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Wrongful convicted and the criminal justice system
Criminal justice system wrongful convictions
Wrongful convictions research paper
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Before the sun had broken on June 6th, 1996 Darlie Routier (26) of Rowlett Texas was pleading with the dispatch operator for immediate help. In this almost 6 minute long call (in which the police get there in 3 minutes and about 45 seconds in) Mrs. Routier seems to be in complete shock, as she begs the operator to quickly send police. However, in between brief periods of hysterical breathing and unintelligible sobs she soberly remarks how she picked up the suspected murder weapon and this could have tainted any fingerprints that were there before. It was her attitude that landed her in the media’s glare, however it was the evidence in this case, all circumstantial, that landed her on Texas’s Death Row. In this paper I aim to highlight and elaborate
Timothy Brian Cole, a Texas Tech student, was convicted of a sexual assault he did not commit in 1985. He was later found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. The real rapist was Jerry Johnson, who had a psychological breakdown and kept his mouth shut for nine years. Cole was a victim of the police and the flaws in the criminal justice system. Johnson tried to contact Cole, but had no success.
In the article “Cole Case,” the author, Jena Williams writes about Timothy Cole, a falsely accused man charged with 25 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Known as the Texas Tech Rapes, four women were raped from 1984 to 1985. As police searched for the rapist, Cole ran into an undercover cop on campus and told her his name and where he lived. Although not suspected to be the rapist, police ran his license plates and discovered Cole recently filed it as being robbed. Claiming to help him by investigating the robbery, police took Cole’s photo and placed it in a lineup of other mug shots.
On March 4, 1974 in Lake Walsh, Florida a nine-year-old boy was taken from his home, and dragged to a baseball field and raped. When he was questioned by the police he said his attacker was between the age of seventeen or eighteen, with bushy sideburns and a mustache. The boy’s uncle said that description sounds like a man named Jimmy Bain. When the police showed the victim the lineup photos, the victim pointed out Bain, but out of the six suspects only Jimmy Bain and one other man had sideburns. On March the 5, 1974 at midnight Jimmy Bain was questioned by the police.
Even when Michael’s new defense team, through the innocence project, found a crime that was eerily similar to the method of murder and subsequent events to the one that Michael was convicted of, the new prosecutor in Williamson County fought hard to keep DNA testing from taking place, even stating that they objected to the testing now because the defense hadn’t requested it before (Morton, 2014). There was further evidence of ineffectiveness in that the coroner who’d changed his estimated time of death between the autopsy and trial, had come under scrutiny for his findings in this case, as well as several others, with claims of gross errors “including one case where he came to the conclusion that a man who’d been stabbed in the back had committed suicide” (Morton, 2014). This was only one of the many injustices that were committed against Michael Morton throughout his trial. In August of 2006, the defense was finally granted permission to perform DNA testing on the items that had been taken from his wife’s body (Morton, 2014). Although this testing did not reveal any information about the guilty party, it did at least give Michael the knowledge that Chris was not sexually violated before or after her death (Morton,
In the January 29, The Stanford Daily editorial Stanford, California, it debates the different essential of the principle of morality and identified Brock Turner had applied a use of force in raping an unconscious woman behind the dumpster. Furthermore, the young man attended Stanford University and participated in his college swim team dreamt of partaking in the Olympus. The victim heartfelt statement during the trial is disregarded because he comes from a class of privilege and is a man. Not to mention, Brock Turner’s father wrote a letter to expressing the universalizability to court saying, “my son’s life shouldn’t be ruined over 20 minutes of action (Dreher,Rod).” Therefore, Aaron Persky who is a California judge implemented an ethical decision that contemplated the clarity around both the specific choice and decision then declared a six months sentenced ruling.
In February, DNA samples from the Scarborough victim’s rape kits matched Paul. Police came to Karla to talk about it and she gave in. Karla got an attorney and was soon in court, she presented herself as a young woman who was too scared to leave or stop her abusive husband. When asked to talk about the crimes, she left out Tammy and only talked about Mahaffy and French. Karla said she was a reluctant participate who comforted the girls in their last moments.
Michael McAlister was convicted of abduction of a female victim at knifepoint from an apartment complex laundry room at night time in Richmond, VA and rape. The female victim was unable to definitively describe the suspect who attacked and raped her as she could only describe her attacker as someone wielding a knife, a plaid shirt, and she explained that she was only able to get a partial glimpse of her attacker because he was wearing a stocking cap over his face. Her attacker would be later described as a 6 foot tall white male with shoulder length blond hair and a beard; a description that would match Michael McAlister’s appearance. Police then proceeded to ask McAlister to take a picture wearing a plaid shirt for the photo line-up.
Print. This autobiography goes into detail about how Jennifer Thompson was raped at knifepoint by a man who broke into her apartment while she slept. Jennifer was able to escape and eventually identified her attacker, Ronald Cotton. Ronald insisted that she was mistaken.
While the Central Park Five now refute their own confessions, Coulter stresses that “All those charged with the jogger's rape gave detailed, corroborated, videotaped confessions, after full Miranda warnings, four of the five in the presence of an adult relative” (Coulter). With adults present and videotaping, there was no reason for the boys to give false confessions. These confessions alone are powerful enough to convict the Central Park Five, and during that time the defense had very weak arguments to counter the confessions. In the courtroom, “the showing of the videotape yesterday was regarded as the most damaging blow to the defense in the four weeks of testimony thus far”, and it set the course towards conviction (Sullivan). Any jury listening and watching a youth give such a damning confession would doubt the notion of innocence.
In 1982 a woman named rebecca williams a nineteen year old mother of three was raped and stabbed over 30 times in her virgina apartmant she could only describe her attacker as a black man acting alone then she passed away later that week about a year after the incident took place a man named earl washington jr was arrested in a nearby fauquier county for burglary and malicious wounding it took two whole days of questioning the police said he had confessed to five different crimes including rebecca's murder of the crimes 4 were thrown out for insufficient evidence however he did confess to killing and raping rebecca though he admitted to it he describes a different story he didn't know her address her race and said she was short when she was
The victim describes to the judge how on March 1997, she came home from a friend's wedding party where she was kidnapped at gunpoint from her condominium parking lot near Quail Corners shopping center. Vaughan then raped her in her car and forced her to withdraw money from an ATM machine, then left her on a deserted road and stole her car. Word of a serial rapist terrified Charlotte residents in early 1998, until a fingerprint at one of the crime scenes led investigators to Vaughan. Vaughan turned himself in and confessed to each crime, investigators said. The 21-year-old Charlotte man pleaded guilty to the rape charges and 33 other crimes, including kidnappings, sex offenses, robberies, burglaries, house and car break-ins, larcenies and credit card theft.
At 1:30am on April 19, 1989, Trisha Meili, a bank investor was found brutally beaten. She was found to have been raped, and cut so severely that it resulted in a seventy percent loss of total blood in her body. Five suspects that were boys were convicted and charged of the crime. Although, there was an account of a taped confession from these boys, after extended prison sentences, an individual confessed, and they were exonerated. However, before they were found guilty and sentenced, during the midst of interrogations, it was evident that while on trial, there was no actual way to understand if these boys were coerced in giving falsified confessions.
In this case, the defense attorney used the victim’s dress and behavior as the main arguments, aimed to change the public’s opinion in favor of Tyson and to make society blame the victim for what has happened to her. However, the prosecutors provided the factual evidence of violence: the physician who examined the victim confirmed the presence of abrasions. Furthermore, prosecutors emphasized that Washington was a naive 18-year old woman, who could not expect the rape entering Tyson’s hotel room. But even these facts, taken into consideration by those, who blamed Washington, did not change their opinion. That, in turn, proves the strength of the rape myth, because the part of the society still considers that if the 18-year old woman enters male’s room at night, she is definitely going to have sex with
On January 18th, 2015, two men riding their bikes to a party at the Kappa Alpha fraternity house in Stanford, California when they saw what appeared to be a couple having sex. The two men, Peter Jonsson and Carl-Fredrik Arndt, noticed that the woman looked asleep or unconscious and that “something looked weird” about the situation. After confrontation, the suspected assailant moved away from the woman and began running away from the area. They asked the victim, Emily Doe, if she was okay, but she was unresponsive. Arndt and Jonsson then chased after Turner, pinning him down for a few minutes until the officers arrived.
