Darryl Hunt is an African American born in 1965 in North Carolina. In 1984, he was convicted wrongfully of rape and murder of Deborah Sykes, a young white woman working as a newspaper editor. This paper researches oh his wrongful conviction in North Carolina. Darryl Hunt served nineteen and a half years before DNA evidence exonerated him. The charges leveled against him were because of inconsistencies in the initial stages of the case. An all-white bench convicted the then nineteen-year-old Hunt, even though there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime. A hotel employee made false claims that he saw Hunt enter the hotel bathroom, and later emerge with bloodstained towels. Other witnesses also fixed Hunt to the case. While sexual assault was central to the case, in 1994 DNA testing cleared him of involvement in the case, throwing the whole case into question.…
From the beginning this groups core philosophy revolved around belief that the white race was supreme, and should assert its dominance over all other races by whatever means necessary (Prison Offenders, 2009). This…
The Honorable Donald E. Sheldon is a felony trial judge in Ann Arbor, Michigan and a member of the faculty at Eastern Michigan University. In Sheldon’s article, The ‘CSI Effect’: Does it really exist? that was published in the National Institute of Justice, he discusses the craze around the “crime-fiction television dramas” and the possible effects it has on jurors in their decisions in court cases. (Sheldon, par. 3)With the country in complete fascination with crime-fiction Sheldon found television rating from 2006 that showed that “five of the top ten television programs that week were about scientific evidence in criminal cases. Together they amassed more than 100 million viewers.” (Sheldon, Par. 6) With more than 100 million viewers watching crime-fiction in a given week Sheldon wonders “how many of them report for juror duty the next day?”(Sheldon, Par. 7) If the number is significant does it affect how they will judge the outcome in the courtroom?…
After watching Peter Donnelly: How juries are fooled by statistics (Donnelly, 2005), I learned that the use of statistics is very important to the medical field. In the case of Sally Clark, the mother who was convicted of murdering her children, statistics proved that she was innocent.…
In Brandon L. Garrett's book, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong, he makes it very clear how wrongful convictions occur and how these people have spent many years in prison for crimes they never committed. Garrett presents 250 cases of innocent people who were convicted wrongfully because the prosecutors opposed testing the DNA of those convicted. Garrett provided simple statistics such as graphs, percentages, and charts to help the reader understand just how great of an impact this was.…
One of the greatest challenges currently facing the American criminal justice system is overcrowding. America has the largest prison population in the world with over two million inmates which have led to major challenges in housing the many inmates. The many challenges being faced by the correctional system include insufficient prison beds for inmates and lack of prison space as well as inadequate funding, and resources. The causes for the extreme overcrowding have been blamed on retributive sentencing polices, new legislation, the War on Drugs, and the criminalization of the juvenile offender.…
Kassin, S.M., & Wrightsman, L.S. (1983). The construction and validation of a juror bias scale.…
The U.S. Constitution was created so that they can provide rules for the government. The principle of limited government is fundamental and is essential to a democracy. One way the Constitution limits the power of the national government is by specify not only the powers of government but also those things that the government is prohibited from doing.…
These wrongful convictions played a major role in more than 75% of wrongful convictions overturned by DNA testing (The Innocence Project, 2010). Although eyewitness testimony can be critical evidence before a judge or jury; 30 years of strong social science research has proven that eyewitness identification is often unreliable. The research which was conducted by the Innocence Project revealed that the human mind is not like a tape recorder or video camera; we neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall the instance exactly how it occurred. Nevertheless, witness memory is like any other evidence at a crime scene, it must be documented carefully and retrieved methodically and quickly, or it can be contaminated (The Innocence project 2010). We as people can carry fibers, through our clothing, skin and hair that can cause the contamination of a crime scene just by not following proper procedure. Furthermore, in these types of cases, DNA has proven what scientists already know, that eyewitness identification is frequently…
For every innocent person wrongfully convicted, a guilty person roams free. It is unsettling to know that thousands of people are wrongfully convicted resulting in thousands of guilty people still roaming the streets and flying under the radar. We continue to walk the streets with murderers and rapists while innocent men and women sit in prison and are even executed. It is sad to think how flawed our justice system can be. It is completely unacceptable for thousands of people to be convicted based on little to no evidence. Many wrongfully convicted people miss out on decades of their lives and their families’ lives, and even if they are exonerated it doesn’t account for all the lost time nor does it change the fact that…
“The criminal justice system, like any system designed by human beings, clearly has its flaws” - Ben Whishaw. Case after case after case could prove this statement. The O.J. Simpson Trails, The State of Florida vs. George Zimmerman, the fictional Tom Robinson case from To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Case of Emmett Till are all examples of our flawed Justice system. So yes, our justice system is flawed.…
Identify specific changes that tend to be the most striking and have the greatest effect on personality.…
Wood, Mary. “Study of First 200 DNA Exonerations Shows Flawed Criminal System” law.virginia.edu, July 23, 2007.…
The criminal justice system of the United States is said to be a fair system. The system is not supposed to discriminate against different races, religious groups or social classes, everyone is supposed to get the same equal treatment. Unfortunately that’s not the case. Many different types of people including African American’s, Hispanics and the poor are getting unfair treatment in the criminal justice system. The criminal justice system discriminates against certain races and social classes.…
Martin Partington, when writing about the Criminal cases Review Commission, declared that “One of the most serious challenges facing the criminal justice system is ensuring that miscarriages of justice do not occur”, (Partington, Introduction to the English Legal System, Oxford University Press, 2012/13 (7th ed.) at page 135.…