In the United States 1,625 cases has been wrongfully convicted, for crimes they haven’t done nor have any connections to it. Sedrick Courtney’s is a prime example of wrongfully convicted people. The Case of Sedrick Courtney is form to show how our criminal justice system is corrupt. Sedrick Courtney was wrongfully convicted for the robbery on Shemita Greer in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Clarence Earl Gideon was falsely accused of burglarizing a cigarette machine and jukebox inside a poolroom. When Gideon was sent to court to receive his sentence, he had no lawyer, therefore he had to defend himself. Despite his valiant efforts, Gideon was sent to 5 years in prison. While there, Gideon filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus hoping to challenge his conviction. His ability to file for a petition is a positive right, so even though he was not given a lawyer, despite his need and right to one, some of his positive rights—filing a petition—were still upheld.
The written story of how Clarence Earl Gideon, a poor Florida man, went from a convicted criminal to ultimately redefining legal history is astounding. The Supreme Court commonly dismisses more cases than it accepts and the fact that a handwritten petition from a prison inmate was accepted shows that even the seemingly most insignificant person can make a difference in our society. The book’s literature is highly legalistic but constantly provides a detailed account of how the judicial system is constructed. Coming from a regular college student standpoint with no previous formal law education, this makes the underlying concept easier to grasp. The story’s setting during the time of the Gideon case, showed how the legal system was constructed towards the growing concept of a defendant’s rights.
It can be argued that the jury was not a proper representation of his peers. Along with other factual errors surrounding Dixon’s false conviction,
It confirms the already assumed. During the court trial, Dr. Jones was asked “From your conversations and examination of Perry Edward Smith, do you have an opinion as to whether he knew right from wrong at the time of the offense involved in this action?” (296). The doctor replies with a simple no. I strongly disagree what the doctor decides to reply. He claims he has no opinion because of Perry having no opinion.
Nature versus nurture is one of the most controversial debates in contemporary psychology. The debate concerning whether or not humans are born with the preset characteristics that will shape lives for years to come or whether actions are a result of the events and the environment that pave the way for our behavioral characteristics. Capote’s “In Cold Blood” gives the audience a detailed look into the upbringing of the character Perry Smith, creating a sympathetic outlook towards his past and attempting to bring a sense of understanding as to how a seemingly harmless young man could brutally murder four innocent people. In the case of Perry Smith, nurture was the cause of his actions in regards to the Clutter family murders.
David Feige’s Indefensible: One Lawyer’s Journey nto the Inferno of American Justice invites people from all walks of life to a second hand experience of the criminal justice system hard at work. What is most interesting about Feige’s work is its distinct presentation of the life of a public defender in the South Bronx. Instead of simply detailing out his experiences as a public defender, Feige takes it a step further and includes the experiences of his clients. Without the personal relationships that he carefully constructs with each of his defendants, Feige would not be able to argue that the criminal justice system is flimsy at best, decisions always riding on either the judge’s personal attitudes or the clients propensity towards plea bargaining.
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.
According to the presumption of innocence,”a man is innocent until proven guilty”. Throughout the United States there are many different views by many different people and controversial court cases can display so. The controversial court case of Dr. Sam Sheppard, Sheppard was accused of killing his wife Marilyn Sheppard during the early morning of July 4, 1954. On December 24, 1954 Sheppard was guilty of murder in the second degree, but in November 16, 1966 Sheppard was found not guilty in his re-trial. In the controversial court case of Sam Sheppard, the guilty verdict initially incorrectly prosecuted Sheppard of murdering his wife Marilyn Sheppard.
The mass hysteria perspective is unable to account for how Leo Frank failed to win an appeal at nearly every level of government, “Following the verdict, Frank and his attorney appealed against this sentence as far as to the United States Supreme Court, but without success. ”11 While mass hysteria was able to account for the local courts, the mass hysteria cannot account for the Supreme Court ruling. While there was a great deal of public pressure in Georgia, the sentiments felt there were not widespread throughout the entire country. In fact, in some states, such as California, there was widespread support for Leo Frank.13
Twelve Angry Men is in many ways a love letter to the American legal justice system. We find here eleven men, swayed to conclusions by prejudices, past experience, and short-sightedness, challenged by one man who holds himself and his peers to a higher standard of justice, demanding that this marginalized member of society be given his due process. We see the jurors struggle between the two, seemingly conflicting, purposes of a jury, to punish the guilty and to protect the innocent. It proves, however, that the logic of the American trial-by-jury system does work.
In “The Brain on Trial”, David Eagleman claims that the justice system needs to change its sentencing policies due to the discoveries of neurobiological diseases that cause their sufferers to behave in socially unacceptable ways and/or commit crimes. Eagleman uses a variety of rhetorical strategies to present his viewpoint. The most important one is his appeal to logic. By using mostly examples, along with direct address to the readers, Eagleman is able to argue that the legal system has to modify its sentencing policies to take into account the advances made in neuroscience due to the increase in the amount of accused and/or convicted people who have been found to have harbored some kind of brain disease or damage. Eagleman
Since the founding of our judicial system there have always been individuals claiming innocence to a crime that they have been found guilty of, traditionally, after their sentencing no matter how innocent they may or may not be would have to serve, live and possibly die by the decision of their peers. The Innocence Project, founded in 1992 by Barry C. Scheck alongside Peter J. Neufeld faces this issue by challenging the sentencing of convicted individuals who claim their innocence and have factual ground to stand upon. The Innocence Project uses the recent advances in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) testing to prove their client’s innocence by using methods that were not available, too primitive or not provided to their clients during their investigation,
In In Cold Blood, the issue over the death penalty is prominent. Did Perry and Dick deserve to die? Should the severity of one’s crime determine one’s fate? Although Truman Capote writes the novel in a straightforward, “from a distance” way, he conveys, through his characters, theme, and plot development, that the death penalty is an issue that should be looked at from all sides and that the legal system itself is the real issue at hand, and that the death penalty is used as a means to suppress the distress and indignation of the citizens surrounding the case, instead of suppressing the victim himself.
He says the defendant accused of murder was let off and “eight years later they found out that he’d actually done it, anyway” (12). Prejudice clouds a person’s judgement and does not allow the individual to see all the facts. It only allows them to
