...The reoccurring theme in the book, The Falcon and the Snowman, by Robert Lindsey is of mistrust. All throughout the novel the theme is mistrust is seen. From the protagonist Christopher Boyce’s view on the United States covert policy to the Soviet Agent’s mindset of the courier Daulton Lee. Almost every character mistrusts each other or mistrusts another entity. The images and quotes were handpicked to emphasize the doubt almost all characters had of someone or something else. The collage itself has a spray painted background representing the oppression of information and illegal covert operations that are plentiful in the novel. The main text is written with a black background, symbolising classified information. “We're the only nation on earth to ever use atomic weapons on other human beings.” (p.446) This quote is very interesting, as Christopher Boyce says this to his interrogator after Boyce was arrested. Boyce was asked if he had any regrets for his actions, and Boyce tells him that the United States is the one that needs to feel regret. This is major mood shift, as Boyce was excited to work with Top Secret information, yet his whole view changed, and he mistrusted the United States government. The image is the mushroom cloud from the nuclear bomb detonated by the United States on Hiroshima, Japan. This complements the quote as it gives a visual to see, and realize the horror that happened in Hiroshima that ill-fated day. “You can't leave here tonight free of it all...
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...Compensation for the Wrongfully Convicted By: Jeromi Beans EG 372 The federal government needs to act on the issue of compensation for the wrongfully convicted. The first documented case of compensation of the wrongfully convicted happened in 1989 (The Innocent Project). The problem is that people have been convicted and spent long amounts of time in prisons and they were innocent of the crime. Later being exonerated by DNA testing, these people cannot get the time they spent locked up back, so this leaves only money to compensate them for their time. Some states have a program for this and others have caps on how much someone can receive, while others just do not compensate the wrongfully convicted at all(The Associated Press 2008). The problem has gotten big, as far as the people being exonerated in the states where they do not compensate the wrongfully convicted; these people feel that they should be compensated just like the others in states that do compensate. The people being exonerated and released from prison have no health care and struggle to get health care if at all (Soria, 2011). There have been 25 states to have exonerations from DNA testing (Resurrection after Exoneration). “A study by the Berkeley, California-based Life After Exoneration Program found that after their release; half of exonerates are living with family, 2 in 3 are not financially independent, 1 in 3 lose custody of their children, 1 out of 4 suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. All...
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...02/23/2024 Wrongful convictions affect everyone involved. According to the National Institute of Justice, being wrongfully convicted means that “the person convicted is factually innocent of the charges” (Wrongful Convictions, n.d.). They have been around since the beginning of the criminal justice system, and the numbers continue to grow. Eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, and flawed forensic evidence are the leading causes of wrongful convictions, which result in detrimental consequences for those involved. The purpose of this report is to analyze the main causes of wrongful convictions and to propose potential solutions. DISCUSSION OF FINDINGS Problem Defined Wrongful Convictions are when the person convicted of a crime is...
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...There are more times than most people are aware of, of people being wrongfully convicted. The issue of this, is that DNA evidence is not always present in these cases. With the implantation of DNA in these criminal cases, there would be more innocent people walking the streets instead of behind bars. There are many reasons that a person is wrongfully convicted. Some reasons are due to eyewitness identification errors, inadequate evidence or lack thereof. There are so many more factors that play into this issue. The number one reason that someone is wrongfully convicted, is due to Eyewitness misidentification. In fact, that was that factor played in 72 percent of the post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States. At least forty percent of the eyewitness misidentifications involve cross racial identification. Studies show that people are less likely to be able to recognize the faces of a different race, rather than that of their own. (search.proquest.lib.kaplan.edu/docview) ( innocenceproject.com) The first DNA exoneration took place in 1989. Thirty eight states have won the implementation of DNA exonerations, and just since the year 2000, there have been 257 exonerations. There have been a total of 324 DNA exonerations in the United States. 20 of those 324 served time on death row. Also, 16 were charged with capital punishment, however were not sentenced to death. The average age of these wrongfully...
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...criminal justice graduates of what type of employment opportunities that are available to them after graduation that will aide in the effort of preventing American citizens from being wrongfully convicted. | As your Criminal Justice Club Vice President, I have been informed that many of you who are studying criminal justice have been question what you can do after graduation with a degree in criminal justice. Many of you think that the only possible jobs available for you are as corrections officers or police officers. However that is not true, you can become a forensic science technician, a police officer, a private detective, and a crime scene investigator and even a paralegal. More importantly, due to the recent discoveries of many people having been falsely arrested and convicted reinforces my belief that these field or should I say career paths are very important one’s that need to be filled by my fellow graduates recent graduates who have I know have the drive and want to become successful individuals within the criminal justice field. Did you know that between 1972 and 2007 nearly one hundred and twenty inmates have been released from prison because it was found that they had been wrongfully convicted? According to the national registry of exonerations, 90 wrongfully convicted people were released from prison in 2013 and 31 have been released this year alone. Along with many innocent people being imprisoned for crimes they did not commit if and when they have...
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...When someone is wrongfully convicted, it can ruin their reputation and make people look at them differently. Even if they are found innocent after a miscarriage of justice, that person can still be seen as someone who was convicted of a horrible crime. This can cause other people to be wary around them or judge them, which is why a wrongful conviction can ruin someone's reputation. Compensation cannot erase the needless pain that people receive with wrongful convictions, but it can help soften the blow and help them to return to a normal...
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...No matter where you are in the world, there is always going to be awful criminals such as murderers and sex offenders. The big debate is, what do we do to punish them? Some people say to give them a taste of their own medicine and sentence them to the death penalty. Others say to let them rot away in prison so they realize how wrong their decision was. I say that the death penalty should be abolished because many people are wrongfully convicted, it’s hypocritical, and it’s not a true punishment. According to the DPIC, since 1973 there have been 143 exonerees. It is hard to tell for sure how many people have been actually executed from a false accusation because once the execution has occurred, the case is typically forgotten and not further investigated. There are 10 known cases from which the person that was wrongfully convicted was executed (Innocence). We also need to keep in mind the families of the wrongfully accused. How would you feel if your son/daughter or brother/sister was sentenced to the death penalty for something they didn’t even do? Making them go to jail is bad enough, but them being killed is too tragic. Using capital punishment on a person who commits murder is hypocritical. Murder is against the law, so now when a person commits it we’re just going to kill them as well? That doesn’t make any sense. Trying to teach people that killing is wrong by killing those who commit murder just causes confusion and doesn’t solve anything. This is best stated by the...
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...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 of the hairs. The only piece of evidence that was presented to the jury was the testimony of Elkin’s niece. The niece had only seen the attacker for a short period of time and it was in bad lighting. The state of Ohio admitted that there was no physical evidence connecting Elkins to this crime. Elkins presented an alibi to the court but that didn’t work. Elkins was convicted of murder,...
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...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 of the hairs. The only piece of evidence that was presented to the jury was the testimony of Elkin’s niece. The niece had only seen the attacker for a short period of time and it was in bad lighting. The state of Ohio admitted that there was no physical evidence connecting Elkins to this crime. Elkins presented an alibi to the court but that didn’t work. Elkins was convicted of murder,...
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...There are many reasons why cases get exonerated leaving the victims of the crimes emotionally depressed or feeling let down by the justice system. When a convicted felon of a crime that involves a victim is exonerated, why should there be a program in place to support the victim during the process of exonerating the wrongfully convicted? A crime victim needs a program of support when the person convicted of that crime is found to be wrongfully convicted because of emotional guilt, being the reason someone lost years of freedom, or concerned that it could be retaliation from the wrongfully convicted. According to the article “After the Exoneration, What about the Victim”, victims react with shock upon finding out the news of exoneration. The...
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...shed light on the ignorance and indolence of our government and all other parties involved in these wrongly convicted cases such as our law enforcement, members of the bar, judges, forensic analysts, and many more. As well as pointing out the trials and tribulations of the wrongly convicted from the first initial interrogation to the conviction and then on to what may or may not lead to their cases being overturned and those accused of being “guilty” proven innocent and being set free. Their main example used in this article pertaining to the wrongfully convicted cases in the United States was a man named Paul House. The first exoneration took place in 1989 thanks to the advancement of DNA testing. Since then 268 convicts have been exonerated and set free. On average most of those had already served 13 years in prison as well as waiting on death row. It has been found that 17 convicts that have already been sentenced to death were wrongfully convicted. Now since the onset of DNA testing in the year 2000 it has added great pressure for those awaiting the death penalty to have their cases reopened but unfortunately is not a simple task and is more often than not frowned upon and denied by the courts due to insufficient funding, timing and resources. The advocacy group the Innocence Project provides legal aid and funds to those who believe they were wrongfully convicted and have been granted a new trial. The advancement of the DNA testing is mainly used in...
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...Over the years numerous cases have been reported, where wrongfully convicted criminals have been exonerated. Exonerated meaning, someone has been absolved from blame for a fault or wrongdoing. These individuals spent years some a lifetime in a prison cell for a crime they have never actually committed but yet were still put in jail. In extreme cases individuals are even sentenced to death. This issue has been around for decades and has been researched by numerous scientists. Hugo Bedeau and Michael Radelet published their studies in the Stanford Law Review claiming that 350 individuals have been wrongfully convicted in capital cases. Their work inspired many people to begin researching this issue. The public plays a more important role in everyone’s everyday life then people think. Often there is a struggle for the exonerees to return back to a normal life. The things they experience while incarcerated change their lives forever and often people don’t understand that they are in fact innocent and never committed a crime. The main causes of wrongful conviction include: eyewitness misidentification, improper forensic science, false confessions, and informant misconduct. Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of the wrongfully convicted. Research has shown that humans have difficulty recalling events that have happened, since the human brain is not videotape we cannot be certain about the details of an event that occurred. Jurors often rely more on what people...
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...The final project for the course was for students to choose a topic that had been discussed in class, and create some type of presentation. My group chose to dedicate and create our program around the case of George Stinney Jr. George Stinney Jr. was a fourteen year old African American boy, who was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1944 in the state of South Carolina. Stinney had allegedly murdered two young white girls, and was convicted of first degree murder in under ten minutes, by an all white jury. He is one of the youngest people in the United States in the 20th-century to be sentenced to death and to be executed. After 70 years, George Stinney Jr.’s case ruling was overturned and it was admitted that he had be wrongfully convicted....
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...Is the Death Penalty Unethical? 18 March 2014 Kyle Parks Mr. Bagley Accounting 1 18 March 2014 According to an Ohio State University study, "As many as 10,000 inmates are wrongfully convicted of serious crimes each year" (Spring). Some of these convictions result in sentences of the harshest possible punishment in the United States, the death penalty. This means that in this country that claims to be equal and free, a person can still be killed for a crime he/she did not commit. On top of this, it is both highly immoral and costly to execute criminals on death row. For these reasons, the death penalty is unethical and should be discontinued in the United States. The Bible states in multiple places that humans are forbidden to kill other humans. Matthew 5:21 says, "You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment"("Shall Not Murder"). The Bible simply states that, as humans, one does not have the right to kill another human. There is no fine print saying whether it is right or wrong to kill someone after one has committed a crime. Humans have just been taking this matter into their own hands. God also states in the Ten Commandments that one shall not murder. In Mark 10:19, Jesus says, "You know the commandments: You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false...
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...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 that it is important to create and pass laws to require DNA test and make eye-witnesses more reliable because if they do...
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