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Convicting The Innocent Summary

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Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong In Brandon L. Garrett 's book, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong, he makes it very clear how wrongful convictions occur and how these people have spent many years in prison for crimes they never committed. Garrett presents 250 cases of innocent people who were convicted wrongfully because the prosecutors opposed testing the DNA of those convicted. Garrett provided simple statistics such as graphs, percentages, and charts to help the reader understand just how great of an impact this was. These wrongful convictions occur because the criminal justice system had many flaws. It was not only the system that had flaws but also the people on the board. The prosecutors "opposed testing, arguing that it would make no difference" whether or not those being convicted got DNA tested (Garrett 1). Confessions was one of the causes that often led to the downfall of those innocently convicted. In the case of Jeffrey Deskovic, the police officer was supposed to conduct the polygraph examination. The detective for this case explained that he did not actually conduct the examination but only tested "Deskovic 's truthfulness" and to "get …show more content…

Brandon L. Garrett used a lot of evidence to support his claims in Convicting The Innocent. Garrett used many facts to support the claims he made and represented his findings with many charts, graphs, and percentages. He reviewed police reports, interrogation transcripts and recordings, prosecution files, trial transcripts, and court opinions. Just like Garrett 's Convicting the Innocent, William Stuntz 's, The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, he talks about how prosecutors now decide whom to punish and how severely they will be punished. Garrett wrote about this in his book about how the judge and jury believed the prosecutors even though before the trial they recalled a different image of their attacker then the image they have of them during

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