Wrongful Convictions Research Paper

Many people get wrongfully convicted based on their appearance, and yet many of them may not get justice, there is still hope for the ones who do get out and have been wrongfully convicted. Most of the people who get wrongfully convicted are due to official misconduct. Official misconduct is when evidence is falsified, eyewitness misidentification, or witnesses are paid to say certain things. Eyewitness misidentification is one of the main reasons 72% of the reasons as to why people are wrongfully misled. It’s important to know the main leading cause of wrongful convictions. People of color are usually targeted more for crimes they haven’t been involved in, this can be traced back to racism against people of color and shows a bias in the criminal …show more content…
For example, “All-white or nearly all-white juries make wrongful convictions more likely because, compared to diverse juries, they spend less time deliberating, are less skilled at accurately assessing the reliability of evidence, and are more likely to apply racial stereotypes in decision-making.” The evidence is very valuable because it shows that race plays an important part in anyone in the courtroom deciding on the convict. When the jury is made up of all white people and they decide on their decision against a person of color, they may automatically put the convict at a position lower than themselves and automatically presume that because of their race they “had” the motives to commit the crime and focus more on the convicts race rather than taking the evidence into account. Some may argue that my previous statement was wrong and that a group of white men may not judge a convict based on their race. It may be true if the white people in the jury are open-minded and can go on with the trial without judging the race of the …show more content…
It supports my claim because it proves that there are many people with the mindset that white people can never be capable of such crimes, but can be done by African Americans. Some may argue that no one has this mindset anymore, and it was only older generations. In actuality, many people still have the mindset that African Americans are bad and mean no good, which leads them to believe that they’re criminals. Additionally, the people in the LatinX community are also targeted and wrongfully convicted. In this case, a contributing factor is fear, “Innocent Latinx immigrants are more vulnerable to pleading guilty to crimes they didn’t commit under threat of deportation, and law enforcement officers have used witnesses’ immigration statuses to manipulate their testimony.”. There are many contributing factors as to why the people in the Latinx community are wrongfully convicted because of language barriers and fear. As previously mentioned, when a person has certain accommodations they may automatically be seen as less, and automatically

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