Injustices of the Justice System

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 The Republic, the great philosopher Plato attempts to reveal through the character and dialogues of Socrates that justice is better when it is the good for which men must strive for, regardless of whether they could be unjust and still be rewarded. His method is to use dialectic, the asking and answering of questions. This method leads the audience from one point to another, supposedly with indisputable logic by obtaining agreement to each point before going on to the next, therefore, building an argument.

Despite the efforts of the courts and law enforcement agencies to improve the handling of eyewitness testimony, misidentifications continue to be a major contributing factor to false convictions. The Innocence Project is a national litigation and public policy organization that has been dedicated to exonerating wrongfully convicted people through DNA testing. Since their inception in 1992, they have helped overturn 311 wrongful convictions in the United States, as of the date of this paper. Of those 311 cases, they have determined that misidentification has contributed to approximately 73% of those wrongful convictions ("The Innocence Project"). That is an extremely high percentage, and something needs to be done about this.

During recent studies from several researchers it has been concluded that there is a fault within our criminal justice system. Researchers discovered there is a high wrongful conviction rate within the United States judicial system. After, extensive research, it was found that wrongful convictions are caused by eyewitness error, false confessions, flawed forensic science, an informant, bad lawyering, and government misconduct. Without a doubt, this issue has shocked society, due to the fact we rely on the system for pure justice. Within my findings, it is apparent that victims of wrongful convictions suffer numerous affects when

“Most Americans harbor the presumption that their criminal justice system is fair and blind. Within that a priori delusion, an assumption is made that no person shall ever be convicted for a crime that he or she did not commit (Huff, 2002; Marquis, 2005),” (Jones 2012) .The United States upholds itself on the ideology of freedom yet represses the freedom of innocent American citizens. From a young age, children are taught that if they don’t lie, cheat or steal, they won’t have

Almost every day, we hear about justice being served upon criminals and we, as a society, feel a sense of relief that another threat to the public has been sentenced to a term in prison, where they will no longer pose a risk to the world at large. However, there are very rare occasions where the integrity of the justice system gets skewed and people who should not have been convicted are made to serve heavy prison sentences. When word of this judicial misstep reaches the public, there is social outcry, and we begin to question the judicial system for committing such a serious faux pas.

Everyday, people are arrested for crimes they have committed. However, the justice system, in some cases, has failed to convict and arrest the right person. Innocent people have been sent to jail based upon the deliberate misidentification of suspects. Throughout U.S history, there have been several famous wrongful convictions such as the Scottsboro Boys and Ed Johnson (Grimsley). Their convictions were based on race due to the racial strife from the Jim Crow era. Base on David Love’s article, many convictions after the Jim Crow era were still being caused by misleading identification from eyewitness claims of the suspects being African Americans. Due to the advancement of forensic and DNA technology, lack of evidence from previous convictions

The United States prides itself on having robust, deeply entrenched measures implemented across its core agencies, including the police and criminal justice system, to safeguard against wrongfully convicting people who, after further reflection, are factually found to be innocent. As citizens, we have been educated to trust, among other things, that our systems protect the notions that one is innocent until proven guilty and that prosecution must prove any charges beyond a reasonable doubt. Yet, wrongful convictions are more prevalent than we might think. In particular, the publicity of hundreds of cases over the last few decades has put a spotlight on this indisputable

False confessions have been a leading factor in destroying the lives of many innocent people. Since the advances of technology, victims of false confessions have been exonerated from the charges previously placed on them while others are still fighting for innocence or died a criminal. One technological advance that has exonerated many individuals is DNA testing. According to Randy James, DNA testing was discovered in 1985 and was first used in court to convict Tommie Lee Andrews (Time, 2009). Today many Americans are convicted because of false confessions that have not yet been overturned with new evidence (Kassin, 2014). Although DNA testing has led to freedom for many innocent Americans, there are still many innocent people who are locked

With the number of DNA exonerations growing in the recent years, wrongful convictions reveal disturbing trends and fissures in the justice system. It shows how broken the system is, and why it needs urgent fixing. According to Huff (1996), over ten thousand people are convicted wrongfully for serious crimes each year. This study established that factors leading to wrongful convictions are false eyewitnesses, a prejudiced jury, incompetent prosecutors, and suspects’ ignorance. Where DNA evidence clears a suspect, array of reasons emerge; misconduct, mistakes, to race and class factors. It is important to make DNA data available to attorneys in order to enable them mount a strong

237). Race is looked at with these wrongful convictions. Of 350 high cases that was viewed about 40% of them involved African Americans that were wrongfully accused (Gabbidon & Greene, 2013). Misconduct from police and prosecutors is if they did not do their job correctly such as if they are racist which causes them not to do their job. The interrogations done by police of the accused should be taped to make sure things are done by the books(Gabbidon & Greene, 2012, ch7 ppt). Legal counsel should also be there when identification take place. When DNA came about it help release people that was wrongful convicted based on eyewitness error or mistaken identity and etc. There has been unequal numbers of African American and Hispanics that have been wrongly convicted. To help with mistaken identification and eyewitness error, Huff made a statement that qualified expert witnesses need to use to help with this issue (Gabbidon & Greene, 2012, ch7 ppt). There should be innocence commissions to handle these types of situation that could and have happen in

The mission of the agency is to “develop potential procedures to decrease the possibility of conviction of the innocent in North Carolina, thereby increasing conviction of the guilty.” In 2003 the proposal of the commission was implemented by the instruction and teaching committee of the North Carolina Criminal Justice Education and Training Standard Commission and was incorporated into State Basic Law Enforcement Training. These were eventually made into statutory law in 2008. The NCIAC takes thousands of claims and has taken multiple cases to court (Garrett 2013). Agencies like the NCIAC work to bring justice to those who were served injustice. The innocent who end up in prison can’t exonerate themselves on their own. They need help and commissions are their last chance to the freedom they deserve. Commissions have been a helpful asset to pardon the innocent but the largest cause for exonerations is based on DNA testing.

Since 1923, when Judge Learned Hand said that the American judicial system “has always been haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted,” the issue of wrongful conviction has been acknowledged to man (Halstead, 1992; Huff, Rattner, Sagarin, & MacNamara, 1986). After the judge made his innocuous statements, serious study of this phenomenon began. Contrary to the statement the judge made, time and technology have revealed that an unquantifiable number of wrongfully convicted persons have served prison terms and even been executed for crimes they did not commit and some that did not even occur. Research into wrongful conviction was virtually nonexistent until Professor Edward Brochard of Yale University published his book Convicting the Innocent in 1932. This book documented 65 such cases, addressed the legal causes of miscarriage, and offered suggestions to reform. Subsequently, numerous other researchers began conducting case studies and publishing findings that affirmed that wrongful conviction represents a systematic problem within the American judicial process (Huff, 2002).

This article focuses on the State of New Jersey, which became the first state to change its eyewitness lineup procedures, based upon the 2001 justice report on DNA-based exonerations in which judges are required to inform its juries that cross-racial identification may be suspect when there 's no corroborating evidence (Avril, 2006). The article also highlights the case McKinley Cromedy, convicted on eyewitness testimony by a white woman and sent iced to 50 years prison, later exonerated by DNA testing. The article summarizes that of 175 people exonerated nationwide by DNA testing, three-quarters were convicted on the strength of misidentification by a witness (Avril, 2006). The strength of this article supports this author’s hypothesis that race-bias plays a role in misidentification by the witness.

The Innocence Project was established in the wake of a landmark study by the United States Department of Justice and the United States Senate with help from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (Schneider, 2013). This study found that there were numerous reasons why people are wrongfully convicted including, but not limited to eye witness identification, perjured testimony, improper forensic science techniques, and government misconduct (Roberts & Weathered, 2009) The original Innocence Project was founded twenty two (22) years ago as a part of the Cardoza School of Law of Yeshiva University in New York City, New York (Davis, 2012). The Innocence Projects primary goal is to exonerate those whom have been convicted of a crime when there is DNA evidence available to be tested or re-tested (Mitchell, 2011). DNA testing has been possible in five (5) percent to ten (10) percent of cases since 1992 (Risinger, 2007). On the other side, other members of the Innocence Project help to exonerate those have been convicted of a crime where there is no DNA evidence to test. A goal of the Innocence Project is to conduct research on the reasons for wrongful convictions, how to fix the criminal justice system, as well as advocate for those who have been wrongfully convicted (Steiker & Steiker, 2005). The members of this organization strive to teach the world about the dangers of wrongful convictions. To date, this non-profit legal organization, has freed three hundred eighteen (318)