Paul Yale Mo Hassan Bus 18-80473 7 October 2013 O.J. Simpson Trial Verdict 1) What crimes were committed? The OJ Simpson case was a criminal trial, with two charges of murder to O.J. Simpson, the murder of his ex-wife Nichole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, a personal friend of Brown. During the trial, Mark Fuhrman perjured himself on the witness stand, later pleading nolo contendere to a charge of perjury.
After police found Cheryl a victim of Bundy found badly beaten and raped they were able to obtain a blood type from the assailant, sperm samples and fingerprint smudges. Unfortunately, most of the evidence that was tested proved to be inconclusive. The only firm evidence investigators were able to obtain were the hairs found in the mask, teeth impressions from the bite marks on the victims and an eyewitness account from Nita Neary. Although there was no suspect at the time the mask was strikingly similar to the mask found in Teds final arrest. The most conclusive evidence was associated with the murder of Kimberly Leach.
He went to trial and was found guilty of her murder, sentenced to life in prison at hard labor. However, there is evidence that Alvin Heaton was not actually guilty of the murder of Alvin Stevens, and although he confessed to the murder, Alvin Heaton was unfairly tried and convicted. In this paper we will analyze the sheriff’s investigative tactics, the evidence for and against Alvin Heaton presented at trial, the bias of the jury and the early release Alvin Heaton was able to procure from prison. When Sheriff James A. Brown, sheriff of Kane County, Utah in 1908, began the investigation of the murder of Mary Stevens he did so after the body of the deceased young woman had been tracked and found by her brother.
The Criminal Justice System locks up innocent people and yet innocent people are still getting killed. Eyewitness misidentification has proven to be the leading cause for wrongful convictions, according to The Innocence Project. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992, for the purpose of assisting prisoners to be proven innocent through DNA evidence. To date, 300 people in the United States have been exonerated through DNA testing. The Innocence Project's attorneys and Cardozo clinic students have assisted in the majority of these cases.
In the year of 1921, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were convicted of robbery and murder. Although the arguments brought against them were mostly disproven in court, the fact that the two men were known radicals, prejudiced the judge and jury against them. It didn’t help that their trial took place during the height of the Red Scare. On April 9, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti's final appeal was declined, and the two were sentenced to death. The most prominent and respectable critic of the trial was known to be Felix Frankfurter, a professor at Harvard Law School.
The Unfair Trial of Tom Robison In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, the character Tom Robison is accused of a crime he did not commit and the evidence presented in the courtroom actually supported he was innocent. Heck Tate is the sheriff of Maycomb County, who was called after the crime, was made. As the sheriff he didn’t handle this crime the appropriate way. Heck was supposed to call a doctor to check Mayella, getting an understanding of exactly what was wrong with her. Heck also went wrong when he didn’t get everyone’s side of the story; he only got the Ewells side.
The defendant appealed the manslaughter conviction on the grounds that he could not be liable for the victim’s death as he did not physically kill her. It could be argued that the defendant was right as the victim had been killed by police bullets and not his own. The police officers involved were also negligent as they were accused of taking out the light in the hallway which left them unable to see that the victim was in front of the defendant. The police were found to be negligent and were ordered to pay civil compensation to the victim’s family. However, his appeal was rejected as the defendant’s unlawful and dangerous act directed against the
Here are the statics: “Since 1989 when the first DNA exoneration occurred, 328 defendants have been exonerated in the United States after being convicted of serious crimes such as rape and murder. The exonerated were 316 men and 12 women; 145 of them were cleared by DNA identification and 183 by other kinds of evidence” (http://www.ur.umich.edu/0304/May10_04/25.shtml). What went wrong? * Eyewitness Misidentification * Improper Forensic Science * False Confessions * Overzealousness/Public Pressure Eyewitness Misidentification Imagine being a victim so frighten and traumatized after such a hideous unimaginable experience. It can be hard, almost impossible to accurately describe the assailant.
Eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in nearly 75% of convictions overturned through DNA testing. While eyewitness testimony can be persuasive evidence before a judge or jury, 30 years of strong social science research has proven that eyewitness identification is often unreliable. Research shows that the human mind is not like a tape recorder; we neither record events exactly as we see them, nor recall them like a tape that has been rewound. Instead, witness memory is like any other evidence at a crime scene; it must be preserved carefully and retrieved methodically, or it can be contaminated When police use suggestive procedures to obtain an identification, that should per-se be a reason to exclude the identification. If such identifications are excluded, police will begin to use only reliable identification procedures.
On the same day, Iran publicly hanged a 17-year old boy, name Alireza Molla-Soltani had convicted of killing a popular athlete despite international prohibitions against executing juveniles. He claimed his killing as part of a self-defense. Death penalty is always a controversial topic for over the decades. First and foremost, according to dictionary, death penalty is one of the capital punishment of death sentence awarded for capital offences like crimes involving planned murder, multiple murders, repeated crimes, rape and murder where in the criminal provisions consider such persons as a gross danger to the existence of the society and provide death punishment. In my opinion, death penalty should not be legalize as a form of punishment in law.