Was Bennett Barbour An Innocent Or Inhumane?

Imagine at the age of 22, having a decent job, a spouse and expecting your first child together. You’d never imagine that prison was in your future, Bennett Barbour certainly didn’t expect this to happen to him let alone be a victim for 34 years. In 1978, the 22-year-old Bennett was arrested after being wrongly convicted of rape of a 19-year old college student while being held at gunpoint. The victim described the assailant as a 5’6” 145-pound male, they were shown two live lineups and a photo lineup and each time the 115-pound bone diseased Bennett Barbour was chosen despite the fact he did not meet the descriptions. (Innocenceproject.org) Bennett was in police files and picture available due to a petty theft that he committed in 1977 (Possley,

When he was told that he was cleared of the rape charge due to a re-test of the DNA evidence, he said, “I know I’m excluded. I’ve been saying that all along.” (McNeil, 2012) The realized that the DNA had belonged to a true sex offender who was on parole at the time of the accident. Bennett wasn’t the only one to believe he was innocent from the start, the Innocence Project did as well. The Innocence Project is a non-profit organization that’s located in New York who has the goal of exonerating wrongfully convicted people with the use of DNA

We know that DNA testing is giving hope to the hopeless in prison. Margret Berger (2006) comments, “Even though the number of inmates released as a consequence of DNA testing is minuscule in contrast to the two million persons incarcerated in the United States, the DNA exonerations have had an enormous impact on the fundamental assumptions about the American criminal justice system and how it operates.” Changes like the desirability of the death penalty, the growing concerns on how forensic laboratories operate alongside the increasing interest in forensic science overall. For instance, as the number of exonerations continues to rise, the number of people being placed on death row is decreasing thanks to Supreme Court rulings that juveniles under the age of 18 and the mentally ill cannot be sentenced to death. The death penalty is overall losing its appeal to society, not just because of the DNA testing, but people become aware of the wrongful convictions of other crimes as well. While Bennett Barbour did not spend any time on death row, another wrongly convicted Nick Yarris had. Both Bennett and Nick had suffered due to forensic laboratories making a mistake when doing testing either through DNA being left out for too long, thrown away or in an off chance, tampered with to make a