One of the issues currently in the Texas justice system is a miscarriage of justice. A miscarriage of justice is primarily the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. In the film, Unreal Dream: The Michael Morton Story, it is shown that Mr. Morton was given an unfair trial, which led to his conviction for a crime he did not commit. During Mr. Morton’s trial, then-district attorney Ken Anderson had refused to call on chief investigator Don Wood to the witness stand because he did not want to turn over key documents in Mr. Wood’s file to Mr. Morton’s defense lawyer. A specific file that could have helped Mr. Morton’s case was a transcript of a conversation that chief investigator Don Wood had with Mr. Morton’s mother-in-law, Rita Kirkpatrick. During the conversation, Rita was telling investigator Don Wood the story her grandson, Michael Morton’s son, Eric, had told her. While Eric was recalling what he had witnessed, Rita asked him a key question, “Where was Daddy, Eric? Was Daddy there?” to which Eric had answered, “No, Mommy and Eric was there.” Had Mr. Morton's defense lawyer had access to those documents, they could have proven Mr. Morton innocent, found the real suspect, and spared 25 years of Mr. Morton's life. However, because there was no evidence given that hinted to Mr. Morton’s innocence, he was sentenced to life in prison. …show more content…
The Texas criminal justice system has always had a reputation for being ruthless when convicting felons and we have seemed to have kept up that reputation. Many Texans believe in the phrase, “do the crime, do the time,” and will often send perpetrators to prison for minute offenses. At first that may have seemed like the best solution with what to do with these defendants, however, too many are being convicted too quickly and are now overcrowding Texas prisons. Many of those who see the problem with the overcrowding are calling for
Even when Michael’s new defense team, through the innocence project, found a crime that was eerily similar to the method of murder and subsequent events to the one that Michael was convicted of, the new prosecutor in Williamson County fought hard to keep DNA testing from taking place, even stating that they objected to the testing now because the defense hadn’t requested it before (Morton, 2014). There was further evidence of ineffectiveness in that the coroner who’d changed his estimated time of death between the autopsy and trial, had come under scrutiny for his findings in this case, as well as several others, with claims of gross errors “including one case where he came to the conclusion that a man who’d been stabbed in the back had committed suicide” (Morton, 2014). This was only one of the many injustices that were committed against Michael Morton throughout his trial. In August of 2006, the defense was finally granted permission to perform DNA testing on the items that had been taken from his wife’s body (Morton, 2014). Although this testing did not reveal any information about the guilty party, it did at least give Michael the knowledge that Chris was not sexually violated before or after her death (Morton,
The case involved an individual by the name of Danny Escobedo, who was arrested on January 19, 1960, for the murder of his brother-in-law. Escobedo was arrested without a warrant and interrogated; he did not make any statement to the police and was released after contacting his lawyer. On January 30, Benedict DiGerlando, told the police about Escobedo’s involvement in the crime that Escobedo “had fired the fatal shots” (Escobedo v. Illinois- Supreme Court Cases: The Dynamic Court, 1999, pg.2). He was later arrested a second time and taken to the police headquarters. Soon enough Escobedo requested to have “advice from my lawyer”
Assistant District Attorney John Norsetter concealed exculpatory evidence for close 11 years. Ralph Armstrong was convicted for rape and murder in 1995. John Norsetter was aware that Armstrong was not guilty of such tarrying crime, however, he remained silence even though he knew Armstrong was innocent. Back in 1995, a woman made a call to the district attorney testifying that Stephen Armstrong, who was Ralph’s cousin was the responsible of the crime. The prosecutor never told defense attorneys of such valuable information.
In discusiion of chapter 19, I learned that there is a high rate of incarcerated offenders in the justice system. Some offenders are released early and placed on parole. The caseloads of officers are overloaded. The average parolee have fines that they can not pay due to poor resources in the community. Many are released early because the prisons are overcrowded and punishments are used to deter crime.
Maya Young 29 November 2017 Wrongful convictions, flawed evidence procedures, and the death penalty all can compromise the Texas criminal justice system. The United States has the largest prison population in the world. The South is imprisoning more people and at a higher rate and is executing more people. There's more people locked up in Texas than any other state, including California. There are more people in max lockdown, more people in for profit facilities, and more people executed than in any other state.
Our criminal justice system is harsh on all the prisoners but especially to the African American prisoners. If our communities, courtrooms, and cell blocks work together, our criminal justice system can be
Texas Felons Seeking Rights Stripped of their voting rights. Not having the right to bear arms. No opportunities at specific job fields.
Between the large amounts of evidence that the jurors had to keep track of, and countless testimonies from both lay and expert witnesses they had to listen to, the trial of Casey Anthony was proving to be difficult. Issues began early on with the testimony given by Casey’s mother and Caylee’s grandmother, Cindy Anthony. When questioned about her original phone call to the police, Cindy retracted her statement about the car smelling like a dead body, saying that she was only using “a figure of speech.” (Hayes, 2011). Furthermore, another piece of evidence presented was searches done on a computer in the Anthony household, which included searches on chloroform, alcohol, and neck breaking.
Thesis: It is very important for the sake of Americans tax dollars that we change the way that prisons are run and increase the productivity of inmates so when they are released from jail they are ready to be a productive member in society and have the confidence to achieve new goals. Introduction: Day after day, millions of inmates sit in jail doing nothing productive with their lives. We are paying to house inmates that may not even have a good reason to be there. For example, drug offenders are being kept with murderers and other violent offenders.
With well over two million people incarcerated in the United States and countless more tied up within the criminal justice system, alternatives to incapacitation are needed now more than ever. Jails and prisons are feeling the strain on their resources due to overcrowding. This overcrowding has debilitated their ability to function as a place to serve out sentences and to rehabilitate inmates. Alternatives to incarceration could reduce prison populations as well as reduce economic costs. A few programs that have shown to be effective are probation and restorative justice.
I’m referring to the medium to lesser charges, including drug charges and immigration. There is a whole spectrum however of those lesser charges those inmates could benefit from in this way of prison education. In conclusion, a change must be made to the way government runs the prisons and what could be beneficial to make this change and what is currently not working. The number of inmates is one of those changes that could be extremely beneficial, not only to society but also to those specific individuals who have minor charges and deserve a second chance. The women and men that do ever get this second chance at life, truly never get a real second chance if they are not assisted with tools to
The United States is faced with a major issue of mass incarceration and prison overpopulation. With the largest prison population in the world and the second highest incarceration rate per-capita (1 in 100 citizens is behind bars), the United States’ corrections system needs to be reformed now, through both policy and administrative changes. While I am certain you are familiar with these statistics, I would like to emphasize that using incarceration as the primary response to social problems as is happening today in the United States not only impacts those individuals incarcerated and their families, but also costs tax payers billions of dollars. I would encourage you to consider ways to downscale the prison population. One of them would
Something will always need to be fixed in society because society is a reflection of us, and we are not perfect. Recently, there’s been many issues that have caught the attention of people living all across the world. Things such as police brutality, sexual assault in the workplace, and immigration law, just to name a few, but there’s also been an underlying issue that people are becoming more informed about, and that I believe matters - prison reform. Prison reform matters because in many instances, prisoners are treated inhumanely when they are locked up, and aren’t treated as humans when they have served their time. I believe we can bring about change in the prison system by changing the way we punish people who do commit crimes and focusing more on actual rehabilitation.
The United States has a larger percent of its population incarcerated than any other country. America is responsible for a quarter of the world’s inmates, and its incarceration rate is growing exponentially. The expense generated by these overcrowded prisons cost the country a substantial amount of money every year. While people are incarcerated for several reasons, the country’s prisons are focused on punishment rather than reform, and the result is a misguided system that fails to rehabilitate criminals or discourage crime. This literature review will discuss the ineffectiveness of the United States’ criminal justice system and how mass incarceration of non-violent offenders, racial profiling, and a high rate of recidivism has become a problem.
This preconceived notion could not be farther from the truth. In reality, these reform movements are idiotically placing a bandaid over the tremendous issue that the prison system is. An imbalance of reforms between women and men, unrestrained sexual abuse in women’s prisons, and tyrannical gender roles are just three of countless examples of how prison reform movements only create more misfortune and fail to provide any real solution to worsening prison conditions. Perhaps instead of conjuring up additional ideas on how to reform prisons, America’s so-called democratic society should agree upon abolishing prisons as a whole. This being said, it is crucial to identify ongoing issues in today’s society, understand how they contribute to unlawful behavior, and seek a solution.