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Lamar Johnson Case Essay

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After 28 years behind bars for a murder he did not commit, Lamar Johnson is now an exonerated man. In 1995, Johnson was charged with first-degree murder for the shooting of his friend, Markus Boyd. Over his two-day trial, the guilty verdict was determined by one key factor, a lone eyewitness; looking beyond inconsistencies within the case and taking word of mouth over investigative evidence, the jury’s ruling was decided in less than two hours. At just 21 years old, Johnson was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, leaving behind his girlfriend and two young daughters (Moriarty, 2024). Beginning the day of his incarceration, Johnson began to build a new case to reclaim his innocence, in a sense becoming his own lawyer …show more content…

Based on records dating back to 1989, over 3,100 people have been exonerated from crimes they did not commit, spending a combined total of 27,200 years in prison; to this day, the rate of exonerations continues to rise (Equal Justice Initiative, 2022). More people are questioning the accountability of police, yet, in the case of Lamar Johnson, “trust” in the system is what placed him in prison. In an interview, Johnson stated, “I didn’t have anything to hide.I believed in the system,” and at the time, he did not have a lawyer to represent him because of financial constraints (Moriarty, 2024). Based on radical criminology, working-class people are highly susceptible to incarceration because of the circumstances that determined the system’s establishment and the persistence of these historical connotations. In this manner, the law inherently deems disadvantaged communities as threats to society and order, thus obvious monetary deficits and unfavorable societal depositions restrict their means to escape the system. The perseverance of this discriminatory structure is to keep the system, especially prisons, running as a business, in which profit is gained through the incarcerated working class and their cheap labor (Montes,

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