Innocent individuals are wrongly convicted for the following 8 reasons. First, eyewitness testimony can be inaccurate: this happens when an individual is convinced that he or she saw the defendant partake in criminal activity -- yet they are mistaken Continue Reading...
DNA Research "Unfortunately, the current Federal and State DNA collection and analysis system suffers from a variety of problems. In many cases public crime laboratories are overwhelmed by backlogs of unanalyzed DNA samples, samples that could be us Continue Reading...
She had been struck several times in the head with a Toney Penna golf club -- so ferociously that the club had shattered into multiple pieces -- and then stabbed in the neck with the broken shaft the club's handle and part of the shaft had vanished. Continue Reading...
In the present times many government officials do the same feeding of celebrities and common people. Anyone can become a target for a prosecutor's conviction record. The war on drugs has come as a bonanza for such U.S. attorneys. It is easy to get a Continue Reading...
Death Penalty Viewpoint Summary Convicted wrongfully for the murder of a man by the name Delbert Baker, Juan Roberto Melendez-Colon spent more than seventeen years on death row awaiting his execution. His eventual release came after Mr. Baker's rea Continue Reading...
, 2010, p. 428). In a country where Blacks represent only 13% of the population, as of 2010 they made up "twenty-eight of the fifty-seven (49%) of inmates on federal death row," Cohen writes on page 428. Speaking of the "geography of the federal dea Continue Reading...
An interesting and similar development in juvenile justice is the issue of life imprisonment as a cruel and unusual sentence for juvenile offenders. This issue is addressed by Mark Sherman (2009). Sherman states that Joe Sullivan was 13 years old w Continue Reading...
CSI, and its offshoots, CSI: Miami, and CSI: New York are popular American television dramas. The premier of the show was in 2000, and since then, interest in forensics, forensic science, and criminal justice in general has increased noticeably. The Continue Reading...
False Identification and Lineup Instructions Biased/Unbiased There are many instances where people have been wrongly accused only because they were falsely identified or either because there was not enough evidence present that would prove them guil Continue Reading...
Moreover, it is not necessarily even clear that capital punishment through humane means is worse than life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. The many prisoners who choose not to appeal their capital sentences and (especially) those wh Continue Reading...
Paradoxically, states with harsher criminal statutes and higher conviction rates tend to maintain fewer inmate developmental programs because high-volume prisons tend to be run on a for-profit basis that discourages "unnecessary" spending. The most Continue Reading...
Capital Punishment Debate The United States is one of the few industrialized nations in the world that still practices capital punishment. Most European nations and our northern neighbor Canada do not have the death penalty and in fact will not send Continue Reading...
Exclusionary Rule prevents the admission of evidence that was gathered in an unconstitutional way as specified by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which covers the parameters of searches and seizures. In fact, officers of the law who conduc Continue Reading...
Women and the Death Penalty Analysis An Analysis of the Historical Effect of Gender and Race on the Application of the Death Penalty in the United States While the debate over capital punishment continues to rage in the United States, questions of Continue Reading...
DNA in Trials The use of DNA in solving crimes has become widely accepted. DNA is now routinely presented in courts as evidence. DNA evidence had helped to identify crime victims and has helped put criminals behind bars. Additionally, DNA is now hel Continue Reading...
Capital Punishment in Texas Khalil, Samy. "Doing the impossible: Appellate reweighing of harm and mitigation in capital cases after Williams v. Taylor, with a special focus on Texas." Texas Law Review, 80(1): November 2001. Proquest Database. In th Continue Reading...
Legalizing Death Penalty Pro-death sentence In civilized states like the U.S.A., there are various means of punishment that are meted out against offenders and capital punishment is one of them. This goes on in chagrin of many pressure groups who a Continue Reading...
" This article puts forward the notion that when analyzing the "...relationships between minority groups and mainstream populations," the issue of whether the use of "formal control is applied fairly and consistently between these different groups" Continue Reading...
Hair is also in contact with chemicals in shampoos, and any dyes, gels, sprays or other cosmetics that may be placed on the hair (11). Since there is no standardized method for cleaning these external contaminants off of the hair prior to analysis, Continue Reading...
Ethics Forensic Science Legal and Ethical Issues in Forensic Science When most people think about the conviction of criminals, scientific evidence provides some of most credible evidence available. Scientific evidence is generally considered to be Continue Reading...
Proposition 34 California's Proposition 34 calls for the end of the death penalty and replaces death sentences with a sentence of life without parole. The proposition would: (1) repeal the death penalty and replace it with life imprisonment without Continue Reading...
These individuals are at risk of either confessing to crimes they did not commit or otherwise compromising their rights by virtue of inappropriate police interrogation techniques (Gudjonsson, 2003), a fact that has increasingly been recognized by th Continue Reading...
" (Linder, 1) By and large, Simpson's history would support the argument which might have been levied by forensics psychologists that, in addition to the circumstantial evidence connecting him to the murders and his suspect behavioral pattern at the Continue Reading...
Ultimate Punishment There are many topics which are controversial in the modern society. People constantly debate the merits of abortion or women's rights. Perhaps one of the most controversial topics for debate at present is over the ethical right Continue Reading...
Capital Punishment Currently, 38 states have legalized capital punishment statutes. In most states, the reinstatements of the death penalty were a response to public outcry over the perceived increase of violent crimes. There are now more than 3,000 Continue Reading...
The study also made an assessment of the 14 countries who eradicated the capital punishment. Murder went up by 7% from five years prior to the abolition period to five years following the abolition claimed by the study. Besides, researches were cond Continue Reading...
Perceived Media Credibility The media contributes immensely to the ideological beliefs held by an individual or group of people. The criminal justice system has, in recent years, embraced increasingly punitive crime-control policies with the intent Continue Reading...
org. "It is stacked again and again in the killers' favor and victims are an after-thought. It would be unlikely to ever lead to an execution in Massachusetts." Chief among the group's gripes is that the bill does not specifically call for death in Continue Reading...
Forensic Science and Police Work Forensic science has been playing a very crucial role in crime-solving activities of the investigative agencies for last many years. Its popularity has grown tremendously even though it cannot be trusted to formally Continue Reading...
Capital Punishment The issue of the death penalty and capital crime has become one of the dominant issues debated in contemporary culture. The reason for this is firstly a moral questioning of the right to take a life, even when it is in retribution Continue Reading...
He noted the uneven pattern, which he knew would make a match easier. Crime library's Kathleen Ramsland writes in the Most Famous Bite Mark, "In his expert testimony, Souviron described the bite mark on Lisa Levy as the jury examined the photograp Continue Reading...
Even for the crime of murder (without torture), the infliction of many tortures are worse than the crime. The moral justification for executing a murderer is much more obvious than the infliction of any punishment that is even worse from the perspec Continue Reading...
The court ruled that the police impaired her free choice by going beyond the evidence connecting her to the crime and introducing a completely extrinsic consideration in the form of an empty but plausible threat to take away something to which she a Continue Reading...
'" (Aspen, 1997, p.95). The primary step is to change the mindset of lawyers. They have to stop believing that they run the show and instead focus them as members of a team along with the judge to ensure that the legal system works for the innocent Continue Reading...
One of the most brutal crimes in North Carolina occurred in 1984 when a young white newspaper reporter, Deborah Sykes, was assaulted, raped, sodomized, and stabbed to death a few blocks from her workplace in Winston-Salem (Stern & Sundberg, 2006) Continue Reading...
Double Jeopardy The ancient common rule prohibition on multiple trials, known as the double jeopardy, is a procedural protection that forbids the prosecution of an offender for an unlawful offence. The offender, in this case, may have been previousl Continue Reading...
Much of the credit for these exonerations goes to teams of reporters, professors, students, and pro bono attorneys who were willing to listen to the claims of innocence from imprisoned defendants and who dedicated hundreds of hours of uncompensated Continue Reading...
