Wrongful Convictions

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

To provide a balance in specific nations and considerations of cross cutting, the issues must go beyond national boundaries. The traditional contrast of adversarial versus legal systems will be to determine what impacted each system that may have on preventing wrongful convictions and whether or not the traditional difference remains viable or needs revision. The number of public policies intended to reduce the number of these convictions and compensate more fairly and just to those who are the victims of these mistrials.

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

If a wrongful conviction occurs nowadays, our greatest chance to prove that it is a wrongful convictions is with DNA

Throughout the chain of events involved in the identification of a suspect, wrongful incarcerations occur as a result of various unintentional errors, flaws and abuses made by the key government agencies that each have a stake in this process.

Wrongful convictions occur when innocent defendants are found guilty in a criminal trial; When people are wrongfully convicted, they spend part of their life in prison while the criminal is free of punishment. The world has two million citizens incarcerated, about 20,000 people punished for crimes they did not commit (Ferner). Two thousand people are punished for crimes they did not commit, that is not a small number, so why do wrongful convictions occur? Wrongful convictions can occur for various reasons; the common causes are eyewitness misidentification, unvalidated or improper forensics science, false confessions, government misconduct, unprofessional lawyering, and informants or snitches.

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

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).

According to Medwed what distorts the prosecution in wrongful convictions is the combination of mainly these biases, that together all are part of what is called "tunnel vision" (Medwed, 2010, p. 2203.

Prosecutors can have the tendency to develop a fierce loyalty to a particular version of events, with a common loyalty to the guilt of a particular suspect which can lead to wrongful convictions.i Such loyalty can result in a refusal to consider alternative theories or suspects during the initial investigation.ii Professor Keith A. Findley describes tunnel vision as being, "the product of a variety of cognitive distortions, such as confirmation bias, and outcome bias, which can impede accuracy in what we perceive and in how we interpret what we perceive."iii Similar factors that play a role in wrongful convictions include: selective information processing, which is the motivation to defend one’s beliefs in the face of conflicting evidence,

In the criminal justice system there are various processes and personnel involved in the war on crime. Despite the image of a justice system that’s supposed goal is to eliminate crime, many have entirely different attitudes and perceptions of the system. Numerous inequalities unmistakably exist in the criminal justice system, one being socioeconomic bias, which is displayed and integrated in many ways throughout the levels of the system. For instance, police will predominately monitor poor neighbourhoods over wealthier ones, leading to a greater number of arrest. As a result, criminal records being a basis of deciding to charge someone is an unreliable source due to the great likelihood that the person has already been through the system due

The four General Principals in Criminal law are innocent until proven guilty, the bass of criminal justice it to prove that a person is innocent until they are proven guilty. The person that can prove that they are guilty is the Magistrate, Judge, or the Jury, they must think beyond a reasonable doubt that the offender is guilty. Just because a person is a charge of a crime does not mean they are guilty of committing it means that the offender is allegedly guilty of committing the crime. The second one is, Burden of proof is when the prosecution has the duty to prove that the person who is charged an offense. For the defendant that is found guilty must be proven beyond a reason or doubt. The defendant does not decide if they are innocent or

The death penalty can also be up to the victims families and their beliefs and thoughts can help decide what the prosecution pursues for the criminals.

No problem challenges the legitimacy of the criminal justice system more than the conviction of innocent individuals. The aspect of wrongful conviction is established within the law to protect the innocent from being abused by the law. (Not so sure about this one)

A wrongful conviction is a terrible injustice that is magnified when an actual innocent person spends years, sometimes even decades in prison and/or death row. This has been recognized by the U.S Legal system for quite some time now and the rising number of exonerations are growing.