Innocent until proven guilty is a phrase the United States justice system says we abide by but in many cases this seems to falter from true. Due to various factors such as tunnel vision, faulty forensics, false confessions, improper identification, missing evidence and the list could go on; all of these reasons can lead to a biased trial and ultimately lead to a wrongful conviction. Julie Rea was a single mom convicted of the murder of her ten year old son Joel Kirkpatrick on October 13th, 1997. This twenty-eight year old mom and her son lived in a rural area in Lawrence, Illinois that was referred to as a quaint little town that very rarely saw any crime so when the news of sweet little Joel Kirkpatrick being murdered got out it sent the …show more content…
Her conviction was influenced by several factors such as: perjury, inaccuracies at the crime scene and official misconduct; the prosecution even went as far to let her ex husband testify and state that she was debating on aborting Joel (which was false) (Bluhm Legal Clinic, 2022). All while the defendant was claiming a man broke into her home and there was a struggle between the two of them. Julie also sustained injuries from the struggle but ultimately he had escaped and she then ran for …show more content…
Tommy Lynn Sells at the time of her son's murder had been linked to committing similar crimes in several different states. Sells after being arrested and convicted of a similar crime admitted that he killed Joel Kirkpatrick and struggled with Julie inside of the home. He stated that he had broken into their home through a window and stabbed Joel to death with a knife he took from Julie’s butcher block (The National Registry of Exonerations, 2012). The details he provided were not released to the public and they matched exactly what Julie had been saying all along. The Downstate Innocence Project was able to conjure up evidence that puts Sells in the area at the time of Joel’s murder and along with his confession that was all they needed to prove Julie Rea’s innocence. She was able to post bond in 2006 due to the overwhelming evidence provided and she was officially exonerated in the year
She was able to escape and phone a neighbor which led to his arrest after being caught a little while later. The girl that was friends of Katy Harris survived and madea full recovery and was able to give a full description of the killer and identified him as Tommy Lynn Sells and he was then incarcerated and sent to jail in Texas when he was later then given the death penalty after being tried. Tommy Lynn Sells operated over a span of ten to twenty years killing what people believe to be more than seventy people but evidence can not prove this. Tommy was given the death penalty by Texas and was put to an end in 2014 once the system was able to get information and confessions out of him and once all the convictions and processing was done. Tommy was ended by lethal injection.
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,
In 1992 Kennedy Brewer was arrested in the state of Mississippi and accused of killing his girlfriend’s 3 year old daughter Christine Jackson. Brewer was babysitting the child that evening and two days after she disappeared her body was found in a creek. After he waited in jail for three years a trial began and Brewer was convicted of capital murder and sent to death row. Police suspected Brewer because he was the only one home and there was no evidence of a break in. although there was a broken window by where the child slept that was overlooked that could have been an entry way for an intruder.
Later, she was release because of another suspect in the murder. Then, she was convicted again when she returned to the US after a witness came forward.
The testimony showed that his initial victim may not have been Katy Harris. It is thought that his first pick was Noell Houchin, the bartender that was serving him at the bar that night. He kept expressing to her how much he wanted to have sex with her. On the other hand, the witness of the murder was Krystal, and she restated how the murder of her friend and the slicing of her own neck went about. Krystal had one reason to expose Sells: he killed her friend Katy (SC 7).
When asking her daughter, Casey, where Caylee was she made many different excuses before finally admitting that she had not seen Caylee in weeks. Police suspected that Casey was responsible for the death of Caylee and after an investigation, Casey was charged
(2021) The trial lasted 6 weeks from May to July 2011, the prosecution was seeking the death penalty, they alleged Casey wanted to get rid of her parent
There was a bullet with Teresa's DNA on it yet it took police 6 entire months to find it after searching his garage after they searched it multiple times beforehand and yet again they failed to take any photographic evidence. There were reports of the evidence being mishandled and rumors of the officers planting evidence to secure Stevens' conviction along with Brendan's. This caused concern about the honesty and justice of Steven's
The Biased Trial of Tom Robinson Tom never would've been guilty if it weren't for a biased courtroom. In To Kill a Mockingbird Tom Robinson is accused of raping a young white girl named Mayella. Tom Robinson had lots of evidence that he was not guilty but the community was against Tom Robinson. Here is some evidence that proves that the accusations were motivated because he was black.
However, there are those that believe she is the murderer. The evidence gathered all pointed only to her. She was found innocent because the police at the time mishandled the case, the evidence that was collected pointed to her, she was
The Supreme Court recently began hearing oral arguments in a case, where two men were convicted of bribery by a jury. However, that conviction was overturned by an appeal because the jury had been improperly instructed as to what constitutes a guilty verdict. The attorney for the defense, Lisa Blatt said, “The government should bear the consequences when overlapping charges produce split verdicts of acquittals and invalid convictions.” This quote identifies with one of the fundamental principles of the American legal system, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. While Blatt continues to argue that the vacated conviction is worthless.
In your every day, ordinary lives, the credibility one has is important. No vocation requires more skill to assess the credibility of others than in the court system. On any given day a trial judge faces many people whose lives hang in the balance and will likely do anything to keep from being restricted from their freedoms. People will lie, twist the truth, and conveniently remember things differently all to hide the sordid truth. Knowing this, it becomes increasingly apparent that the courts, judges and representatives need to have a keen ability to assess credibility.
“A person is innocent until proved guilty in a court of law” In the play Twelve Angry Men by Reginald Rose, an 18-year-old is on trial for the murder of his father. After many pieces of evidence, the three that are in doubt are the old man hearing “I’m going to kill you!” as well as the weapon of choice and how it was replicated, and finally the woman’s testimony. In my opinion, the boy could have been proven guilty, based on these the boy is not guilty.
Unfortunately, in this case the prosecution did a poor job on linking all evidence to Casey Anthony that proved she murdered her daughter. The prosecution ignored a single plain legitimate notion “Corpus Delicti” requirement and due to that failure of addressing it the jury was forced to give a “not guilty” verdict from the beginning of the
Therefore, when a person argues that a juvenile was not aware of their crime is a discrediting claim. In 1990 in the city of Chicago, a couple expecting their first child were murdered in cold blood in the hands of a juvenile teen. The teen shot both the husband and the wife who pleaded for their lives and the life of their unborn child. Author of “Juvenile Justice Information Exchange”, Jennifer Jenkins states, “He reported to a friend, who testified at his trial, about his ‘thrill kill’ that he just wanted to ‘see what it would feel like to shoot someone’”. This killer was aware of his crime and was aware of who his victims were due to planning the murders months before.