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Wrongful Convictions

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Submitted By lickintoejam
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Wrongful convictions happen every day within our justice system, according to the , Bureau of Justice Statistics, admits that statistically 8% to 12% of all state prisoners are either actually or factually innocent.
One out of every 100 adults in the United States is behind bars. If we take those on parole or probation into account, that ratio jumps to 1 out of 31 adults. America, the Land of the Free, imprisons five times more people than Great Britain, nine times more people in Germany, and 12 times more people than Japan. Only about 8 percent of sentenced prisoners in federal prison were incarcerated for violent crimes, and about 52 percent of sentenced prisoners for state prisons. Within three years of their release, roughly two-thirds of former prisoners are re-arrested, while 52 percent are re-incarcerated.
Those statistics only show a small part of the lingering problems with our criminal justice system. What about the reported 1-2 percent of our prison population that shouldn’t be there in the first place?
Radley Balko, senior writer for Huffington Post and contributing editor at Reason, says since 1989, “DNA testing has freed 268 people who were convicted of crimes they did not commit.”
(HVnews, 2011)

We are paying taxes to not only take care of the convicted but also the innocent. With everyone wanting fast justice, many people in power like police, judges and lawyers tend to rush through a case if they feel they are able to get something stick without following every avenue, and using appropriate DNA testing, proper identification and questioning of witnesses.
In the 200 convictions studied, 283 instances of probable systemic failure were identified and isolated from case profiles published by the Innocence Project. In many cases, these profiles were either corroborated or clarified by other sources. (Jarvis, 2008)

The staggering numbers of

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