Johnny Briscoe Research Papers

On October 21, 1982, the innocence project reports that “a man broke into a woman’s apartment in a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri…threatened the woman with a knife, stole her jewelry, and then brutally raped her” (The Innocence Project). That man was believed by St. Louis authorities to be a man named Johnny Briscoe. The rapist himself stated several times to the woman that his own name was Johnny Briscoe, as he was smoking a cigarette with her after he brutally assaulted her. Calls to that house from the rapist were even traced back to a pay phone near Briscoe’s residence, per The Innocent Project’s report (The Innocence Project). Therefore, when Johnny Briscoe was brought in, pointed out in a lineup by the victim, and brought into trial, it

The brevity of forensic evidence pointed to a man that would be like Briscoe, but not him indefinitely; the forensic scientist, for instance, upon examining hair found at the scene stated that the hair was similar to Briscoe’s qualitatively, but had no quantitative evidence to prove the relation to the two hairs and therefore founded his conclusions on an inherent prejudice (The Innocence Project). In the end, after many long years, forensic evidence that was deemed by officials to be no longer existent was found, tested, and was found to prove Briscoe’s innocence all along. This case cost Briscoe 23 years of his life, and while faulty evidence was one of the causes of his wrongful conviction, if this case was viewed from the lens of sociology then many other factors begin to play a role in this

Symbolic Interactionism states that we create meaning for objects and concepts, and that the meaning of things may change depending on even one simple factor. This case could have gone very differently, and probably a case similar to this already has, if not for one simple thing, and that is that Johnny Briscoe was a poor, uneducated, black man. Because he was a poor black man, the police system assumed his guilt even more than if he was white, having the stereotype in the back of their minds that this was just another black criminal from the poorer side of St. Louis. The courts also convicted him because he was black, dismissing his alibi because of their subliminal or even outright bias towards him as a black man and basing their case on DNA evidence and even forensic hair analysis that pointed not to Briscoe as the culprit but any African American man with an even remotely similar