Supporting The Original Victim After A Wrongful Conviction Decision

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

A prosecutor looking for real justice, Adam Foss demonstrates just how effective rhetorical devices can be to persuade a population to defend the rights of others. When telling the story of how people end up in the criminal justice system, Foss tells “Even in our ‘worst.’ I saw...childhood trauma, victimization, poverty...interaction with the police…”(3:24) Many people tend to see people convicted of crimes as inhuman or lesser than us. However, Foss begins to humanize them. Moreover, he states that the reason these people commit crimes isn’t because of some violent, unfathomable reason, but rather because of their rough experiences earlier in life. To fix crime, people must step up and fix issues that cause crime, not throw people into a broken

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.

In the article “Race, wrongful conviction and exoneration” by Earl smith and Angela J. Hattery, these sociologist discuss the issues of racial discrimination and the amount of wrongful convictions within the American justice system. They also discuss the issues on the lack of exonerations based on race in our prison systems. As stated in the article “Approximately 75% [of citizens] in jail are members of minority groups and on average have spent 13 years in prison for crimes they did not commit.” (Smith) This heart breaking statistic shows the true facts that there is an increasing issue in the amount of people in jail for crimes they did not commit due to their race. The main focus of the article is to raise awareness about the issues within our countries justice system and to understand the reasons for these inequalities on a deeper level.

This past legislative session saw a major win for the wrongly convicted with H.B. 48. H.B. 48 creates a commission to review convictions after exoneration and aims to prevent wrongful conviction. This bill is a supported across the political spectrum on the part of author Ruth Jones McClendon (D) and Sen. Rodney Ellis (D) along with joint authors Rep. Jeff Leach (R), Rep. David Simpson (R), Rep. Abel Herrero (D), Rep. Joe Moody (D) and The Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Center for Effective Justice.

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

The justice system present in the United States is one of fairness, equality, and human rights. In a court of law, all men are created equal and have certain unalienable rights that nothing or no one can take away. What is to happen when these rights are denied, abused, or ignored? It is a frightening outcome when unruly factors destroy the basis of this system. As a victim of injustice once said, “People have prejudices, people have fears, people have hates. These things cloud our ability to reason.” Injustice has a tendency to overshadow reason. How can one feel safe in this country, when no one is totally safe from the sometimes unjust scrutiny of the law? If justice rests on one being innocent until proven guilty, what is to happen

At the state level, Colorado has written and enacted its own Victims’ Rights Act ahead of federal mandates previously discussed. In the early 1990’s Colorado passed an amendment to the state constitution to provide crime victims with certain rights. The driving force behind the amendment was to ensure the victim in a crime has their rights pursued and enforced in the same manner as those of criminal defendants. It is necessary to understand when a crime occurs; victims’ lives and those of their families are forever changed through no fault of their own.

“No one loses their innocence. It is either taken away or given willingly” Tiffany Madison. A person’s innocence and freedom should be theirs to hold and control, but that is not always the way things unfold. Conviction flaws, poor evidence, and the social responses to these flaws are all involved and present in the cases of Paula Gray and Keith Allen Harward, as new evidence thirty years after they were imprisoned comes to light.

Wrongful convictions can be the result an assortment of conditions that contribute to injustice. Variables include the Brady violations, faulty forensics, weak defense, misleading prosecution, misidentification, lying, false confessions, race and financial resources of the defendant (Gould, J. et al. 2013). Seventy-five percent or more of erroneous convictions have involved mistaken eyewitness identification: (Garrett, 2009). False confessions of innocent people pleading guilty corrupt our system. Furthermore, it must be noted that the American judicial system relies heavily upon a plea-bargaining system, where some may plead guilty as opposed to taking their chances before a jury. States that have a reputation for punitive juries may

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.

Before the victims movement, victims were ignored in most court systems by the professionals who process criminal cases. Victims were often seen as inconvenient. The victims rights movement has changed this unfair treatment. As time passed prosecutors’ offices in the most jurisdictions spend greater time than they did in the past giving notice to victims and consulting with them about decisions made in their case. The staff of the prosecutors offices and court systems have a responsibility of shepherding victims through the intricacies of the criminal justice system. For example, they send a notice providing information about the systems operation, and to help them secure protection of threatened victims who have suffered harm. Laws have changed to allow victims to be present throughout trials in a number of jurisdictions. Victims information or their voices are heard in court, mainly at sentencing, and at the time guilty pleas are received. All of this has had changed by giving the victim the respect and dignity they need, honoring their participation and

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 traditional criminal justice system is criticized for its neglect of victim importance and needs, for example (Symonds, 1980) acknowledges, that the criminal justice system is concerned about looking back at the event rather than focusing on how to rehabilitate and as a consequence making victims be in a ‘secondary victimization’ effect. This is the attitudes, behaviors and the beliefs of the people in the criminal

The history of victimology travels further back in time than most would realize. The concept of the victim emerged from the many attempts of many societies and peoples to explain both the reasons behind victimization and the appropriate action to be taken as a result of it (Burgess et al., 2013). As a concept, it can be difficult to define victimology, since each individual defines the term differently. According to the text utilized for this class, victimology is defined as being the study of the victim, including the offender and society. It is also seen as being a social-structural way of viewing the relationships between crime and the law as well as the criminal and the victim (Burgess et al, 2013)..