Let 's Get Free

Pamela Colloff’s “The Innocent Man,” is an eye-opening, gut-wrenching essay in which Colloff beautifully takes a high complexity prejudiced case of a guilty murder verdict and successfully brings to light her inspiring character Michael Morton’s true innocence in a flawed justice system. Suspense, sadness and frustration are effectively provoked from the reader about Michael’s tragic nightmare which persists for over two decades of time. A nightmare which begins when Michael returns home from work on August 13, 1986, to find out his dead wife was beaten to death in their bed. This is only the beginning of what Colloff unfolds in her writing of Michael’s twenty-five-year agonizing battle behind bars. Step by step Colloff’s marvelous writing

After reading “the Innocent Man” by Pamela Colloff’s who write a long journalism about Michael Morton, who was found guilty for murdering his wife Christine was sentenced for fifteen years in prison. Later founding that Michael was Innocent after reinvestigating his case, capturing DNA testing and finding new evidence was able to help prove his innocence. The theme of this essay a widow husband who seek to fight for his freedom in prison and staying connected with his son. Michal son Eric gave him a reason to have hope that they would one day reunite and his son would know for himself that he did murder his wife. The point of view of this essay although a man is falsely accuse for a crime he did not commit he is self-determined to fight.

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

The legal elements of this book, is the lack of justice for the defendants, lack of resources in the courtroom, and the bias that the people within the courtroom had. This related to our law and society class because society looks

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

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.

The book Ordinary Injustice: How America Holds Court written by Amy Bach reflects upon “ordinary injustice” that members of society fall victim to by the American criminal justice system. In short, the phrase “ordinary injustice” comes from the improper acts that have become second nature to court officials but has yet to be explained and resolved by other actors in the court. It is noted in the text that “ordinary injustice results when a community of legal professionals becomes so accustomed to a pattern of lapses that they can no longer see their role in them” (Bach 2). This recurring pattern has been easy to identify by outsiders but difficult to handle by insiders of the court. Bach supports this idea by making clear that, “proving mistakes, both visible and invisible, [is] very difficult in the criminal justice system, even for those who are insiders” (258).

Throughout the reading of “Just Mercy”, a novel written by Bryan Stevenson, and the movie “The Shawshank Redemption”, there are many examples that represent the corruption within the criminal justice system. The various forms of corruption are expressed through specific cases that have occurred within the criminal justice and through different characters in the reading or the movie that show examples of corruption. The different corruptions categorize into overall groups such as race, gender, and mental capabilities.

Normally, if a defendant is arrested and brought to court, the prosecutor must present enough evidence to make the judge or grand jury believe that the defendant had committed the crime. In the memoir, “Just Mercy” by Bryan Stevenson, cases regarding corruption and quick trials are presented to the reader from Stevenson’s point of view. Many times Stevenson implied that characters such as Sheriff Tate and other officers abused their power to cause hasty trials and take cases that did not have enough evidence to convict and create false witness testimonies. Testimonies were manipulated to give the advantage to the prosecutors and when other people spoke up for the defendant they were either bribed or silenced. For example, in the Walter McMillian case, the testimonies of his family and neighbors saying he was at his house was dismissed while Ralph Myers testimony was the key factor for the case. When Myers had admitted that he had lied in his testimony, he was “threatened and harassed by the local authorities”(Stevenson

His approach certainly sparks his readers' anger at the crime problem in America, but does not effectively translate their anger into support for truth-in-sentencing. He further hinders his attempt to alter the opinions of his opponents by selectively failing to mention how truth-in-sentencing will reduce crime.

American criminal justice system seems like a perfectly set up rule which is equal to everyone, but it can be biased. According to the article, ‘The New Jim Crow’, many of these indictments seem unfair against certain races. Also, on the documentary about Steven Avery we watched during our first week of class, emphasized the point that the criminal justice system or the law itself can be manipulated by people who are experts. But the criticism on the wrong judgment cannot be removed completely, since the judges and the lawyers are humans too. Even though they did not have any intent to manipulate or put more charges on certain defendant, they can still make wrong decisions. As people are tried on the court run by other people, it is completely normal to make wrong decisions, or to have someone who tries to manipulate the problems. This kind of things happen everywhere, not only in the criminal justice system. Of course, the purification movement against corruption should be developed inside of the

In our world, today, it happens on occasion that we, like Hale, put too much justice on the fairness that our court system is said to have. It has happened that someone was convicted of a crime that the person did not commit or a person, who committed a crime receives too strict, or more commonly the case, a

To judge is to irreparably arbitrate; the judged seldom find recourse if an error lies in the judge’s logic. In criminal proceedings, the courts judge alleged criminals and deliver verdicts. A frequently encountered issue is determining guilt. Critics of the de facto court system cite moral culpability as an ideal that the courts fail to attain. Priding its moral superiority, the United States surprisingly lacks some of the basic rights to justice afforded to others elsewhere. America purports to have a duty to serve justice, yet the justice system provides little leeway to those whose crimes are not their fault. This notion of unfulfilled justice appears in In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. When Dick and Perry commit murder, the circumstances are such that Perry cannot be entirely accountable for the actions he took. Perry bears no responsibility for the crimes he committed; storied psychological illnesses and pitfalls compromised his sense of right and wrong, rendering him incapable of intervening in his planned crime with Dick.

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).

The New York Times bestseller book titled Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case examines the O.J. Simpson criminal trial of the mid-1990s. The author, Alan M. Dershowitz, relates the Simpson case to the broad functions and perspectives of the American criminal justice system as a whole. A Harvard law school teacher at the time and one of the most renowned legal minds in the country, Dershowitz served as one of O.J. Simpson’s twelve defense lawyers during the trial. Dershowitz utilizes the Simpson case to illustrate how today’s criminal justice system operates and relates it to the misperceptions of the public. Many outside spectators of the case firmly believed that Simpson committed the