...Innocence Project Research Paper Since 1992 The Innocence Project has exonerated 289 people in the United States. To be exonerated of a crime means that a person is acquitted for their crime and released back into society. These wrongful convictions are due to unvalidated or improper forensic science, eyewitness misidentification, and false confessions. In this paper I am going to tell the story of Clarence Elkins and why wrongfully convicting a person is a problem in the United States. It all started on June 6th, 1998 in Summit County, Ohio. Clarence Elkins’ niece was sleeping over at her grandmother’s house, only to be woken in the middle of the night to hearing her grandmother screaming. So his niece ran into the kitchen to see her grandmother being beaten by a man. She ran back into her bedroom to be followed by this man. The niece was sexually assaulted by him. Her next memory was waking up to see her grandmother dead in the kitchen. She then proceeded to run to her neighbor’s house to call the cops. While the cops were on the way the niece proceeded to tell her neighbors that the man she saw last night looked like her uncle Clarence Elkins. Elkins was immediately brought in for questioning and he was the police’s number one suspect. Biological evidence, including hairs, was found at the crime scene and from the victim’s body. Mitochondrial DNA testing was done on pubic hairs from the victim’s bodies. This testing excluded Elkins as a possible contributor...
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...Innocence Project Research Paper Since 1992 The Innocence Project has exonerated 289 people in the United States. To be exonerated of a crime means that a person is acquitted for their crime and released back into society. These wrongful convictions are due to unvalidated or improper forensic science, eyewitness misidentification, and false confessions. In this paper I am going to tell the story of Clarence Elkins and why wrongfully convicting a person is a problem in the United States. It all started on June 6th, 1998 in Summit County, Ohio. Clarence Elkins’ niece was sleeping over at her grandmother’s house, only to be woken in the middle of the night to hearing her grandmother screaming. So his niece ran into the kitchen to see her grandmother being beaten by a man. She ran back into her bedroom to be followed by this man. The niece was sexually assaulted by him. Her next memory was waking up to see her grandmother dead in the kitchen. She then proceeded to run to her neighbor’s house to call the cops. While the cops were on the way the niece proceeded to tell her neighbors that the man she saw last night looked like her uncle Clarence Elkins. Elkins was immediately brought in for questioning and he was the police’s number one suspect. Biological evidence, including hairs, was found at the crime scene and from the victim’s body. Mitochondrial DNA testing was done on pubic hairs from the victim’s bodies. This testing excluded Elkins as a possible contributor...
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...Blue Ocean recently partnered with the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project (MAIP) to enhance our understanding of social injustices so that we have the knowledge to provide relevant and timely support to our community. We believe that life's persistent question of ‘What are we doing for others?’ is one we must answer with action, time and resources. We love learning more about other organizations in our community and are always looking for new ways to give back. The Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project’s mission is to free the staggering number of innocent people who remain incarcerated, and to bring reform to the system in the hopes of preventing future injustice. To this day, 356 people in the United States have been exonerated by DNA testing, including 20 who served time on death row. People who come to MAIP for help have nowhere else to turn - many have been convicted of horrendous crimes and are ignored by society despite their innocence. Often times, they have never had competent legal representation. MAIP gives hope to people who feel that they are out of options....
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...in the brutal beating death of his wife, Christine Morton, and sentenced to life in prison in 1987. But a recent court-ordered DNA test, conducted on a blood-stained bandanna over the objections of Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley, points instead to an unnamed California felon as the killer, according to court briefs filed by the Innocence Project of New York. The court filing urged a Williamson County district judge to remove Bradley from the case, saying he cannot be trusted to oversee a reinvestigation of the killing because he has shown “unprofessional” animosity toward Michael Morton and his lawyers. What’s more, the motion alleges, Bradley worked to keep a key piece of evidence hidden from Morton’s lawyers — a transcript of a police interview that shows the Mortons’ 3-year-old son witnessed his mother’s murder and said the attacker was not his father. The transcript should have been provided to Morton’s defense lawyers before the trial but was not, according to the Innocence Project motion. Bradley, who was not district attorney during the trial, recently opposed releasing the transcript to the Innocence Project under the state’s open records laws, the motion said. “Justice demands a rigorous and unbiased investigation into the true circumstances of Christine Morton’s death, and an explanation as to how her grieving husband was wrongfully...
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...They help heal families who have been hurt by the twisted justice system we have in America. Back then if they were accused they never got justice, the family never got justice. “The Innocence Project is a non-profit legal organization that is committed to exonerating wrongly convicted people through the use of DNA testing and to reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice” (Wikipedia.com) The Innocence Project has freed 343 wrongfully convicted and during this 40% of the DNA cases were able to find the real person who committed the crimes. In most of the cases that the Innocence Project has worked on, the most common reason for wrong convictions is false eyewitness identification or government...
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...Implications: There are many factors that lead to miscarriages of criminal justice. Few wrongful convictions are caused by eyewitness identification, forensic science errors, and false confessions. Mistaken eyewitness identification is the number one cause of wrongful convictions. Eyewitness “was a factor in 72% of post-conviction DNA exoneration cases in the U.S.” (Innocence Project, 2007). Studies show that the human mind does not record or obtain information like a video recorder; it does not keep the information as a short-term memory, but keeps the information in long-term memory. For this reason, witnesses cannot fully recall facial details, especially when they are under stress by the events of the crime. Also, memory is very flexible...
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...The Innocence Commission The criminal justice system is best described as a search for the truth, however the more precise definition of it states that it is the system of law enforcement, the bar, the judiciary, corrections, and probation that is directly involved in the apprehension, prosecution, defense, sentencing, incarceration, and supervision of those suspected of or charged with criminal offences. As the justice system is handled by humans, it is bound to make mistakes and such errors lead to circumstances in which an innocent is found guilty; this is called a miscarriage of justice. Miscarriage of justice means the failure of a judicial system or court in the administration of justice, especially when an innocent is convicted in a crime (Dictionary.com, 2007). Miscarriage of justice is also known as wrongful conviction. If someone is wrongfully convicted, that person is punished for an offence he or she did not commit and the actual perpetrator of the crime goes free. As well, public confidence in the system declines when wrongful convictions are identified. There are several elements that cause a miscarriage of justice, such as non-disclosure of evidence by police or prosecution, confirmation bias on the part of investigators, fabrication of evidence, poor identification, and unreliable confessions due to police pressure or psychological instability. They are all considered unjust as they violate the principle of justice. The three major causes for wrongful...
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...Supporting a Position There are several problems with capital punishment used in this country. In addition there are several issues with the State of Florida's implementation of Lethal-Injection. Florida's procedure for the use of lethal injections is the principal issue in both the NPR Podcast (Which is incorrectly labeled as a podcast as it is streaming only and you can not download it.) and the St. Petersburg Times article. The State of Florida uses outdated and inhumane procedures when administering lethal injections. They do so without a doctor present to insure that the proper steps are taken to prevent what happened to Angel Diaz from happening again. The excuse that it is hard to find doctors that are willing to violate their ethics is inexcusable. The are more issues at hand then just the correct administration of capital punishment. Many of the people executed in this country are innocent. The legal system direly needs to be reworked. There should be protections in place to protect innocent people from being murdered by the courts. The amount of legal red-tape in the appeals process is excruciatingly high. The case of Leo Jones is one example. On May 23, 1981 patrolman Thomas Szafranski was shot by high-powered 30-30 rifle while he was stopped at a traffic light. Leo Jones who lived in apartment near by was later arrested (Mills, 2008). That night he was beaten until he confessed to the murder (Mills, 2008). Retired police officer Cleveland Smith testified...
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...Prison Overcrowding Final Project Terence Ingram Professor Karina Arzumanova, Esq. March 17, 2013 Strayer University Prison Overcrowding Final Project Criminal Activity is on the rise. With prison populations growing at an all-time rate, the federal prison system has not been able to keep up. As a result, this is a serious problem which puts inmates and guards in danger and holds back efforts to rehabilitate convicts. (McLaughlin, 2012) Violence will be on the rise as more inmates are squeezed into small living quarters. Increased inmate misconduct is a direct result of prison overcrowding which negatively affects the safety and security of inmates and staff. If prisons don’t find a solution to this problem, it will create more tension and could potentially cause an inmate to snap and create a violent incident. With more prisoners confined in small spaces, prison officials are forced to cut back on inmate’s cafeteria time, time in the recreation yards, and television rooms. Multiple inmates are put in cells that were specifically created for one individual inmate. Common areas that were not meant to be used for inmates are being used for living arrangements even though it was not designed for that. Crowded cells and the loss of privacy increase the odds that inmates will lash out, threatening the guards keeping watch. ( McLaughlin, 2012) Policies have been put in place to make sure that inmates are not being violated. Some may say that overcrowding in prisons is inhumane...
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...opening his own gym to help the at-risk children. He also dreamed of getting a professional fight. He got his chance to box in a professional fight and he won. The Innocence Project has a hard time freeing the innocent because evidence is often destroyed, eye-witnesses are unreliable, and DNA testing was not always available. After a case is finished and someone is in prison, evidence gets destroyed to make room for more evidence in other cases. This makes it impossible to retrieve to help prove the innocence of some of the wrongfully convicted. Eye-witnesses are often wrong in giving descriptions and choosing out of a line up. They say when an eye-witness identifies the suspect in a line-up where all the people are revealed to the witness at once, the witness is often overwhelmed and chooses the wrong one. The way to solve this problem would be to have the suspects walk out one at a time so the eye-witness can take time to see each one alone. They also suggest that the cop that is in the room with the witness should not be aware of who the suspect is because he can give hint to which one if he knows. I think these should be written into laws to help protect people who have been arrested get a fair trial. With DNA testing becoming an option to help free the wrongfully convicted it made the life of Innocence Project workers much easier. They can now go back into cases where DNA test were not done and use the test to prove whether the person was actually guilty or not. I believe...
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...In addition to those forms of legislation there has also been other forms passed to protect the falsely convicted.. Since 1989, more than 150 people imprisoned in the United States have been proven innocent through post-conviction DNA testing. The Innocence Project is a non-profit legal organization that is committed to exonerating wrongly convicted people through the use of DNA testing and to reforming the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. The Innocence Project focuses on cases in which DNA evidence is available to be tested or tested. DNA testing is possible in 5 to 10 percent of criminal cases. Other members of the Innocence Network also help to exonerate those in whose cases DNA testing is not possible.In addition to working on behalf of those who may have been wrongfully convicted of crimes throughout the United States, those working for the Innocence Project perform research and advocacy related to the causes of wrongful convictions.Some of the Innocence Project's successes have resulted in releasing people from death row (Help Us Put an End to Wrongful...
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...Witness Misidentification Freddricka Harris CCJ 4360-001 Monekka Munroe Misidentification can be defined as making a falsely or inaccurate identification. Witness can be defined as one who can give a firsthand account of something seen, heard, or experienced. (American Heritage Dictionary) When you put these two words together, you get witness misidentification which has been referred to as the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, with nearly 75% of the convictions overturned through DNA testing. There have been 260 exonerations across the country based on forensic DNA testing with 3 out of 4 involving cases of eyewitness misidentification. (Innocence Project 1999) In 1907 or 1908, Hugo Munsterberg published “On the Witness Stand”; he questioned the reliability of eyewitness identification. As recent as 30 or 40 years ago, the Supreme Court acknowledged that eyewitness identification is problematic and can lead to wrongful convictions. The Supreme Court instructed lower courts to determine the validity of eyewitness testimony based on irrelevant factors, like the certainty of the witness, the certainty you express in court during the trial has nothing to do with how certain you feel two days after the event when you pick a photograph out of a set or pick the suspect out of a lineup. It has been said that you become more certain over time. (The Confidential Resource September 15, 2010) An eyewitness viewing a simultaneous lineup...
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...Forensic Evidence Analysis of The Innocence Project data shows that there were errors in the forensic science in 63% of their cases (Cole, 2012). Forensic science is solely based on subjective opinion, and with few processes being backed scientifically, are usually unreliable. Hair comparisons, fingerprint comparisons, bite-mark analysis, shoe print comparisons and voice comparisons have been pointed out as having poor accuracy. Another problem comes with expert testimony, as testifying on a technique with an unknown accuracy should hold no value. The Innocence Project data stated that 61% of 153 cases had invalid expert testimony. Phrases such as “consistent” and “similar” are often used during forensic expert testimony, and while they hold no inherent meaning, they are seen as very valuable to a jury. (Cole, 2012). Forensics in the case The cases against Jessie Miskelley and Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin seem to be circumstantial on hearsay. Not a lot of forensic...
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...On April 8, 1986 in Lake Elsinore, CA a female store cashier was raped and robbed at gunpoint in the shoe store she worked in. When the criminal raped her, they wiped their semen onto her sweater. This particular sweater played a big part in the investigation process and was taken as evidence towards Herman Atkins’ conviction. The victim went in for vaginal swab testing and turned over her sweater to the investigators. The victim did not identify that Atkins was her rapist until she saw a wanted poster of him for unrelated charges. A witness that worked at a store nearby said they had seen Atkins in the victim’s store earlier that day and after testing the semen, they found Atkins’ blood type and PGM matched the semen on the victim’s sweater....
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...statistics kept by the Criminal Justice Department on the number of crimes that were recorded as wrongful convictions, research has estimated about 5% of the cases that are tried annual result in a false conviction. Since 1989, 1,241 people have been wrongfully convicted and later cleared of all charges based on evidence that they were innocent, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, a project of the law schools at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University (Clark 2013). The Michigan Innocence Clinic was the first clinic of its kind to work on non-DNA exonerations. Their work has revealed particular circumstances far too often seen in cases of wrongful conviction. These cases show us how the criminal justice system is in need of much repair and how the Michigan Innocence Clinic can combat troubling trends of the system. In each case that have been worked on, the Michigan Innocence Clinic have uncovered overlapping causes of wrongful convictions. There are many causes of wrongful convictions, but there are a few common causes that the Michigan Innocence Clinic have found:...
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