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Summary Of The Innocence Project

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The United States leads the entire world in the number of incarcerations, there are approximately 2 million people behind bars at this time, that means that a wrongful conviction rate of 1% would translate to 20,000. Though we do not have a steady percentage of falsely accused individuals, simply 1% is still a large amount of innocent citizens. The Innocence Project exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and hopes to adjust the criminal justice system to prevent future cases of injustice. Their website contains hundreds unethical incarcerations and convictions, including Cathy Woods and Kathy Gonzalez, two of the only women in their entire database.
As mentioned before, Cathy Woods is one of the few women written about by The …show more content…

Kathy Gonzalez was sentenced to ten years after agreeing to plead guilty and testify falsely to her alleged role in the crime of raping and murdering a 68-year-old woman in Beatrice, Nebraska. The case all started on the night of February 5th, 1985; Helen Wilson was in her apartment, where she lived alone, when she was sexually assaulted, stabbed, and suffocated to death. Semen, blood, along with fingerprints, were all found and collected at the crime scene. A car was seen near Wilson’s home the night of the crime, an Oldsmobile Cutlass similar to one driven by Gonzalez’s co-defendant Thomas Winslow, it was searched and eventually returned. Investigative officers were aware of similar crimes in the neighborhood in the summer of 1983, which is approximately 18 months before this attack, attempted sexual assaults of elderly women within four blocks of Wilson’s home. Four years later, Thomas Winslow was in jail for an unrelated incident when he is approached by investigators, asking for help solving the 1985 murder, saying he could be released on his pending charge. Little did Winslow know, these investigators had already spoken with someone who pointed Winslow and several others in the crime. Separately, Ada JoAnn Taylor allegedly told law enforcement that Winslow and another man named Joseph White were involved in the crime, in the same general time frame, another man named James Dean admitted to his involvement in the crime. Ultimately, based on the statements given by alleged participants and informants, a total of six people were arrested and charged in 1989, for the murder – Thomas Winslow, Joseph White, Ada JoAnn Taylor, James Dean, Debra Shelden, and Kathy

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The Innocence Project Darryl Hunt was a 19 year-old African American male living in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was wrongfully convicted of the murder of Deborah Sykes, a 25-year-old copy editor at a local newspaper. Many eyewitness misidentifications, incorrect information, and unjust actions resulted in Darryl Hunt spending 19 years of his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Deborah Sykes was sexually assaulted and murdered on August 10, 1984. A call was made to alert the police of a body and the name given by the caller was Sammy Mitchell, a friend of Darryl Hunt.

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Wrongful convictions are not usually thought of but there is a numerous amount of people that have been wrongly convicted throughout the years. Within the US there is about 2 million people behind bars meaning that 1% or 20,000 people are in for a crime they did not commit. But however, in 2015 only 149 people were cleared of a crime they didn’t not commit. Also, recent studies have said 1 out of 25 people on death row is likely innocent. One good website that has a list and the stories of people that were wrongly convicted is innocence project.

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Roy Brown Through the Innocence Project The Innocence Project frees people from jail that were wrongly convicted of a crime. That is what happened to Roy Brown. Through the help of the Innocence Project, he was released from jail. Brown was convicted of a horrific crime that included murder, even though the evidence that was provided was analyzed and presented wrongly.

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I am 21 and for as long as I can remember I have heard many stories about innocent people being accused of and being punished for crimes they did not commit. On Monday, March 20th of this year, I met Anthony Ray Hinton and learned about his story. Arrested on suspicion of two capital murders at age 29. He was convicted and sentenced to death despite having a reliable alibi and passing a polygraph test. It was only after repeated efforts by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) team that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned his conviction based on his attorney’s deficient representation and he was eventually exonerated after 30 years in solitary confinement on Friday, April 3rd, 2015.

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The book “for the Children? Protecting innocence in a Carceral State” written by Erica R. Meiners, is a book about how youths in the communities of color are deprived of protection, and how childhood was not being made available to all children of that community. According to the book, Meiners pointed out school-to-prison pipeline, incarceration willful defiance, racial profiling and policing has been a recurring and terrifying issue among the children of color, especially among the African American children. The ideology of policing and incarceration was to ensure that American citizens, both white and black are protected from harm and violence in schools and in their different neighborhoods.

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Wrongful convictions are a problem that most government officials won’t admit. The United States and other countries such as Australia have been susceptible to these miscarriages of justice. This can arise from a snowball effect of scenarios such as witness misidentification, perjured testimonies, coercive methods of interrogation, prosecutorial misconduct and ineffective counsel. These are some of the reasons that can potentially lead innocent people to be convicted of crimes they did not commit. The thousands of exonerations in the United States has caused concern for other nations to reevaluate their criminal justice system.

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Throughout time the death penalty has not been administered equally, and the Innocence Project has been receiving a lot of attention for allowing information such as this to be surfaced. The Innocence Project has been created to help exonerate those that are seeking death row. The Innocence Project has created a statistic from their own findings as a result will be used to show what really happens behind the scene of death row through a lenses that most people would not hear. The Innocence Project receives about 8000+letters each year from .prisoners seeking help with their case. Race plays a big factor in the decision process during trials.

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With millions of criminal convictions a year, more than two million people may end up behind bars(Gross). According to Samuel Gross reporter for The Washington Post, writes that also “even one percent amounts to tens of thousands of tragic [wrongful conviction] errors”(Gross). Citizens who are wrongfully convicted are incarcerated for a crime he or she did not commit. Many police officers, prosecutors, and judges are responsible for the verdict that puts innocents into prison. To be able to get exonerated many wait over a decade just to get there case looked at, not many are able to have the opportunity of getting out.

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Out of the 337 cases where innocent men and women were wrongfully imprisoned nearly half of the true suspects were identified and convicted. The racial heritage of those who have been exonerated is fairly diverse, consisting of “206 African Americans, 104 Caucasians, 25 Latinos, and 2 Asian Americans” (The Innocence Project). (Transition) Although The Innocence Project has changed the lives of many who others would not afford them the opportunity to prove their innocence, they would not have been able to do so without the recent

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My dad always said that he saw something in my eyes on the day I was born that made him fall in love instantly. Later on in life I asked him what exactly he saw, to which he replied “Innocence.” I wasn't sure exactly what he meant, but as I grew I came to realised everyone is born with innocence, a blank canvas, and you get all your personality traits as you experience things and grow as a person. In my lifetime, I have learned through my numbered experiences that my most prominent features were my tenacity, my farouche tendencies and my ability to be empathetic when no one else is able to, all of which are important to who I am today.

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The presumption of innocence is an important component of the criminal law system. When a person is charged with a criminal offence the law regards the alleged offender as innocent until proved guilty. In other words, the prosecution bears the burden of proving beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant is indeed guilty of the crime alleged. This position however, is somewhat different when persons are suspected of money laundering and terrorist financing offences. To say then, that the cardinal freedom of an individual (in this case the customer of a bank) to be presumed innocent until proved guilty is blown away by the enforcement of anti-money laundering and counter terrorism financing legislations in the Commonwealth Caribbean is true to a great extent.

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The question requires one to discuss as to what extent has the “Presumption of Innocence” as articulated by Viscount Sankey in Woolmington v DPP [1935] , has changed in light of Human Rights Act [HRA] 1998. Woolmington v DPP is a landmark House of Lords [ HOL] case where the Presumption of Innocence was first articulated # . In delivering his judgement for a unanimous Court, Viscount Sankey made his famous "Golden thread’ speech . ‘Throughout the web of the English Criminal Law one golden thread is always to be seen that it is the duty of the prosecution to prove the prisoner's guilt subject to... the defence of insanity and subject also to any statutory exception. If, at the end of and on the whole of the case, there is a reasonable doubt,

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