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6 general causes of wrongful convictions
6 general causes of wrongful convictions
Racial inequality in the justice system
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Some criminals deserve to die because they should not have the privilege to live 30 years after, from being sentenced to death for committing first degree murder. For example, there has been a case, in 1984, where Kermit Alexander’s family was murdered. As a matter of fact, the criminals have not been executed since they have received the death sentence.
The Troy Davis case is a case about the death penalty, the judicial objection to examine new evidence of innocence and the frailty and malleability of eyewitness memory. How much risk of error is tolerable? Prosecutors never produced any physical evidence connecting him to the crime. The case against Troy Davis consisted entirely of witness testimony.
He went through the same fair trial that every other individual goes through, and based on that, the death penalty is not
In 2013, Sean McElwee, a researcher and writer based in New York, published an article called “It’s Time to Abolish the Death Penalty.” He believes the death penalty needs to be abolished due to it being unjust, ineffective, and costly ways of dealing with convicts. McElwee is currently a policy analyst; he produced innovative new research and analysis on democracy issues. The article provides a well established base of ideas that include personal evidence, statistics and history; this evidence he provides builds a strong case of how the death penalty weakens the purpose of our criminal justice system.
While evil gives us the right to punish the bad people with judgment, does it follow that we should act on this right? The death penalty system is recognized as the world's most severe punishment for offenders because it has a direct denial of the right of criminals, and depriving prisoner’s opportunity to go back and compensate the victims. Jeffrey Reiman's article "Against the Death Penalty," he begins with a concise summary of his ideas of the four points of death, and then he goes into more detail. The first point he makes: "Although the death penalty is a just punishment for some murderers, it is unfair to punish the perpetrators less stringent (reduced to a certain limit). " In his first point, he shows how the most established death penalties are weak.
The Death Penalty first used in America in 1608 has been a controversial issue for much time (Part). Two landmark cases of the Death Penalty were Furman v. Georgia in 1972 and Gregg v. Georgia in 1076. Furman v. Georgia Furman v. Georgia in 1972, was a court case which decided the constitutionality of the death penalty. The case was that of William Henry Furman, an African American from Georgia.
The execution in May 1989 involving Stephen McCoy is one in several examples of these defective results. According to witnesses, McCoy reacted violently to the lethal injection given to him. According to the Flawed Executions, the Anti-Death Penalty Movement, and the Politics of Capital Punishment article, “after the drug was administered McCoy was seen gagging, violently coughing, and undergoing body contortions” (Haines). Examples such as these show that the systems that has been put in place, and the methods used in order to afflict capital punishment has some defects. Morally speaking, one cannot consider to willingly and with a clear conscious sentence an individual to a punishment that completely fraudulent and unethical.
Justice a noun defined as the quality of being just; righteousness, equitableness, or moral rightness. This definition explains the expectations our nation has for the way that crime and punishment are dealt with. The public believes that the matter at hand should be carried out as stated in the constitution. The death penalty is a necessary punishment that needs to be enforced for violent crimes committed. Individuals who commit such horrendous crimes have lost the privilege of their initial born rights.
Countless times the wrong person has been sentence to death or convicted because of an error made by the law. The percentage for convicting the wrong is 4.1%; the wrong person could serve a life sentence (Gross). Along with decision errors, government officials can be biased. For example, Brock Turner, a Stanford star swimmer was convicted of rape, but he only served six months. Apparently, his judge, Aaron Pesky, was biased against women and did not take sexual assault cases seriously.
The death penalty comes into direct conflict with article 8 of the bill of rights, “nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted” (“Bill of Rights,” n.d.). Both Justice Breyer and Justice Ginsburg agree that the death penalty is unconstitutional as it is cruel and unusual due to it being arbitrary, unreliable and rare (Baude 2015). Botched executions contribute to the death penalty being cruel and unusual. Since 1900, there have been 273 botched executions and 7.3% of executions done by legal injection fail. Many states use a three-drug cocktail in order to execute prisoners, with the first being an anesthetic, the second being a paralytic, and the third being a heart stop drug.
About 7482 death sentences have been handed out over 31 years. Of those 117 were innocent people (7). Even though that doesn’t like much, over one hundred innocent people died because they were falsely accused. The topic of deciding one's punishment for killing another has been discussed many times. In many cases innocent people are killed, because they were wrongly convicted.
In Missouri a wrongful conviction lead to the following, “Illinois' former governor, George Ryan, halted all executions in 2000 after 13 people were found innocent of the convictions that landed them on death row. Assuming an imperfect judicial system still with major instances of systemic discrimination, there is always the chance that individuals will be wrongfully condemned to death. Governor Ryan granted clemency to over 160 death row inmates before leaving office in 2003” (Death Penalty Statistics 1). The United States may be putting more innocent people to death than previously thought.
Corrupt officials and other flaws in creating a seamless trial are quite likely in cases that include the death penalty or a life sentence. If a person is wrongfully executed for a crime they have not committed, they cannot get their life back. Alternatively, if someone is jailed for said crime, and later proven innocent, they have the opportunity to resume their lives as usual and sue the courts for violating their rights. The death penalty severely violates the eighth amendment against cruel and unusual punishment.
The study of Columbia University Law School concluded that 2/3 of all death sentence have errors. This circumstance might happen on an innocent people, which shows that death
For this reason it is a crime to put an innocent person to death. It is the same as murdering someone for no reason. The person gets tried for it but the court does not. They can just say it was a mistake and get away with it as if it wasn 't wrong.
