Ivic 2 Romeo Phillion: 31 Years Behind Bars "It was all fabrication, perjury, bias, promises and coercing. That 's how they built their case. There is not one piece of evidence that points at me; it all points the other way." – Romeo Phillion Miscarriages of justice, where an innocent individual is wrongfully convicted of a crime, were, until recently, thought to occur infrequently. Although the number of wrongful convictions is an unknown figure, it has been said to be approximately one to five percent of convictions in America each year, where one percent averages out to about 6000 cases (Anderson, Anderson & Marquis, 2001).…
Wrongful Conviction On the morning of August 10, 1984, Deborah Sykes was brutally stabbed, sexually assaulted, and eventually killed in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The man convicted for her murder was Darryl Hunt, a 19 year old boy that would go on to spend 20 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Hunt was convicted based on eye-witness testimony and informants, but was later exonerated based on DNA evidence that matched a man that was caught just a few months after the murder took place. This case is an exemplar of the strength of DNA evidence and the fragility of eyewitness testimony.…
Introduction There are many people who have been accused of crimes they have not committed. Youngblood and African American male. He was wrongfully convicted of sexual assault, kidnapping, and child molestation of the young Latino boy name David Leon. At the time of the crime Larry was 30 years old. And the incident happened in the state of Arizona, on October 29th, 1983.…
Donohue (2014) analyzed these five reasons explaining why some are being convicted for capital crimes. Donohue(2014) findings were helped by attorney’s that handled these categories of crime in outgoing cases that used these factors, which determined that race has nothing to do with the conviction. Through the two hundred and five cases they incorporated victims’ pain from the crime, victim’s identity, crimes were planned or had intent and whether there was various victim’s involved in the crime. Various states have started moving away from capital punishment.…
To research wrongful convictions is to delve into the Innocence Project, a non-profit organization founded in 1992. Their goal is to free and exonerate wrongfully convicted individuals…
The power of juries has proven to play a large factor in wrongful convictions, although the jury selection process is meant to select people who won’t nullify or wrongfully convict it still…
Furthermore, Henkel, Coffman and Dailey also conducted a study in regards to false confessions but more focused on the people’s attitudes and beliefs about such issue. The purpose of the study was to examine the ability of jurors in regards of false confessions and their potential biases in the matter. Henkel, Coffman and Dailey conducted their study by administering two different surveys, each survey took approximately 10-15 minutes. One survey was to measure the knowledge, beliefs, and attitudes about false confessions in regards to issues in the criminal justice system, the second survey was just a continuation of the first one regarding aspects of the criminal justice and false confessions as a strong indicator of guilt. One half of the…
If the goals of the Innocence Movement are to identify innocent defendants and prevent future wrongful convictions, political dissidence must be considered as a separate cause. The reality is that defendants, known to actively oppose social injustice, are indicted, convicted, and given extremely asinine sentences for crimes based on lack luster evidence. The highlighted case studies confirm that factually innocent defendants are at risk of wrongful convictions because of their political affiliations. Political dissidence was a participatory factor prior to, during, and after their trials.…
In Illusory Causation in the Courtroom, published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, G. Daniel Lassiter explores illusory causation in terms of the role it plays in courtrooms. This is the possibility of the effect that camera perspective has on jurors’ judgements on the suspect’s guilt, whether it was a voluntary confession and sentence recommendations. The Death Penalty Information Center had documented cases in which death row inmates were released due to new evidence and in many cases, the cause of wrongful convictions can be traced back to the interrogation phase in which false confessions are extracted. Many experts believe that the solution to suspects being coerced into wrongful confessions are videotaping confessions.…
At Kidwell & Gallagher, potential clients for wrongful death cases can speak to accident lawyers with years of experience. Attorneys Craig W. Kidwell and Barbara Gallagher Esq. of Elko, Nevada encourage individuals to learn more about how to receive fair financial compensation in the proper jurisdictions. Wrongful death cases are cases that may be brought through the courts against a business or another person when someone dies. The survivors bring forth a wrongful death suit during which they seek financial compensation for the loss of the deceased which may include funeral expenses, medical expenses, and lost wages to help in protecting the family members of the individual who was affected due to an intentional act or negligence.…
In conclusion, both an eyewitness and the reasonable person provide standards in the court of law that are used in determining whether to convict a suspect, as demonstrated by the eyewitness in the State v. Hendersen (2011) case. Unfortunately, both standards are based upon subjective perception. For example, human error in memory processing may decrease the accuracy in an eyewitness testimony. Research should be done on individual interpretation as it relates to an eyewitness or the reasonable person in order to prevent any wrongful…
In the book “Ordinary Injustice” by Amy Bach, chapter four titled “Show Trial”, describes a number of different cases showing wrongful convictions being processed through the criminal justice system based off of false confessions. In Chicago, there was a nine-year-old girl named Lisa Cabassa was found raped and killed in the back of an alley a couple miles from her home. Two months after the rape and murder of Lisa, a witness named Judy called the police to give her testimony on the crime. Her statement consisted of her telling the police the people involved with the crime were named Michael Evans and Paul Terry, whom were teenagers from the neighborhood. She spotted them with Lisa that night.…
Confirmation Bias When an investigation for a case begins, the law enforcement is trying to gather the most evidence that will help in solving the case. This could include many things such as physical evidence or eyewitness testimonies. Sometimes making the legal system unfavorable at times for many reasons such as, evidence getting lost or destroyed or the eye witnesses not being able to remeber correctly. The public and the law enforcers are constantly looking for new ways to improve the criminal justice system as times goes on and change. This paper will help to understand some changes that can happen to improve confirmation bias and how to implement these changes into the criminal justice system.…
There are three factors that can lead someone to be wrongfully convicted: false confessions made by the innocent person, inaccurate systems used by the criminal justice system, and lack of DNA evidence. The first cause is false confession. A false confession is an admission of guilt in a crime in which the confessor…
Jon B. Gould, J.D., Ph.D., a professor and the director of the Washington Institute for Public and International Affairs Research at American University and his team of researchers conducted a three year, first of its kind, large-scale empirical study Predicting Erroneous Convictions: A Social Science Approach to Miscarriages of Justice employing social scientific methods. It was funded by NIJ, and an NIJ video features Gould discussing wrongful convictions. After identifying 460 cases employing sophisticated analytical methods matched with a qualitative review of the cases from a panel of experts, 10 statistically significant factors were identified that distinguish a wrongful conviction from a “near miss” (a case in which an innocent defendant was acquitted or had charges dismissed before trial) NIJ…