Jake Thomas PHIL 460 11/17/16 Wrongful Convictions For many years our justice system has over-looked the fact that sometimes they produce erroneous convictions. The system believes they are more likely to release guilty individuals than to convict innocent ones because defendants are recognized as innocent until proven guilty. However, as much as we’d like to believe this, recent studies have lead researchers to a different conclusion. The conclusion they’ve come to is that there are far more innocent…
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Abstract Darryl Hunt is an African American born in 1965 in North Carolina. In 1984, he was convicted wrongfully of rape and murder of Deborah Sykes, a young white woman working as a newspaper editor. This paper researches oh his wrongful conviction in North Carolina. Darryl Hunt served nineteen and a half years before DNA evidence exonerated him. The charges leveled against him were because of inconsistencies in the initial stages of the case. An all-white bench convicted the then nineteen-year-old…
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A wrongful conviction has become known as factual innocence. A wrongful conviction might refer to a case in which a person with a good defense is found guilty. It may also be applied to a case in which the appellate court reverses the conviction because the defendant’s constitutional rights were violated (regardless of any factual guilt that might be present) (Zalman, M., Smith, B., & Kiger, A., 2008, p. 75). A wrongful conviction is a terrible injustice that is magnified when an actually innocent…
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the right person who committed the crime is only sometimes consistently done. Despite the diligent work of the courts, innocent people can sometimes be mistakenly found guilty. This type of error has significant consequences that reach far and wide. It is essential to recognize that wrongful convictions occur more frequently than people often believe. Improper convictions, characterized as the conviction of innocent people, are more standard than frequently accepted. This exploration reveals that these…
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Barr English 12 5/1/2024 A Calling for Justice “The greatest tragedy in the justice system is when an innocent person is wrongfully convicted,” wrote American Lawyer and social justice activist, Bryan Stevenston (“Famous Quotes About Wrongful Convictions”). This statement reflects the serious ethical and societal issues of wrongful convictions in the United States (U.S.) prison system. Despite its primary objective of guaranteeing justice and fairness, the system is not immune to mistakes and errors…
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Introduction To the Criminal Justice System In the complex world of criminal justice, the death penalty is one of the most controversial issues in the world. Particularly, the unsettling reality of wrongful convictions has cast a shadow over the system. This paper aims toward the current Doherty students perception of these issues and their impact on trusting our justice system vs. facts taken from court cases and victims themselves. In this paper I will identify wrongful convictions; what they are,…
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DNA profiling technologies have had a considerable impact on how forensic science and criminal investigation have been understood, carried out, and regulated in the last 25 years. Current methods of forensic DNA profiling (known also as DNA fingerprinting and DNA typing), based on Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) amplifications of a varying number of Short Tandem Repeat (STR) loci found at different locations on the human genome, are regularly described as constituting the “gold standard for identification”…
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experienced. (American Heritage Dictionary) When you put these two words together, you get witness misidentification which has been referred to as the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, with nearly 75% of the convictions overturned through DNA testing. There have been 260 exonerations across the country based on forensic DNA testing with 3 out of 4 involving cases of eyewitness misidentification. (Innocence Project 1999) In 1907 or 1908, Hugo Munsterberg published “On the Witness Stand”;…
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Intro to Criminal Justice 12/15/2011 The Death Penalty In the Unites States capital punishment is challenged as to if it is a moral or immoral action. Capital punishment is seen mostly in the south where it is commonly practiced, Texas being the leading state of executions since 1976. Many people have different opinions about this type of sentencing because there are always conflicts when it comes to deciding if this punishment is just for the criminal being charged…
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Capital Punishment One of the most controversial topics that affects the United States and other nations in general is the death penalty and if it really is a proper way to serve justice. What really is the death penalty? The death penalty is a legal process where an individual is sentenced to death as a way to punish him or her for his or her crime. The history of the death penalty is a long and brutal one. It dates back from the stoning and crucifixion killings of the B.C. era to today’s…
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