Brenton Butler's Argument Essay: I Fought The Law

In the article “Two British Boys”, by William E. Schmidt, James Bulger, who was two years old, was murdered. In the hour before the ruthless murder where they beat him with stones, bricks, and metal, they intentionally lied to concerned civilians who approached the two boys as they dragged a screaming James Bulger down the sidewalk. “Some passers-by did intervene on James 's behalf, only to be told by the boys that James was either a younger brother or a lost child they were taking to a nearby police station. When one woman challenged that explanation, telling the boys they were walking away from the police station, one said they had been wrongly sent that way by someone else. ”(Schmidt, 10).

Barbara Deppner and her companion, the former foreman of the car-theft ring, Percy House, testified that Kuklinski had told him about both murders. However, this was all circumstantial evidence because it was just a “He said, she said”

Years later through DNA testing, it was confirmed that Ronald Cotton was innocent and Bobby Poole was the man who committed the crime. How could Thompson, the perfect witness, be so wrong? The argument that Thompson is trying to make through

Even the innocent get sentenced major years for crimes that weren't even committed by them. Sentence reforming needs to take action.

As background information developed into many details, the case got stranger and stranger. The mother Rachelle Bond and the mother 's boyfriend Michael McCarthy were both accused of murdering the little girl. Bond is being accused of accessory to murder after the fact, and McCarthy is charged with the actual

In this series, it is not detectives who solve the crime, rather it is a group of attorneys and students getting together to prove their client is innocent. It does not necessarily matter if this client is innocent, the main goal to make it seem like they are. In process with steps of deduction and evidence they come to the root of what really happened to figure out if their client is indeed innocent, hence why it can easily be mistaken for crime-fiction. However, ‘The Twenty Rules for Crime Fiction’ states that ‘The detective novel must have a detective in it; and a detective is not a detective unless he detects. His function is to gather clues that will eventually lead to the person who did the dirty work in the first chapter’(Van Dine 1928: para.7).

They thought he was left in the care of his older sibbling.(Byford,p.235) In this case the bystanders didn 't intervene, because of the numbers of other people around, some were even alone, when they encounterd the three boys, but because the thought they didn 't have the right to intrude other people 's family life. The two abducters were aware of this, and even told witnesses that he was their brother. Comparing the cases of Catherine Genovese and James Bulger, both of them took place in a public place and in both them a large number of bystanders witnessed parts of the crime (38 people in both cases) Both of the approaches, the experimental method and the discourse analysis tried to explain, why despite the number of witnesses, none of them intervened to that degree, that both of the vitims could have been spared with their

However, this story of Mrs. Stephens being helpless is all the defense has. But how can you, the jury, believe a story from a woman that would lie to doctors, to police,

After a twelve-hour interrogation, Brenton Butler confessed to the murder of Mary Ann Stephens. A key claim made by the defense attorneys in this case was that this was a false confession, and after reaching a verdict of not guilty, the jury clearly agreed. The factors that led the false confession were laid out in a scene during the documentary. Instead of using the interview to discover the truth, the interrogators specifically sought out a confession from the suspect. They began the interrogation with the presumption that Brenton Butler was guilty.

It is as simple as a DNA test to have someone released on a crime they didn’t commit. According to Huffington Post in 2015, over 149 were released on a wrongful conviction being out highest number in years. (Ferner 2016) The most common reason for the convicted is eyewitness misinterpretation, when the witness is left to decide who they thought it could've been.

In 2007, the respondent Xavier Alvarez attended a meeting as a board member in Claremont, California, where he introduced himself as the following: “I’m a retired marine of 25 years. I retired in the year 2001. Back in 1987, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor” (United States v Alvarez 1). In fact, Mr. Alvarez had never received said award, nor had he served in the United States Armed Forces. As a result of making said false statement, Alvarez was indicted under the Stolen Valor Act.

Since the founding of our judicial system there have always been individuals claiming innocence to a crime that they have been found guilty of, traditionally, after their sentencing no matter how innocent they may or may not be would have to serve, live and possibly die by the decision of their peers. The Innocence Project, founded in 1992 by Barry C. Scheck alongside Peter J. Neufeld faces this issue by challenging the sentencing of convicted individuals who claim their innocence and have factual ground to stand upon. The Innocence Project uses the recent advances in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) testing to prove their client’s innocence by using methods that were not available, too primitive or not provided to their clients during their investigation,

As you are shown in the film, after the identification of Brenton Butler and his so-called testimony to investigators, the police and prosecutors just stopped working on the case. Thus, evidence that would have supported Butler’s innocence and help find the actual killer weren’t discovered until Brenton’s defense attorney, Pat McGuinness did some investigation and research of his own. Thus, flowing from film from the trial to McGuinness’s investigation scenes shows the how he attained the information that he and his partner could present in the courtroom. While the prosecutors only had the one eyewitness, who claimed to have only caught a glimpse of the shooter and gave description that did not even match Butler. The film presents the conclusion that the police did not actually do the work to find the actual killer and if it wasn’t for Pat McGuinness and his partner wanting to find the culprit, it would never actually be solved.

One piece of evidence that proves the boy’s innocence is accuracy of the Old man’s testimony. In the play the jurors are arguing over whether or not the man heard the phrase “I’m going to kill you”. According to evidence, the noise of the train passing would be much too loud to hear anything,

They all told him what he wanted to hear so he would stop. In torture showing the instruments is a way to get someone to confess, and to the detective talking about the death penalty was similar to the idea of showing the instruments according to one of the interviewers in the documentary. Norfolk showed a complete disregard for both justice and truth with this case. With seven men telling seven different stories the police manipulated all the stories and bent it all in their favor to preserve the evidence that came before