A vastly accepted principle of the justice system is that bringing the guilty perpetrators to justice. Consequently, the danger of a guilty person remaining free dominated public attention (Bjerk & Helland, 2018). However, the justice system has been flawed for robbing of life experiences and freedom of wrongfully convicted individuals (Gould & Leo, 2010). The flaws in the justice system have attracted public opinion and research interest. Empirical interest in wrongful convictions dates back to research work by Borchard (1932). The introduction of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) testing technology in the justice system brought to light the flaws in the system by revealing the innocence of convicts in prison with some serving death or life sentences (Bjerk & Helland, 2018). Wrongful convictions occur when factually innocent persons are convicted of crimes; a miscarriage in the justice system. The handful convictions of innocent persons challenges the efficacy of the US justice system.
The…...
DNA Exonerations: John Kogut
The Path To Exoneration: John Kogut
The Path to Conviction
When 16-year-old Teresa Fusco left work at 9:45 PM on November 10, 1984 she became one among several young girls reported missing over the past several years [Centurion Ministries, 2013; Innocence Project, n.d.(a)]. In contrast to her predecessors, however, her body was discovered a month later in a wooded area several blocks from the roller rink where she worked. According to the autopsy, Teresa had been raped and murdered. Semen and sperm were collected from her body and the marks on her neck revealed that she had been strangled with a rope or cord. Also found at the scene were her jewelry and the murder weapon. The coroner's office, however, failed to conduct a blood type analysis on the semen.
The Nassau County police were under tremendous pressure to solve these disappearances, especially Teresa's rape and murder [Innocence Project, n.d.(a)].…...
Criminal Justice System
Challenges of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) to law enforcement
Law enforcement agencies view the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) the most harmful street gang in the U.S. The aggressive nature of MS-13 members have led to a variety of killings and terrible beatings. Various trials held in New York and Maryland have led to significant jail terms even extending to life imprisonment for MS-13 members. The FBI was first attracted by violence, but proof of the gang's escalating level of organization has drawn public attention. Organization is an indicator of a future where MS-13 is will be a transnational network of criminals extending from the United States to suburban communities in a multitude of U.S. towns (Mandel, 2013).
Despite functions of violence, it is worrying to note that MS-13 movement is improving its structure and organization. Many major security experts are comparing it to the illegal groups of the 50s such as…...
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References
Erbschloe, M. (2001). Information Warfare How To Survive Cyber Attacks. New York: Osborne/McGraw-Hill.
Mandel, R. (2013). Global Security Upheaval Armed Nonstate Groups Usurping State Stability Functions. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Scheck, B. (2010). 250 Exonerated, Too Many Wrongfully Convicted: An Innocence Project Report On The First 250 DNA Exonerations In The U.S. New York: Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University.
Siegel, L., & Senna, J. (2009). Essentials of Criminal Justice (6th Ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
She had been struck several times in the head with a Toney Penna golf club -- so ferociously that the club had shattered into multiple pieces -- and then stabbed in the neck with the broken shaft the club's handle and part of the shaft had vanished. (Kennedy Jr., 2003, Martha Moxley section, ¶ 1)
From evidence retrieved from the autopsy, police determined Moxley's murder occurred at approximately10:00 P.M..
On July 10, 1998, 23 years after Moxley's murder, "Connecticut authorities convened a one-man grand jury consisting of Judge George Thim. The state's attorney Jonathan Benedict took over the Moxley case and began a multimillion-dollar effort to convict Michael Skakel" (Kennedy Jr., 2003, Mark Fuhrman section, ¶ 5). Until this time, Greenwich police and state investigators considered Ken Littleton as the primary suspect for the murder of Moxley (Fuhrman, cited in Kennedy Jr., Mark Fuhrman section, ¶ 7). According to prosecutors' arguments,…...
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References
Caldwell, Lori. (2004, June 8). Post-Tribune. Gun missing as evidence, so Gary man acquitted. Post-Tribune (in). Retrieved November 20, 2008 from HighBeam Research database.
Givens, Ann. (2006). Evidence bungled?: Blood work in DWI death trial might have been mishandled, according to testimony of troopers, others. Newsday (Melville, NY). McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. Retrieved November 20, 2008 from HighBeam Research database.
Caldwell, Lori. (2004, June 8). Post-Tribune. "Gun missing as evidence, so Gary man acquitted." Post-Tribune (in). 2004. Retrieved November 20, 2008 from HighBeam Research: www.highbeam.com/doc/1N11032253A4EBD8A1C.html
Crime
With the advent of technology, there are other tests apart from Blood Type present to rule out a crime. If today, the assailant's blood type does not match the blood on the crime scene, it does not necessarily prove him guilty. Forensics studies have indicated that there are two types of people on this planet regarding secretion of ABO proteins in body fluids. There are the secretors, and then there are nonsecretors. In cases of rape, the fluid usually tested is semen. The thing to note is that if that person is a secretor, only then his blood antigens will be present in the semen. If the semen is negative for any antigen that can either mean that the person is type O or is a non-secretor (Lyle, 2011) Furthermore, there are thousands and millions of people who have the same blood type. Due to this reason, DNA testing has…...
Gross, S.R., Jacoby, K., Matheson, D.J., Montgomery, N. & Patil, S. (2005). Exonerations in the United States 1989 through 2003. The journal of criminal law and criminology (1973-), 95 (2), pp. 523 -- 560.
A good example is the 1985 murder of convenience store clerk Cynthia Barlieb, whose murder was prosecuted by a district attorney bent on securing execution for Barlieb's killer (Pompeilo 2005). The original trial and all the subsequent appeals forced Barlieb's family, including four young daughters, to spend 17 years in the legal process - her oldest daughter was 8 years old when Cynthia was first shot, and 25 when the process ended without a death sentence (Pompelio 2005). During those 17 years, Cynthia Barlieb's family was forced to repeatedly relive her murder.
hen a person is murdered, it is understandable that American society demands justice, particularly on behalf of the victim's family and loved ones. But we can not advocate capital punishment under the guise of protecting the interests of victims' families, and then cut those members out of the process when they do not support the death penalty. and,…...
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Works Cited
American Civil Liberties Union (2002). "ACLU Praises Supreme Court Refusal of 'Sleeping Lawyer' Case as 'Acknowledgment and Reminder' of Death Penalty Problems." Retrieved Sept. 30, 2006 at http://www.aclu.org/capital/unequal/10466prs20020603.html .
Antonio, Michael E. (2006). "Arbitrariness and the death penalty: how the defendant's appearance during trial influences capital jurors' punishment decision." Behavioral Sciences & the Law. March 2006.Vol.24, Iss. 2.
Safeguarding the criminal justice system from wrongful convictions through an efficient innocence program policy evaluation proposalExecutive summaryConvicting innocent people is a global concern. The problem has been brought to the fore in the US through DNA tests that have proven the innocence of some of the people already serving jail terms. So far, up to 138 people have been exonerated of the crimes they were accused and convicted of. Of the number, 13 people were on death row. Experts observe that at least 23 people have already been executed after conviction, in the US, despite their innocence. There are persistent efforts that have led to significant progress with regard to detecting and preventing people from being wrongfully convicted. There is a lot of room for improvement in this area though. Apart from the reforms highlighted and discussed in this paper, the public is increasingly becoming aware of the problem.…...
One of the most brutal crimes in North Carolina occurred in 1984 when a young white newspaper reporter, Deborah Sykes, was assaulted, raped, sodomized, and stabbed to death a few blocks from her workplace in Winston-Salem (Stern & Sundberg, 2006). Darryl Hunt, a 19-year-old black man was charged with this crime despite the absence of any physical evidence linking him to the crime. Hunt’s charges were largely based on an eyewitness’ identification that was made by a former member of Klu Klux Klan. He was later convicted of the crime and sentenced to life imprisonment by a jury of 11 whites and one black. However, in 1994, DNA testing showed that Hunt did not rape the victim, which generated significant doubts on his involvement in the murder of Deborah Sykes. Despite these findings, Hunt stayed behind bars for another decade for a crime he did not commit before his release…...
Post response questions, requires a position support position evidence assigned readings. Please correct sources APA. Each question 1.5 pages length. The reading attached. 1. Critics death penalty contend evidence wrongful conviction offenders sentenced death powerful evidence favor abolishing death penalty
One of the foundational principles of the American system of justice is that it is better to let a guilty man go free than it is to condemn an innocent man as guilty. The existence of the death penalty seems to belie this principle. Once someone has been put to death, there is no way to reconsider the verdict. No matter how heinous the crimes of the clearly guilty people put to death, there also have been innocent persons convicted of capital crimes. Despite all of the controls put into place within the American justice system, mistakes have been made in the past and fortunately many of these defendants were still…...
Convicted wrongfully for the murder of a man by the name Delbert Baker, Juan Roberto Melendez-Colon spent more than seventeen years on death row awaiting his execution. His eventual release came after Mr. Baker's real killer confessed to the said murder. Now a free man, Melendez-Colon adds his voice to the call for the abolition of the death penalty. In his opinion, wrongful conviction cases cannot be resolved using DNA testing. In response to proponents of the death penalty who are somehow convinced that DNA testing could easily resolve persistent cases of wrongful conviction, Melendez-Colon points out that DNA "is quite limited because it is not present in the great majority of murder cases." To back up his assertion, Melendez-Colon observes that since 1973, only 17 of the 139 death row exonerations involved DNA. In his opinion, there is a huge amount of money that the State of…...
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Like Melendez-Colon, Philip Brasfield and Carl M. Cannon are also of the opinion that DNA testing cannot help resolve the inherent shortcomings of the capital punishment system. According to Brasfield, although post-conviction DNA testing has been of great significance in helping expose the fallibility of the said system, "DNA tests are useless in cases where no evidence is found at the crime scene." This statement effectively reinforces Cannon's assertion that DNA is largely irrelevant in a significant number of other cases including but not limited to non-rape cases. For this and several other reasons, the authors appear convinced that the execution of innocents cannot necessarily be prevented through the utilization of DNA evidence. In the opinion of both authors, the death penalty should be abolished so as to bring to an end the killing of innocents in the name of justice.
My Opinion on the Topic
It is highly likely that a significant number of people have been wrongfully convicted and subsequently executed since the 1976 reinstatement of the death penalty in the U.S. In my opinion, embracing the utilization of DNA testing (both pre and post-conviction) could help solve some of our capital justice system's fundamental flaws. Given that the said testing has in the past helped exonerate quite a number of death row convicts, its widespread utilization could help solve many more innocent lives. With that in mind, the federal government needs to further increase funding to programs that seek to enhance both the availability and quality of DNA testing. That way, we do not necessarily have to abolish the death penalty.
Misattribution Creation of New Memories
Primary source: single paragraph on source misattribution
The 1989 article "Misinformation and memory: The creation of new memories" by Elizabeth F. Loftus and Hunter G. Hoffman discusses a commonly-observed phenomenon in memory research, namely that new, erroneous memories can be created with misinformation. This misinformation can impair or replace the original, accurate memory as well as be accepted as a 'real' memory when no such memory exists. One theory to explain this is source misattribution when there is confusion over the source of origin of a memory. Talking about a screwdriver leads us to think we saw the screwdriver with our own eyes. However, biologically-oriented psychologists note that the mechanism of synaptic changes related to memory is poorly understood. It is uncertain if misremembering involves actual memory loss and replacement (Loftus & Hoffman 102). One further question related to source misattribution, not specifically discussed in the…...
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References
Eyewitness identification. (2011). Kentucky: Department of Public Advocacy.
Loftus, Elizabeth F. & Hunter G. Hoffman. (1989). Misinformation and memory: The creation of new memories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 118 (1): 100-104
Capital Punishment
An Ethical Analysis & Position Statement
Against the Practice of Capital Punishment
Talia Villella
Ethics Final
An Historical Overview
Issues and elevant Facts
Application of Ethical Theories
Support for Capital Punishment
Arguments Against Capital Punishment
An Historical Overview
The practice of capital punishment is often known by other names such as the death penalty or an execution, but the basic concept is that someone convicted of a crime that is worthy of their life (capital crime) is put to death after their conviction by some form an authority figure taking the life of the convicted. There are many different methods that have been employed to take a convicted person's life and history and it is striking to read about the creativity in which brutal forms of executions have been designed over the millennia. Even the Old Testament is riddled with a plethora of different crimes that are considered worthy of capital punishment and there are millions of people around…...
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References
Binghamton University. "The Death Penalty." 6 March 2011. Paren Ethical. .
Chalfin, A., A. Haviland and S. Raphael. "What Do Panel Studies Tell Us About a Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment? A Critique of the Literature." Journal of Quatitative Criminology (2013): 5-43.
Dezhadbksh, H., P. Rubin and J. Shepherd. "Does Capital Punishment Have a Deterrent Effect? New Evidence from Postmoratorium Panel Data." American Law and Economics Review (2003): 344-376.
Mocain, H. and R. Gittings. "Getting off Death Row: Commuted Sentences and the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment." Journal of Law and Economics (2003): 453-478.
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