...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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...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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...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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...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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...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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...The research also remarked that 67 prosecutors that appeals courts had indicated many violations, however, only six were censured. In April, ProPublica issued a research in New York City regarding 30 cases involved prosecutor mischiefs which produced a sentence to be nullified. Solely, one prosecutor was actually punished. The Innocence Project research 75 DNA exemptions in cases where the prisoner was later discovered to be unconditionally innocent and affirmed that prosecutorial mischiefs constituents to almost half of those wrongful sentences. According to a representative for the Innocence Project, none of the DA in those conflicts sustained any strict professional...
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...multiple points evidence must go through, allowing room for error. There is no one way to solve one crime, so the area for error is large. Focusing on just the three main causes of wrongful convictions, there are eyewitness misidentification, flawed forensic evidence, and false confessions. Eyewitness Misidentification The first major one is eyewitness misidentification. Eyewitness misidentification is when someone incorrectly names or points out a suspect in a crime. This can happen by accident or on purpose. The person may look really similar to someone they know, leading to an accidental eyewitness misidentification. It can also happen if someone is angry at a person and just simply wants to see them get in trouble. According to the Innocence Project within 351 exonerations, 68% of them were due to eyewitness misidentifications (Berman & Toglia, 2021). Eyewitness misidentification has been an issue since the start of crime and continues to show up abundantly today. According to the 2022 Annual Report released by The National Registry of Exonerations, 54 exonerations were made involving mistaken witness identification. Not only were there 54 exonerations for mistaken witness identification, but there were also 181 cases exonerated due to false accusations (2022 Annual Report: The National Registry of Exonerations, 2023). This directly ties to wrongfully naming the...
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...Name: Date: TRUE/FALSE Directions: Answer each of the following by indicating if the statement is TRUE or FALSE 1. The word forensics refers to the application of scientific knowledge to legal questions. TRUE 2. A fact is a statement or assertion of information that can be verified. TRUE 3. What we perceive about a person depends in part on their mannerisms and gestures. TRUE 4. Good observation skills come naturally to investigators. They do not need to be trained. FALSE 5. The first task of forensic scientists is to find, examine, and evaluate evidence from a crime scene. TRUE 6. The Innocence Project is an organization that seeks to get convicted killers out of prison. SKIP 7. Our emotional state influences our ability to see and hear what is happening around us. TRUE 8. If we remember seeing something happen, we can trust that is happened just as we think it did. FALSE 9. Through our senses of sight, taste, hearing, smell, and touch, we gather every single moment about what is around us. TRUE 10. Most wrongful convictions seem to be the result of faulty eye-witness testimony. TRUE MULTIPLE CHOICE Directions: Answer the following questions with the choice that best answers the question 1. One of the important tools of the forensic investigator is the ability to: (a) a. Observe, interpret and report observation clearly b. Observer assumptions clearly. c. Report assumptions...
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...A major issue in the forensic criminal justice system is DNA testing because of how it is handled, tested, and transported, and there are many logical solutions for this issue. In our court system, DNA is a large evidential piece of proving someone’s innocence, but it is not always trustworthy. DNA can make or break a case, especially if it is not cared for in the right way. “the problem with DNA evidence is no longer 1 of validity, but one of proficiency, 2 cofounding variables in the DNA testing process weaken and often destroy DNA powerfulness and usefulness in the court room, crime labs and juries”(innocence project). . First off, DNA is a very complex molecule that is located everywhere in our body, and there are many different ways to test it. There is also many different kinds of DNA testing, a...
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