Dozens of innocent people are victim to prosecution of crimes they have never committed. Specifically in Texas, 17 out of 40 criminal cases have been exonerated. That is over 40% of cases with people wrongfully sentenced. This means that the real criminals are still out on the streets, and innocent people are losing years of their lives. Texas convicts have hope, because DNA evidence is preserved for most of the cases, which can now be read and compared with other evidence because the technology is here. The problem is that district attorneys are under pressure to prosecute someone to comfort the public and lead them to believe they are doing their job. The same problem occurs with today's news and media outlets, because they are more concerned about getting the news out first than they are about making sure that whatever they report is true.

The majority of wrongly charged criminals have been African American. This may relate to Gladwell's ideas in Blink, where people relate black to negative things and white to positive. Prosecutors my subconsciously believe that black people are more likely to commit crimes. This does not imply they are racist bigots, but there is a stigma that people associate with black people and crime.

Eyewitness accounts are not substantiative enough to prove whether an individual has committed a crime or not. In the case of James Lee Woodward, he was convicted because he had been convicted of theft as a teenager, so his previous criminal record suggested that he could have committed another crime. After all, according to the 20/80 rule, 20 percent of people cause 80 percent of the problems, so he could've been one of the few that commit multiple crimes. Logically, he could have been the suspect, but there was nothing to prove that he was guilty. I understand why the DA would jump to conclusions as they have in the past, but obviously they have not been putting much thought into their hypothesis, because over 40% of the criminals have been wrongfully convicted.

Time cannot be bought back, so something must be done to prevent so many false convictions. The convictions are a matter of public safety versus personal rights and liberties. DNA testing has been a giant leap in aiding to determine who is truly innocent and guilty. However, there are many states who have not preserved DNA evidence from the scene of crimes that have occurred a long time ago. How will these innocent people be discovered and exonerated?

Posted in Posted by Umang Patel at 12:53 AM