Pros And Cons Of Miscarriage Of Justice

      Fifteen hundred miles away, in Portland, Oregon Brandon Roses ten is found guilty of murdering his five-year-old sister because he claimed that she was annoying him. Later investigators found out that Brandon’s father had told him that killing his sister was “OK”, because he was too young to be put in jail. Another investigation is currently under way (Edmonds). In Austin, Texas, two young men Efrain Perez and Raul Villareal were both seventeen in June of 1993. As part of Villareal’s gang initiation, the boys spent the evening in an open field drinking and fighting among

The criminal justice system plays an important role in this society, it is meant to protect and serve. This “system” is also meant to maintain the peace and enforce the laws set by the government. However, the criminal justice system is not even close to perfect. It has many flaws, some of which are: police brutality, death penalty, mass incarceration, gun violence, and especially wrongful convictions. A majority of the flaws that the system has can be easily fixed and can be set straight. For example, the issue of wrongful convictions has been relevant for quite some time and has the potential to decrease its probability of occurring by focusing on the importance of scientific evidence, rid of faulty witness testimonies, and make sure that the lack of evidence and/or government misconduct, if applicable, does not determine the outcome of the case.

The movie “The Central Park Five” was a documentary film. It is talking about five young men were involved in a rape case. One white woman was raped and left for dead in the central park in 1989. Police officers arrested five fifteen years old suspects. The government did not have enough evidence to judge these five black men and Latino Americans; however, because of the racial discrimination, the justices judged them as guilty and sentenced them to jail about 9 to 15 years. After few months, Matias Reyes confessed to the rape case and the lab test also showed that the sperm was matched. The five teenagers were released after the suspect confessed his crime. Directors of the movie, Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David Mcmahon, used

A brutal killing spree in the summer of 1969 perplexed police and petrified residents of California’s wealthiest communities. There was a total of nine dead bodies and three murder scenes. Among the killed were a wealthy heiress from a famous family, a well known Hollywood hairdresser, and a young actress who was

The criminal justice system used today is to follow principles that protect and establish equality for all and while the United States criminal justice system may strive to follow these right of the people, but unfortunately, this is where the system falls short of fundamental American principles. Repeatedly the criminal justice system does the adverse of what it’s supposed to do. It does not protect the many liberties the people should have. Some may argue that the criminal justice system is indeed fair for

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.

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.

Every year in the United States of America, millions of crimes are committed that violate and harm the individual rights, properties, and freedoms that are not only guaranteed to American citizens of this country, but also naturally inherent to mankind as whole. Based on the founding principles of our country, which are derived from the Constitution of these United States, justice is dealt accordingly to the perpetrators of these crimes. While this justice is usually fair, due to certain rights given to those who may be charged with crimes, sometimes an error is made. A simple mistake, a missing or broken link in the chain that

On the night of April 19th, 1989 in New York City’s Central Park there were a number of assaults and attacks happening. Trisha went out for her routine jog through Central Park. She did not make it home and was found by a police officer in a wooded area beaten almost to death (Innocent Project, 2016). There were about 30 teenagers out that night causing chaos in Central Park. The police had picked up Raymond Santana and many others that night from the streets. Raymond Santana was one of the five young men who later would falsely confess to the assault and rape of Trisha Meilli (Innocence Project, 2016). According to the Innocence Project (2016), Santana also gave a videotaped confession along with four of the other suspects. The other young men were Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, and Korey Wise. All of these men, including Santana, were convicted of the attacks (Innocence Project, 2016). However, Santana was a juvenile at the time and was sentenced to five to ten years. Then, in 2002 Matias Reyes, confessed to the attack on the Central Park jogger and admitted that he was alone in the act. DNA from Reyes was cross matched with DNA from the rape kit and the hairs found on the victim (Innocence Project, 2016). The five young men’s convictions were then overturned. Santana spent five years in prison for a crime that he falsely confessed

In many countries across the world people are wrongfully convicted by a system whose sole purpose is to protects its citizens. Wrongful convictions are a grave miscarriage of justice. A report Published by Nation Registry of Exonerations stated that 149 people were cleared in 2015 for crimes that they did not commit in the United States (Ferner, 2016), this number is staggering. Also, in Japan 162 wrongful convicted between 1910 and 2010 (Johnson, 2015). With that said, a lot of people is being detained for crimes they did not commit in every region of the world, meanwhile the real culprits are left to roam freely. Common reasons for wrongful conviction in the United states and Japan are harsh and long interrogations, witness identification, errors or misconduct of the law enforcement and jailhouse informants also known as snitches, but mostly lack of DNA evidences. Even though, these countries have constitutional rights for its citizens, the reasons for wrongful convictions are similar.

In a 22 month span, starting in July 1979, 30 African American children and young men were murdered or disappeared in Atlanta, Georgia (Nickell 1 of 2). Due to the various motives that each murder presented, it was believed that multiple individuals were responsible for these crimes. However only 1 person was ultimately charged with these homicides. The person that was found responsible for 2 of the many murders is Wayne Williams. He was suspected and subsequently arrested after police heard a splash in the water under a bridge on May 22, 1981, and Williams was the only one on the bridge during the time frame of the body drop (Plummer 1 of 3). This case was splashed all over headlines both nationally and internationally (Nickell 1 of 2). Due

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.

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).

In American society, justice is blind. Justice is commonly defined as a rightful or lawful act. Or in other terms to bring to justice, to come before a court for trial or to receive punishment for one’s misdeeds. Some believe it is fairly administered and equal. But lack within the criminal justice system make us question equality. There are two individual aspects of how justice can be served; the perspective of the victim and the perspective of the criminal "per say". I will be focusing on instances in which wrongfully people were punished for crimes they didn 't commit and families or victims thought justice was served. The first case in which justice was wrongfully served is the case of Louis Taylor. Louis Taylor did forty-one years to life for something he didn 't do. Secondly, Steven Avery served eighteen years for being wrongfully convicted for rape. Although in Avery 's case he was exonerated through DNA testing.

“It’s a general problem not specific to the law of the United Kingdom a criminal justice system characterized by an emphasis on crime control rather than due process will inevitably produce miscarriage of justice.”