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there Justice for All Racial Minorities?
Black people are more likely to be wrongfully accused, have less access to advanced education, and are low in America's economy. There is serious racial injustice in America and people are continually ignoring it.
Firstly, in 2001, eighteen-year-old Marvin Anderson was wrongly accused and convicted of rape, sodomy, abduction, and robbery. He was sentenced to 210 years in prison, “My whole body went numb” Anderson told CNN. Anderson was later released after fifteen years, it took 4 more to be exonerated. Marvin Anderson is only one of many innocent black men to be convicted. Reports show it's more likely for black people to be wrongly convicted than white people and spend more time in prison waiting for exoneration.
African Americans are only 13 percent of the population in America, but almost half have been wrongfully convicted of crimes since 1989. Innocent black people are seven times more likely to be convicted than innocent white men. Partly because homicide rates are slightly higher with black people than with whites, so black men and women are more likely suspected and convicted of crimes they didn’t commit.
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This is where you get “They all the look the same.” Psychologist have studied many factors that question the accuracy of eyewitness testimonies. One finding is that eyewitnesses are typically better at accurately identifying someone of their own race. When the witness and suspect are of two different ethnic groups, the chance of incorrectly identifying them goes up by 50 percent. In one analysis of 77 mistaken identifications, 35 percent of cases involved blacks misidentified by whites, whereas 28 percent of cases involved white misidentified by
“A report by the United States General Accounting Office in 1990 concluded that 82 percent of the empirically valid studies on the subject show that the race of the victim has an impact on capital charging decisions or sentencing verdicts or both” (86).
This paper will consider eye witness testimony and its place in convicting accused criminals. Psychology online (2013) defines “eye witness testimony” as a statement from a person who has witnessed a crime, and is capable of communicating what they have seen, to a court of law under oath. Eye witness testimonies are used to convict accused criminals due to the first hand nature of the eye witnesses’ observations. There are however many faults within this system of identification. Characteristics of the crime is the first issue that will be discussed in this paper, and the flaws that have been identified. The second issue to be discussed will be the stress impact and the inability to correctly identify the accused in a violent or weapon focused crime. The third issue to be discussed is inter racial identification and the problems faced when this becomes a prominent issue. The fourth issue will be time lapse, meaning, the time between the crime and the eye witness making a statement and how the memory can be misconstrued in this time frame. To follow this will be the issue of how much trust jurors-who have no legal training-put on to the eye witness testimony, which may be faltered. This paper references the works of primarily Wells and Olsen (2003) and Rodin (1987) and Schmechel et al. (2006) it will be argued that eye witness testimony is not always accurate, due to many features; inter racial identification, characteristics of the crime, response latency, and line up procedures therefore this paper will confirm that eyewitness testimonies should not be utilised in the criminal ju...
The majority of our prison population is made up of African Americans of low social and economic classes, who come from low income houses and have low levels of education. The chapter also discusses the amount of money the United States loses yearly due to white collar crime as compared to the cost of violent crime. Another main point was the factors that make it more likely for a poor person to be incarcerated, such as the difficulty they would have in accessing adequate legal counsel and their inability to pay bail. This chapter addresses the inequality of sentencing in regards to race, it supplies us with NCVS data that shows less than one-fourth of assailants are perceived as black even though they are arrested at a much higher rate. In addition to African Americans being more likely to be charged with a crime, they are also more likely to receive harsher punishments for the same crimes- which can be seen in the crack/cocaine disparities. These harsher punishments are also shown in the higher rates of African Americans sentenced to
The last reason people are wrongly accused is because of their race. Whether people are African American, Caucasian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, or any other race, they get wrongly accused. Tom in To Kill A Mockingbird was wrongly accused just because he was African American and nobody wanted to see what really happened. Tom should have never been accused for what he did. Mayella kissed Tom and accused him of something else. “She kissed a black man” (Lee 393). Mayella should have dropped the case and admitted that her father had beaten her. Of course he was left-handed after
A study of race and jury trials in Florida published last year in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, found that “conviction rates for black and white defendants are similar when there is at least some representation of blacks in the jury pool.” But all-white juries are a very different story—they convict blacks 16% more often than they convict whites (2).
According to Innocent Project (N.D.), officers who were white interrogated Marvin a black man, and the officers automatically made Marvin a possible suspect for a rape case and he was sentenced to 210 years in prison. In addition, Marvin was convicted of a false identity that was created by the cops. He served 15 years in prison before his charges were overturned. DNA evidence was the key element that overturned Marvin's charges. He was identified as the only black man who committed the crime.
Even though racism has always been a problem since the beginning of time, recently in the United States, there has been a rise in discrimination and violence has been directed towards the African American minority primarily from those in the white majority who believe they are more superior, especially in our criminal justice system. There are many different reasons for the ethnic disparities in the criminal justice system between the majority and the minority, but some key reasons are differential involvement, individual racism, and institutional racism to why racial disparities exist in
Statistical accounts show consistent accord in that African Americans are disproportionately arrested over whites. What is much less lucid, however, is the real reason for this disparity. Both criminologists and political scientists alike have expounded remarkably polarized explanations for this phenomenon. Exemplary of this are two arguments as developed as they are diametrically opposed, that of William Wilbanks and that of Samuel Walker, Cassia Spohn and Miriam DeLone.
Many inequalities exist within the justice system that need to be brought to light and addressed. Statistics show that African American men are arrested more often than females and people of other races. There are some measures that can and need to be taken to reduce the racial disparity in the justice system.
These statistics demonstrate that racialized mass incarceration exists in the U.S. There are a few reasons why African Americans are discriminated against by the legal system. The primary cause is inequitable protection by the law and unequal enforcement of it. Unequal protection is when the legal system offers less protection to African Americans that are victimized by whites. It is unequal enforcement because discriminatory treatment of African Americans that are labeled as criminal suspects is more accepted.
2010, “Racial Disparities in Sentencing: Implications for the Criminal Justice System and the African American Community”, African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies 4(1): 1-31, in this Albonetti’s study is discussed in which it was found that minority status alone accounted for an additional sentence length of “one to seven months.” African American defendants were “likely to receive pretrial release but were more likely to be convicted, and be given harsher sentences after conviction than white defendants charged with the same crimes.” One of the reasons behind this are the sentencing laws, it is seen that these laws are designed in a way that they tend to be harsher towards a certain group of people, generally towards the people of color than others thus leading to inequality with the sentencing
There are many factors that can contribute to faulty eyewitness testimony, including own-race bias, focus on a weapon, stress, length of exposure to the stranger, eyewitness confidence, and events that occur after the incident, such as suggestive police procedures (V...
The statistics say that African Americans are twelve percent of the U.S. population, but are 43 percent of the prisoners on death row. Although blacks make up 50 percent of all murder victims, 83 percent of the victims in death penalty cases are white. Since 1976, only ten executions have involved a white defendant who killed a black victim.... ... middle of paper ...
Eyewitness testimony is especially vulnerable to error when the question is misleading or when there’s a difference in ethnicity. However, using an eyewitness as a source of evidence can be risky and is rarely 100% accurate. This can be proven by the theory of the possibility of false memory formation and the question of whether or not a memory can lie. For instance, a group of students saw the face of a young man with straight hair, then heard a description of the face supposedly written by another witness, one that wrongly mentioned light, curly hair. When they reconstructed the face using a kit of facial features, a third of their reconstructions contained the misleading detail, whereas only 5 percent contained it when curly hair was not mentioned (Page 359). This situation shows how misleading information from other sources can be profoundly altered.
In Wisconsin, there are 2,542 black adults and 563 hispanics incarcerated comparing to a low number of 221 whites. (www.sentencingproject.org). In society, racism has labeled african americans as criminals, thefts, killers, and cold hearted. If there was a robbery and the cops had two suspects, one was black and the other was white. The cops are more likely to chose the black male over the white male.