Juries: Wrongful Convictions In Australia

This essay will explore how prosecutorial misconduct causes wrongful convictions in both the United States and Australia. This essay will also argue that rehabilitation and compensation should be provided by the state. A major flaw in the criminal justice system not only in the United States but also in Australia, is the failure to set forth a plan for the people who were exonerated to be accepted back into society. The lack of a plan for rehabilitation for the exonerated poses a problem for society since some might find it easier to find a job in prison then in the real world, this process makes it immensely difficult for prisoners to get acclimated back into society. The Australian Law Review Committee is an entity which evaluates and gives

Miscarriage of justice is not just framed around contaminated evidence but also by the fact that juries misinterpret information and instructions which result in an incorrect verdict. Voting for the verdict previously had to be unanimous until 2006, when the Juries (Amendment) Act 2006 (NSW). Although majority verdict allows for quicker and easier verdicts, less pressure to conform and eliminates a rogue juror, there has been much criticism as the point of the trial to prove standard of proof that the accused

This paper takes a leap into the corrupted side of the criminal justice system. After analyzing several articles regarding wrongful conviction cases in the Unites States, it is apparent that wrongful conviction cases occur more often than society believed. It has come to surface in recent years that wrongful convictions are a big problem with our criminal justice system. Researchers have discovered the causes of wrongful convictions to be bad lawyering, government misconduct, informants, false confessions, flawed forensic science and eyewitness error. Furthermore, this paper explores the affects victims face due to a wrongful conviction. As society has begun to steadily realize that miscarriage of justice is a possibility, researchers have considered reforms to the criminal justice system.

The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines fairness to be ‘the quality of treating people equally or in a way that is reasonable’ and justice as ‘the quality of being fair or reasonable’ (Oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com, 2014). Investigation of the characteristics of the Australian Legal System (ALS) including its adoption, structure and operational rules, reveal that for the most part the system is based on these two attributes. This inference is further evidenced by the legally binding operational framework assigned to the financial services industry and reflected in the codes of practice that also guide it.

As defined, a wrongful conviction is a conviction of a person accused of a crime which, in the result of the subsequent investigation, proves erroneous. Persons who are in fact innocent but who have been wrongly convicted by a jury or other court of law. For this reason, wrongful convictions disrupt trust in our justice system, therefore, such convictions undermine public safety by leaving the correct or legitimate positives of the guilty in the community to carry out future offences. With this in mind, one needs to secure the society and/or families of crime victims that are caused by the incorrect or misleading errors that all humankind institutions occasionally make through accidental, unintentional, and through failures in working the system.

On any given day in Canada, there are more blameless individuals in jail than liable ones. By "blameless individuals" I mean the individuals who have been blamed for a wrongdoing and are being hung on remand, anticipating a safeguard hearing or a trial. “dozens of innocent people might be languishing behind bars. Over the ensuing 30 years, more than 20 convicted murderers have been freed on the basis of serious doubts about the reliability of evidence and trial fairness in their cases.” The revealing of wrongly convicted wrongdoers has been apparently the overwhelming lawful improvement in Canada over the past half-century. In recent years, the issue of wrongful conviction has turned into an acknowledged reality in most common law jurisdiction; Prominent cases tend not just to attract our consideration regarding the deleterious impacts of a wrongful conviction on an individual but also to illustrate how parts of the criminal justice process have fizzled. An across the nation system of attorneys, columnists and legitimate associations have fought resolutely in the courts to get the freedom of offenders who had, in some cases, spent decades incarcerated. Clearly, wrongful conviction is the aspect of being in fact innocent but unfairly held accountable by a jury or other court of law for an act you did not do. Also a criminal code is a statute which implies or endeavors to set out all denied or criminal offenses, and their different disciplines. In this paper, I discuss

Jury duty is lampooned frequently in the popular culture as being a dreadfully boring waste of time and energy that keeps us all away from the more important things in life such as family, work, and getting drunk. Indeed, most of the time, juries see cases that are often dull and certain. Unfortunately, not all cases can be high profile, riveting murder cases that Nancy Grace can shrill on and on about for months on end. Perhaps worst of all, it is something that we are forced to do, and Americans tend to not like being forced to do things. However, there is no better way to grant impartiality to criminal procedures than the jury system. The jury system allows us, the average American, to have our say in the criminal justice process in perhaps the most important role: we can determine whether or not a person is guilty of a crime and we can do so uninhibited by our own personal biases, the biases of judges, and the biases of the federal government.

Pope Innocent III “ forbade priestly involvement in ordeals—thus taking away their holy sanction [and] in 1215, a jury system was loosely in place in Norman England. In this system, the king’s court chose twelve persons to testify as to what they knew about the facts of a case or the character of the parties involved” (The American Trial Jury). Since its establishment in 1215, problems have arisen regarding the jury system across the world. Foremost, the rise of technology engendered unjust trials and biased jurors in the 1950s, during the Sam Sheppard case. The news media released the names and telephone numbers of the jurors involved in the case and they encouraged local citizens to call the, to voice their opinions during a trial, and therefore the jury was not isolated from media outlets (The American Trial Jury). Race also generates dilemmas with the jury system, like in the case of Keith Tharpe. Woefully, he was on trial for murder and convicted solely because of a racist juror who referred to him as a derogatory name for blacks (A Black Man Convicted By a Racist Juror is About To Be Executed). Likewise, the jury system is flawed due to a rise in juror misconduct. In the year 2009, during the court case United States v. Bristol-Martir, a juror conducted illicit research on the case and was subsequently disqualified as a result of her immoral actions (Saltzburg, Dealing With Juror

We hear in the news about police misconduct, use of excessive force, embezzlement, but one thing I found while researching what I should write this paper on is the Wrongful convictions of innocent men and women, that spend years in prison being innocent, and there is nothing that gets done till it’s too late. Some wrongful convictions are honest mistakes, but many times law enforcement and prosecutors lose sight of the obligation of ensuring truth and justice, and are focused on their conviction rates. As with any job, they are honest people and ones that just don’t care and are corrupt, this exists in the criminal justice system. One way to prove someone is innocent now is through DNA testing, but even at all levels of a criminal investigation there could be misconduct or mishandling of evidence, which then causes the evidence to become compromised.

In today’s Canadian society, it is certain that criminal law is to serve and protect and its fundamental purpose is to prevent crime and punish offenders. However, there have been cases where criminal law has punished the offender who turned out to be innocent. A conviction is needed to show that the system is not in disrepute and to keep order and people safe in society. If a criminal cannot be caught then people will look down upon the system in disgrace. In many cases, officers will arrest an individual who fits a certain description that they know will lead to an arrest and conviction. In the case of Guy Paul Morin it shows how the system failed in aiding the innocent who abide to the law. The law is established to protect those who

Let me start by saying that I feel the proliferation of media and devices, particularly social media, make ALL information available to EVERY person across the globe 24/7. This being said, the availability of an uninformed jury pool is virtually impossible. In today’s society, everyone has information, therefore to assume that any perspective juror is unaware of at least the basics of every meaningful crime in their local, state and national scene is naïve at best. The best a defendant and defense attorney can hope for is that the jurors will put aside any preconceived notions of the guilt or innocence of the accused, follow the jury instructions, and render an unbiased verdict. Do I feel that this happens…NO. Jurors lie, attorneys and judges

This essay seeks to provide a comprehensive analysis on the topic of jury competence. Research in Australia, on this topic, has been constrained by legislative barriers, and the general hesitancy of administrators to interfere with the jury system. Thus, this essay has been primarily confined to research undertaken overseas.

A jury is a group of people who give a verdict in a legal case based on evidence provided to them in court. The idea of a jury dates back to 1215 the Magna Carta era, where King John of England agreed to mend himself (kings) to laws related to the management of kings and queens, representatives of the church and citizens. In Australia jury duty is a compulsory engagement. According to the Queensland government website a pool of 18-70 people are randomly selected from the electoral role. Additionally, from the 18-70 randomly selected people, 12 are handpicked by the defence and the prosecution to be jurors in the trial. Both the defence and the prosecution must agree on the jurors to eliminate potential bias.

Trial by jury is not a new concept; it has been around since ancient times. The United States’ Founding Fathers embedded the right to trial by jury in the U.S. Constitution because King George III often denied them of the benefits of trial by jury (Shepard, 2005). Juries are needed to defend against absolute government, but juries are not entirely fair. For something around so long, the concept of a justice system based in adversarial processes still may be flawed. Jurors may possess implicit biases, which alter their judgments. Elek and Hannaford-Agor (2013) define implicit bias as, “an individual’s unconscious attitudes [that] introduce unjustified assumptions about other people and related evidence that can distort a person’s judgment

Australian courtrooms are highly ritualised spaces where various long serving customs and traditions are strictly followed in order to constitute events of power, and also featured in the relative power relations. As was evident by the local courtrooms visited within The Downing Centre, the architecture, language, courtroom actors and spatial organisation demonstrate the numerous levels of power, of which are present. This usage of power is evident as visible through the relationships between the courtroom actors, particularly those between the judge or magistrate, the witnesses and lastly, the lawyers. These relations significantly highlight the disparity of power between these individuals. Simultaneously, the courtroom architecture of which is present also signals and represents the different levels of power during court proceedings. In addition, the use of legal jargon in one’s favour is also a worthy indicator of attaining this much sought after power aforementioned.