The Miscarriage of Justice

Our “professed” criminal justice system has never operated to provide “justice” to the poor and powerless among us. Year after year, hundreds of individuals get wrongfully convicted as an outcome of criminal proceedings that are embedded in the miscarriage of justice. Wrongful Conviction is when someone who is innocent is convicted of a crime for which they did not commit. People are being imprisoned because of innumerable factors such as misidentification, false confessions, or obligated to plead guilty to elude certain penalties. Some examples of this could be: extortions of harm or death in prison or in the streets, death penalty, or extensive prison sentences. People that are wrongfully convicted can spend countless years, or even up to a decade in the penitentiary.

Victims of this depraved act are confronted with anxiety, depression, as well as trouble with readjusting to society. Overpopulation in prisons comprises criminals as well as those who are wrongfully convicted; I will be contending to why wrongful imprisonments are a drawback here in the United States. I will be deliberating the contributors, the effects, and methods to prevent wrongful convictions in the United States all together.

As an American citizen, you pay taxes. Taxes can range from social security, highway repairs, and maintaining prisons. What if half of those prisoners that you are paying your taxes to are innocent? More than 10,000 innocent individuals are being punished every year in the United States, and that is containing people that are put on death row. Your hard-earned wealth is being misused on people that are innocent in the crime, but shamefaced in the court of law. Innocent people are expiring and having their freedom seized, because of faults in our Justice System. Due to the racial profiling within the Justice System, misconduct of prosecutors, mistaken identification, and ineffective assistance of counsel leave innocent people convicted of crimes they did not commit.

Therefore, those who are unjustly convicted should receive reparations for their years lost so they can re-enter society. To help inhibit wrongful convictions from occurring, states should concentrate more on their distinctive forms of reforms of the Justice System and their connections with wrongful convictions.

In Arthur L. Rizer’s (2003) article about How Race is Affected on Wrongful Convictions, he stated how Former President Lincoln had said, “all men are created equal,” but the United States has fallen short of this testimony in its criminal justice system. In a court of law, all men are not treated equally. It is essential to gain knowledge of the history that has passed, for instance, criminal statutes targeting race existed for most of the twentieth century. Rizer gave an example in his article about how the administration of punishment has direct ties to both the race of the offender and the race of the victim. Rizer (2003) noted that in the state of North Carolina, they had mandatory capital crime statutes for those cases where a black man was convicted of raping a white woman, but a white man convicted of the same crime would receive a maximum of one year in prison. As you can see, race does play a big part when convicting someone of a crime. By having these presumptions of criminal intent that has been assigned to minorities, there will still be an increase of wrongful convictions towards the innocent, which brings me to my first case, Haynesworth v. Virginia (1984).

Cite this page