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American criminal justice system history
American criminal justice system history
Describe the criminal justice system
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In America we believe in the saying “you are innocent until proven guilty” but we the people are remarkably swift to point our fingers at someone we believe that committed the crime. This habit is frequently displayed within our criminal justice system when a crime is committed we quickly assume it has something to do with the first person we can link the crime to. We tend to naturally feel sympathy for the victim therefore; if the individual accuses one for a crime the jury has no reason not to believe the victim. Society does not bother to care if the individual did not do the crime because as long as someone was caught and accused of the wrongdoing, then we the people can proceed on with our lives knowing we punished someone for the crime …show more content…
If that does not occur to the reader as an issue than factoring in the main problem of the topic where innocent people die because of false accusation will. In addition, this book review will include a brief review of the qualifications of the authors, overview of the subject and the quality of the book, and as well as my own personal thoughts on the book. In the novel Actual Innocence: When Justice Goes Wrong and How to Make It Right authors Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld, and Jim Dwyer expose the flaws of the criminal justice system through case histories where innocent men were put behind bars and even on death row because of the miscarriages of justice. Initially, the text promotes and galvanizes progressive change in the legal …show more content…
Authors Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld founded the innocence project at a law school in New York City, which has assisted in the exoneration of an astonishing number of innocent individuals. As legal aid lawyers, they blithely engaged in conflicts that implicated
Curtis McGhee is 17-year-old Black male who lived in Iowa. In 1977, he was charged for the murder of John Schweer who worked as a security guard at a car dealership. Later on in 1978, he was sentenced to life in prison for a murder that he never committed. Later on in 2011, McGhee was exonerated based on the police file and court’s transcript that was found, and which indicated that McGhee was a innocent man behind bars, and he was serving time for a crime that he never took in part of committing. This case of Curtis McGhee raises a question on our criminal justice system and it leads us to confirm that miscarriages of justice do occur, and there should be various reforms that should be made so these miscarriages can be prevented from occurring in the future.
This is surprising because the legal system in the United States is “innocent before guilty”. If an innocent man is found guilty then I believe the court should provide their resources to that individual. For example, the United States main form of government is democracy but when the court system makes a fatal error they are not responsible for their own mistakes. Additionally, in the film After Innocence, they focus on questions that ask about human rights and society moral
Wrongful conviction is an issue that has plagued the Canadian Justice System since it came to be. It is an issue that is hard to sort out between horrific crimes and society’s desire to find truth and justice. Incidences of wrongful conviction hit close to home right here in Saskatchewan as well as across the entire nation. Experts claim “each miscarriage of justice, however, deals a blow to society’s confidence in the legal justice system” (Schmalleger, Volk, 2014, 131). Professionals in the criminal justice field such as police, forensic analyst, and prosecutors must all be held accountable for their implications in wrongful convictions. There are several reasons for wrongful convictions such as racial bias, false confessions, jailhouse informants, eyewitness error, erroneous forensic science, inappropriate, professional and institutional misconduct and scientific limitations that society possessed prior to the technological revolution (Roberts, Grossman, 2012, 253 – 259). The introduction of more advanced DNA analysis has been able to clear names and prevent these incidences from occurring as often. As well as the formation of foundations such as The Association of Defense for the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC). Unfortunately, mistakes made in the Canadian Justice System have serious life altering repercussions for everyone that is involved. Both systematic and personal issues arise that require deeper and more intense analysis.
The New York Times bestseller book titled Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case examines the O.J. Simpson criminal trial of the mid-1990s. The author, Alan M. Dershowitz, relates the Simpson case to the broad functions and perspectives of the American criminal justice system as a whole. A Harvard law school teacher at the time and one of the most renowned legal minds in the country, Dershowitz served as one of O.J. Simpson’s twelve defense lawyers during the trial. Dershowitz utilizes the Simpson case to illustrate how today’s criminal justice system operates and relates it to the misperceptions of the public. Many outside spectators of the case firmly believed that Simpson committed the crimes for which he was charged for. Therefore, much of the public was simply dumbfounded when Simpson was acquitted. Dershowitz attempts to explain why the jury acquitted Simpson by examining the entire American criminal justice system as a whole.
At the end of this article the board poses the questions, “How many more [innocent people] remain on death row today? Can the American people be assured that none will be killed by the state?” This serves to put the thought in reader’s heads that maybe many more people on death row are innocent. Using this device the board hopes that after reading this article people will question their own viewpoints on this issue, consider the repercussions of the death penalty, and perhaps even share the article and start a discussion about it with their friends and
The O.J. Simpson trial, as it became known, opened on January 24, 1995 and concluded October 3 the same year. Over the span of the trial, the prosecution team presented 72 witnesses including friends and family of Nicole, friends of O.J., and a 9-1-1 dispatcher. Given the trial’s notable and well-known defendant, those involved in the trial gained lifetime fame. To this day I can still recall the names Judge Lance Ito, Marcia Clark (Deputy District Attorney), and Simpson’s defense counsel, “The Dream Team,” which consisted of a number of high-profile attorneys, most notably Robert Shapiro and Johnnie Cochran. I chose this case because it left a lasting impression in my memory, as well as a lasting impression in our nation’s memory. There have been many high-profile cases over the years, but this case was not predicted to end the way it di...
In other words, “Four percent of defendants sentenced to death are innocent” and “If all innocent people who were given death sentences [were] to be cleared of their offenses, the exoneration rate would rise from the actual rate of those released – 1.6% – to at least 4.1%” (Pilkington). Often times in death penalty trials, prosecutors withhold exculpatory information or include false testimonies and unreliable witnesses in order to comply with the public's desire to blame a scapegoat in a timely matter. America’s legal system lacks the ability to function flawlessly on all accounts. Every defendant and every case differentiates in such large extremes that it is impossible for one system of death to justly exist, especially with the state governments abusing their judicial
"The Innocent and the Death Penalty." Innocenceproject.org/. Innocence Project, n.d. Web. 07 Dec. 2013. .
Walsh, James, and Dan Browning. "Presumed Guilty Until Proved Innocent." Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN). 23 Jul 2000: A1+. SIRS Issues Researcher.
When the victim does not fit the ideal victim attributes which society has familiarised themselves with, it can cause complications and confusion. Experts have noticed there is already a significant presence of victim blaming, especially for cases involving both genders. The fear of being blamed and rejected by the public is prominent in all victims. Victim blaming proclaims the victim also played a role in the crime by allowing the crime to occur through their actions (Kilmartin and Allison, 2017, p.21). Agarin (2014, p.173) underlines the problem of victim blaming is due to the mass of social problems and misconceptions within society. The offender can have “an edge in court of public opinion” if victim blaming exists, resulting in the prevention of the case accomplishing an effective deduction in court (Humphries, 2009, p.27). Thus, victims will become more reluctant to report offences because of their decrease in trust in the police and criminal justice system, leading to the dark figure of
It has been demonstrated the one in seven people, or fourteen percent, who are put on death row were innocent of their convicted crimes. The American society is outraged when an innocent person is killed, the fourteen percent would not have to suffer if the death penalty was illegal throughout the country. There is no way to tell how the more one thousand people, possibly more, executed since 1976 may also have been innocent, courts do not generally entertain claims of innocence when the defendant is dead. Wrongful convictions and executions can be made from many of the following factors: mistaken eyewitness testimony, faulty forensic science, fabricated testimony or testimony from jailhouse informants, grossly incompetent lawyers, false confessions, police or prosecutorial misconduct and racial bias. Many of the people who are resentenced from death to life imprisonment may be innocent and rotting behind bars, since without the imminent threat of death, no one will take up their case to exonerate them. Along with the con of the death of innocent people, the elimination of the death penalty proves as a more effective way to deter
The death row not only consists of murderers, but it could also include a large number of innocent people whose lives are at risk. In the past 35 years, over 130 people have been taken out of the death row because of new evidence proving their innocence. This shows that the death penalty process is very faulty and contains many errors when it comes to convicting a person of a crime. There was an average of three exonerations per year from 1973 to 1999 which soon rose to an average of five per year between 2000 and 2007 ( Cary, Mary Kate). The ...
Tyler, Tom R. “Viewing CSI and the Threshold of Guilt: Managing truth and Justice in Reality
Pennington, Ken. "Innocent Until Proven Guilty: The Origins of a Legal Maxim." Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Syracuse University, n.d. Web. 05 Jan. 2014. .
...sults show that in most cases, innocent people are harmed and convicted for no truthful reason at all.