Illegal Conviction and Assistance to Victims

An innocent person convicted in the court of law for a crime, he or she did not commit, and after depth investigation, a court determine that he or she was innocent it said to be a wrongful conviction. The various reasons why for a wrongful conviction include coercion, intoxication, law ignorance, duress, violence fear, harsh sentence threat, an affiliation of harm, situation misunderstanding, and diminished capacity. The criminal justice system has been paying a lot of attention on wrongful convictions and several Innocence programs and projects to protect people from injustice (Gould, 2008).

These programs and reforms are meant to work and help innocent people who have been wrongly convicted so that they can prove their innocence. Exploratory investigations, pro bono legal and DNA tests are used to proof the innocence of people.

The reforms include State-by-state innocence commissions, enhanced witness identification measures which help minimizes the probability of mistaken identity. Parting of crime labs so that they do not work together with law enforcement establishments, the individuals who are convicted wrongly are compensated, police interrogations recording, better evidence is safeguarding and state laws authorizing post-conviction admission to DNA testing.

With adverse technology, DNA testing has become very efficient in detecting the specific person who performs a crime. There is also a lack of integrity in the judicial system that is causing the evidence to be manipulated by those who are involved in it. There are a lot of people who are proving their innocence by DNA evidence, and they continue to increase each day because DNA is very accurate.

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Despite the fact that technology has been very helpful in criminal justice system, it possesses some major threats, and it can also lead to a wrongful conviction. This is because the machines may identify a sample comes from a different person from the one who causes the crime. Therefore, it is important that if a DNA test is to be carried out to determine the source of a sample the test should be done twice to improve on accuracy because on one test the sample may be contaminated.

On August 30, 1981, Carolyn Armstrong, a twenty-one-year old girl body was found by the roadside in Navarro County, Texas. The girl had no clothes from the waist, and she had been stabbed almost forty times. She was wounded all over from the chest to the following meaning that she died a horrible death. Her car and the ignition keys were found few miles away from the site of her body. There was a black hair net and partly smoked joint in her car. Randolph Arledge had visited his family in Corsicana, Texas during the occurrence of the fateful accident but he went back to his home in Houston the following day. When he arrived in Houston, he found his friends Paula Lucas and Bennie Lamas and went on a road tour in a stolen car. The three of them were arrested in Tennessee as suspects of an armed robbery and were charged. There was a deal that was offered by the officers so that the three of them could testify about the death of Carolyn. Lucas and Lamas made testimonies against their friend falsely and said that Arledge had confessed to them that he had killed a woman in Corsicana. They were considered in their case of armed robbery and Lucas was given probation. The case was later reviewed, and it was determined that it was a wrongful conviction. My opinion to the case is that it was a wrongful procedure for a court to depend on the confession of the two without carrying on the deep investigation.

Deshawn & Marvin Reed was a wrongly convicted case in 2001. They were declared guilty of shooting a man in Ecorse. MI, Deshawn, and Marvin were exonerated by the Michigan Innocence Clinic. The Innocence clinic presented their new evidence to Judge Patricia, and after analyzing all the evidence, the judge overturned the case and held that Reeds had been wrongly convicted. The Wayne County Prosecutor did not appeal Judge Fresard’s decision and did not attempt to retry the Reeds. The clinical program helped in helped in determining the innocence of the convicted people. The case decision was overturned, and the appeal agency claimed that the Reeds were wrongly convicted (Westervelt & Humphrey, 2001).

Dwayne province was a wrongfully convicted case in 2001. Dwayne was convicted of murder on Detroit’s northwest side. In March 2010, Dwayne became an exonerate in the clinic. The clinic presented new evidence in court and proved that Dwayne was innocent. The evidence included exculpatory evidence that was previously suppressed by the court during sentencing. After the presentation of the new evidence, the judge weighed the new evidence, and he threw out Dwayne’s conviction in November 2009 holding that he was wrongly convicted. The case was heard for six months by Wayne County Prosecutor, and eventually de declared that Dwayne had no case to answer and therefore on March 24, 2010, he dropped all the charges. My opinion towards the case is that the judge took time in analyzing all the new evidence provided and therefore Dwayne had been wrong convicted during the previous ruling.

Julie Baumer case falls in the myths about Shaken Baby Syndrome which ended up in a wrongful conviction. Julie was taking care of her baby nephew, and the infant sustained a lot of injuries, and she was convicted of child abuse( Cutler & Penrod, 1995). During the court ruling, all other possible causes of the injuries on the infants were suppressed. The judge did not consider other alternatives were ruled out and Julie ended up convicted. Julie’s lawyers failed to present evidence that proved that the child the child had sustained those injuries from natural causes. The former lawyer had provided the court with evidence that showed that the baby’s head scans showed that the baby had suffered from the stroke and also proved that the child had been abused. The scan had been done by a leading world expert, and therefore they were accepted in the court of law.

When the judge received this evidence, he overturned the conviction, and in December 2009 Julie got released from prison, and the judge ruled that the sentence was a Wrongful Incarceration. The clinic was on judge side, and it defended him against the appeal of the prosecution of Michigan Supreme Court and Michigan Court of Appeals. The program did not give up in proving Julie’s innocence, and therefore the prosecution heard her case again. In 2010 there was a lengthy hearing of the case, and her attorney together with Innocence Clinic defended Julie innocence. Further, they provide beyond reasonable doubt that the injuries were not caused by abuse by nature. The clinic had experts from the county who were qualified and helped in convincing the court that the baby’s injuries were not sustained by any by abuse. However, having presented all the evidence, the case was officially exonerated, and Julie was declared innocent on 15th October 2010.

Andre Ash case of 2016 involved a child abuse. The baby’s grandmother and Andre Ash noticed that there was a bump on the baby’s head. They decided to take the emergency clinic, and after checking on the baby, the doctor told them that the injury on the baby head looks suspicious. To do more analysis on the baby, he was taken to Seattle Children’s Hospital, and according to the analyzing doctor, there were broken ribs, arms and hand and the baby’s skull had fractured. However, the baby showed any discomfort or restriction of motion. Also, there was no bruising. Andre was interrogated, and he did object since it was a detector interrogation. The detective suggested that Andre should enroll in anger management training so that he could explain how he hurt the kid. Ash was denied sleep and was very depressed denied having abused the baby for eighteen times. Karen Kowalczyk’s a detective came up with the different version of interrogation. Her way of asking questions were leading to him confesses that he abused the baby and she also lied to Ash and demonstrated to him how he injured her son. Ash ended up admitting to the crime and was convicted (Westervelt & Humphrey, 2001).

At Stanford Medical Center later determined that the kid had a bone disease and that was the reason why he had fractured with a regular holding. A psychologist called Dr. Charles Honts was a false confession, and he stated that the interrogation techniques used by Kowalchyk were wrong since they lead to a false confession. Ash stayed in prison for ten years, and eventually, he admitted, and the judge made his ruling without considering all the evidence provided by the experts. The case is in the appeal process, and I feel that the conviction was wrong and Ash will be declared innocent because he did not commit the crime according to the expert statement. The only crime he committed is not handling the child carefully because he had no knowledge about the kind born disease condition.

Another wrongfully convicted case is dated 28, September 2000 and the name of the defendant is David Camm. David was arraigned in court for the murder of his two children and wife. The most significance evidence against the defendant was the blood on his tee-shirt. He analyst who performed Camm blood analyst had falsified his credentials, and he was not an expert from any college. After he was uncovered, he testified that he only worked as a crime scene analyst and had been sent to take pictures, but he added his opinions to the evidence. The Stan Faith, the prosecutor, had falsified all his credentials so that he could testify against the defendant. During the investigation, there was a new suspect and was compelled to run a DNA evidence on the blood found on the shirt. The DNA was to be run on CODIS a second time, and it was uncovered that the blood was not run on CODIS and therefore, the prosecutor had lied to Camm family when she assured them that there were no matches.

The DNA contained the blood of Charles Boney who had a history of attacking and stalking women although he was then convicted. During the kidnapping time, Charles was on parole, and the investigators did not follow other leads that would make them obtain evidence about the crime. A DNA analyst who was an investigation on the case declared that at one time Stan Faith had tried to make her testify that the DNA blood sample belongs to Camm. The same incident appeared to a fingerprint analyst who testified in court that the prosecutor made him testify that the fingerprints found on crime scene belonged to Camm and he had analyzed that the belonged to Boney. The prosecutor was later discovered that she was defending Boney because he was a family friend and they all agreed to have a discussion of Boney’s defense before him being a suspect (Cole, 2001). Faith held that he had no idea that Boney was involved. In this case, Camm ended up serving a sentence, and he was innocent. Bribery was involved which is an evil virtue. In the university, integrity is highly maintained so that justice is served. My opinion is that Camm is innocent and his justice was denied by the actions of the prosecutor making him serve in prison for 13 years before the appeal.

On August 17, 1992, Rivera was wrongly convicted of a crime he did not commit. He was convicted of the first-degree murder of eleven-year-old Holly Staker. Holly was a babysitter at a neighbor’s home when she got raped and killed by an intruder. A semen sample was taken so that investigation could begin to determine the murderer. However, the DAN analysis was not performed during that time. There was convicted by a testimony he had given under duress. In the Rivera testimony there were many factual inconsistencies, and therefore he was found of the crime and was sentenced to life in prison. Even before the swabs testing Rivera was convicted two times. However after they carried out a DNA test, Rivera was not the source of the semen. The prosecutor of the case tried Rivera again if after the proof from the semen sample that he did not commit the crime (Baumgartner, DeBoef, & Boydstun 2008). The prosecutor argued that the semen was from a consensual sex Holly had before she was murdered. After the trial, the defendant was convicted for the third time.

After Juan Rivera had appealed, the case was overturned on the fact that he was wrongfully convicted of murder. Rivera stayed in prison for twenty years before the court of appeal granted certiorari. The court of appeal held that the prosecutor was wrong by assuming that the semen sample had been from sex before the murder and therefore insinuating that the girl was sexually active without any evidence (Cole, 2001). The judge in making the decision held that since Rivera had the mental illness, he made testimonies that were not consistency. Rivera has compensated twenty million dollars for a wrongful conviction.

In conclusion, wrongful convictions have been a major problem faced by criminal justice system. The system is now recognizing those who were wrongly convicted of it offers them an appeal so that they can proof their innocence. Congress in U.s has passed an Innocence Protection Act in the year 2004 that aims at protecting individuals who are convicted wrongly by performing DNA tests and offering compensations to them as per every year they spend in prison. Video interrogation has also been introduced to reduce self-incrimination and also suspect manipulation where they plead guilty, and they are innocent. The adoption of innocence reforms and recruiting highly qualified judges will help in reduction of wrongful conviction, and justice will be improved.