Criminal Justice System: Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Guilty Until Proven Innocent In recent discussions of the criminal justice system, a controversial issue has been discussed on whether it is morally correct to keep incarcerated people who are not guilty of a crime, but evidence proves otherwise. Many cases have occurred where people are incarcerated for a crime in which they never committed, due to misleading evidence and malinformation. Even though the innocent people make attempts to prove their innocence, they are often not able to due to incentivized informants, inadequate defense, misapplication of forensic science, government misconduct, false confessions, and misidentified eyewitness. Wrongful convictions are becoming excessively common and has become a big trend within the justice

Many times these claims are made to protect from secret threats made by the guilty one. When guilty people are desperate, they will often go to others and force them to claim guilty, and in return, the actual guilty one says they will not harm others whom are close to them. Another reason innocent people confess, Robin Warder says, is because “After being subjected to many hours of interrogation, suspects can reach a breaking point where they ultimately decide to tell the authorities what they want to hear.” When one confesses that they are guilty, if they are lying, but there is still some evidence that the person was near or at the crime scene at the time, that evidence will be looked for, and other pieces of evidence will often be avoided. This bias has caused many to go to jail solely due to a bias in searching. Warder writes about one of the most well known cases of it’s time, “The Central Park Five,” where a woman named Trisha Meili in Central Park, New York, was raped and beaten, and put into a coma. When Trisha woke up, she had no memory of who did it, and since the five youth, Anton McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, Yusef Salaam, and Kharey Wise, had been in the park that evening, they were found guilty and sent to jail each with sentences of five to thirteen years. Later after all of them were released and registered as sex-offenders, the case was reviewed, and no evidence of these five were found on the scene, and evidence of another man by the name of Matias Reyes, who finally confessed that he had raped Trisha, and claimed to have done it alone. Even though the “Central Park Five” confessed to the crime, they really had nothing to do with the crime, and were intimidated by the officials, and gave up on trying to convince them of their innocence(Warder). According to Amelia Hritz, Michal Blau, and Sara Tomezsko,