Essays on Wrongful Convictions

Capital Punishment has long been a controversial issue. Your political views or religious beliefs may cause you to favor one side of the argument against the other. The death penalty is the most extreme punishment you can receive for committing a crime. But is the death penalty worth its exorbitant cost? The death penalty is vastly more expensive than the cost of a life sentence in prison. The “threat,” “deterrence,' “terror” does not exist to criminals. They do not fear…...

Abstract Racial and ethnic discrimination continues to concern juvenile justice systems nationwide, the data supports the theory of racial bias and disparities in juvenile court. In 2001, black youth were four times as likely for severe sentencing than white juveniles. Nearly 60,000 youth in the United States under age 18 are imprisoned in juvenile detention centers and prisons due to stereotyping them as devious hard criminals. Judges and arresting officers believe confining and cutting black youth off from their families…...

In June, 1989, up and coming film director Spike Lee released his ground breaking, socially conscious and critically acclaimed film, Do the Right Thing. This film, in and of itself has as little to do with wrongful convictions as the classic American literature novel, turned into a movie, by Pulitzer Prize winner, Harper Lee's 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird actually had to do with killing mockingbirds. I bring Do the Right Thing, because it was in 1989, when the criminal…...

Snatch theft is becoming a serious issue nowadays. During the months of June and July 2004, the local media, especially the press, have been replete with reports of crime and violence in Malaysia. There have been many reports of snatch thefts which has given a great impact to the society. Police statistics on these crimes indicate that they are on the rise. Therefore, there is a sense of anxiety, even panic and fear in the air. The seriousness of this…...

A false memory is simply a memory that did not occur. An actual experience can become distorted as best illustrated by the Cog Lab experiment on false memories accessed through Argosy University. The experiment is outlined as follows: a participant is given a list of words that are highly relative in nature at a rate of about one word every 2 seconds. At the finish of the given list, the participant is then shown a list of words in which…...

I. Introduction The death penalty in the United States is a constant source of controversy. Efforts to abolish capital punishment in America date back to over 100 years and continue to expand in present-day. In addition, all 50 states vary in their retention and application of the death penalty. Currently, the death penalty is legal in 32 states, the distribution of the actual executions however, is quite wide. The five states with the highest number of executions performed account for…...

While reading both articles The Death Penalty Violates the Constitution of the United States and Cyberbullying Has a Broader Impact than Traditional Bullying, I found that there were both deductive and inductive argument presented with in the articles. On the first article about the death penalty, the author used inductive arguments to make his point. An example of and inductive argument in this article is “Furthermore, emotional impact, biased jurors, and discriminatory application of death penalty cases work to create…...

The Peggy Hettrick case has been a cold case for decades. The case from 1987 has been a mystery. August 10, 1998 Timothy Masters was charged for her murder. Timothy was released and charges were dismissed on January 22, 2008. The roles in this case were hard to follow. The prosecutor who has the role to present the state’s case against defense had to prove that Timothy’s knife collection, his drawings, failure to report seeing body, and the time frame…...

As the pace of DNA exonerations has grown across the country in recent years, wrongful convictions have revealed disturbing fissures and trends in our criminal justice system. Together, these cases show us how the criminal justice system is broken and how urgently it needs to be fixed. We should learn from the system’s failures. In each case where DNA has proven innocence beyond doubt, an overlapping array of causes has emerged from mistakes to misconduct to factors of race and…...