American Justice

Essay by kingsterUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, January 2006

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Countless times you find that people go to jail, and it is of no fought of there own. They end-up telling there children crazy stories so that they won't find out what really happen and why daddy or mommy can't come home. Some tell there families that they are on a secret mission, others say they are out of town on business, but what ever the reason we have to come up with a better solution to how we convict people. In todays modern world we have different ways of knowing if you did it or not but still people are going to prison for some reason or another.

"DNA evidence unavailable at the time has now proven conclusively that five teenage boys sent to prison 12 years ago for raping and almost killing a young woman jogger in New York's Central Park was not guilty of that crime (whatever else they may have been up to that evening).

What's most shocking is that the boys' convictions were not the result of perjured testimony by racist cops, or manufactured evidence, or jurors addled by some prosecutor's demagogic brilliance. The convictions were based almost entirely on the boys' own confessions. Why would anyone confess to a crime he didn't commit?

DNA testing, which can identify a person indisputably (or indisputably rule that person out) based on a single strand of hair or tiny scrap of skin, has taught us that there are people in prison, including some on death row, who are not just undeserving of their punishment for some legal or political or psychological reason, but plain-and-simple, Perry-Mason not guilty. The Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School, led by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, has achieved a steady stream of murder-conviction reversals. As intended, this has given many people pause...