Bennett Barbour In 1978, a man named Bennett Barbour was convicted of rape and spent 4.5 years in prison until finally proven innocent by DNA testing performed by The Virginia Department of Forensic Science’s post conviction testing project. On February 7, 1978, a student that was 19 years old, that attended William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, was raped in her fiancé’s apartment held at gunpoint. Soon after the rape happened, the victim alerted the police. When investigators arrived at the apartment, the victim described the assailant as 5’ 6” and weighed about 145 pounds. After a week had passed since the crime, the victim was shown photos that had possibly matched the description that was given to the investigators.
So, after all of this, why was Derek still hanged? Well, this is what many people asked after his death and still ask today. Some may say that because he was granted a posthumous pardon in the 1990’s his death was justified. But Bentley’s family and friends would never be able to see him alive and well again, a death penalty is a death penalty, no amount of pardons will bring Derek or any other victims back. And getting the pardon was not easy to achieve.
" This is a dangerous aspect of the three strikes law, reducing the courts power to consider individual circumstances could lead to unnecessarily long prison sentences for some but on the other hand will ensure hardened criminals don’t get off easy. Overall Shicor concludes that the three strikes law results in inefficient and unpredictable outcomes but I believe those results have more to do with the current construction of our legal
The jury ruled that he should be sent to the electric chair; however, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the death penalty and he was to receive life in prison. Due to the overpopulation in the Texas prison he was sent to, McDuff was quietly released from prison into an unsuspecting citizenry (“Deterrent” 3). Shortly after he was released, Texas prostitutes were coming up missing and were later found dead. McDuff continued killing unsuspecting women for four years after he was quietly released from prison. He was later caught because there was a witness that claimed to see what turned out to be his car speeding away from where one of his victims disappeared from.
Another argument against the restorative approach is that it is too soft for some crimes and will it be too hard when applied to less serious crimes? These are the arguments in favor to as well as against the more “just desserts”. When the world is full of crime and it seems like there is nothing that the government can do to protect innocent individuals, restorative approaches are the furthest thing from my mind personally. When crimes are committed against innocent people and they get a simple slap on the risk punishment like ten years in jail with a possibility of parole for accidentally killing someone it disturbs me. For example, here in North Carolina, there was a woman who was clearly out of her mind that decided to give her five year old daughter up for prostitution in order to pay off a drug debt (Netter 2009).
This exoneration was after he had been locked behind bars for several years. In this case, we can identify how these law practitioners worked on information that was inconclusive. The fact that the little Tim Masters had failed to report that he had found a body as he was heading to school made him to be a key suspect in the murder case. In addition, the fact that many pages of artwork characterized with violence and a collection of knives found in his room also made him a key suspect. The defense counsel failed in its duty of protecting the rights of the innocent.
Prison time may be no worse for some people than the way they already live and therefore ineffective as a form of deterrence. People who cannot afford legal support have very minimal access to the legal system. An innocent person may be incarcerated only because they could not afford a suitable legal defence, this along with the theory of “school of crime” means that law abiding members of the community will become criminals through a forced exposure to real criminals. Instead of reducing future crime and recidivism, imprisonment is actually creating more offenders from once law-abiding citizens. The principle basis for a mandatory minimum sentence is the belief that the length of time in prison is a deterrent to future recidivism.
Putting some of the sentencing at the discretion to the judges may keep our prisons from becoming overcrowded. Overcrowded prisons not only cost more to maintain but they also force states to release the truly bad criminals out into society before they
It would be the last time she would stay in her own apartment. The cause of the two young girls disappearances was one man, a convicted rapist Rex Krebs. Rex Krebs saw and stalked Rachel
He also mentioned that a large majority of juveniles were sentence to life in prison without parole and that they not even killed no one but were part of a crime. After a voting against the law he couldn’t accumulated enough supporters. Then after the extremely modest nature of Yee’s bill, this flip flopping is baffling. The law didn’t change regarding juveniles sentence to life, but what the law change was that every youth who were convicted could ask the judge to reexamine their cases after 15 years in prison. It doesn’t mean that after they will go free what it means is that the