it over

In the past decade, eyewitness testimonies have cast a shadow on what is wrong with the justice system in today’s society. Before we had the advanced technology, we have today, eyewitness testimonies were solid cold-hard facts when it came to proving the defendant was guilty. However, time has changed and eyewitness testimonies have proven to be the leading causes of wrongful convictions due to misidentification. The Thompson and Cotton case is a perfect example of how eyewitness testimonies can put an innocent man behind bars.

Darryl Hunt is an African American born in 1965 in North Carolina. In 1984, he was convicted wrongfully of rape and murder of Deborah Sykes, a young white woman working as a newspaper editor. This paper researches oh his wrongful conviction in North Carolina. Darryl Hunt served nineteen and a half years before DNA evidence exonerated him. The charges leveled against him were because of inconsistencies in the initial stages of the case. An all-white bench convicted the then nineteen-year-old Hunt, even though there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime. A hotel employee made false claims that he saw Hunt enter the hotel bathroom, and later emerge with bloodstained towels. Other witnesses also fixed Hunt to the case.

Miscarriages of justices occur due to many variables including faulty or wrong confessions, faulty identifications, wrongful DNA evidence, and the police’s overreach of power. On February 9, 1978, a student from the College of William and Mary, located in Williamsburg, Virginia was sexually assaulted at gunpoint. When the police arrived at the scene, she described her assailant as an African-American male about 5’6 in height and weighing around 145. Having gathered this information, the victim agreed to identify her assailant through photo arrays at the police station. Bennett Barbour was identified arrested and in the span of about two months was charged with rape on April 14, 1978. Despite having an alibi, not matching the victim’s description, and having brittle bone disease Barbour was declared guilty by a jury. Barbour’s case is representative of the many cases in which wrongful eyewitness testimony produces miscarriages of justice. Bennett Barbour served 5 years in prison and 29 years of parole until he was cleared of his charges due to DNA evidence when the Virginia Supreme Court cleared his charges.

The interview about the National Registry of Exonerations incorporated detail, which showed how complex this database actually is and this interview was informative because it defined a necessary definition pertaining to exonerations. Professor Gross and Research Associate Jackson highlight the importance of recording wrongful convictions and began recording based on the number of wrongful convictions. I liked there was insight in the development of the National Registry of Exonerations. Throughout the interview, I came across a few interesting realities about the exoneration database. It was a little alarming at the time that it took for an exoneration database to even emerge.

In 1982, Alton Logan was charged and sentenced to life in prison for the first-degree murder of a McDonald’s security guard in Illinois after three witnesses identified him despite the fact that several family members gave testimonies stating that Logan was home in the bed when the murder occurred (CBSNews, 2008). Around the same time attorneys Dale Coventry and Jamie Kunz were defending a man named Andrew Wilson was facing similar charges in the same jurisdiction who confessed to them that he killed the McDonalds security guard, and that Alton Logan was innocent (CBSNews, 2008). The two attorneys, being bound by the Attorney-Client Privilege and their duty of confidentiality to their client they did not come forward with the information that could have relieved Logan from the charges and his life sentence. Wilson gave the attorney’s permission to disclose the information upon his death and they took necessary measures to preserve the information until the time came when they would be able to share it (CBSNews, 2008).