Wrongful Conviction Research Paper

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Wrongful Conviction: Is Race A Factor? Almost everyday, someone is being arrested for a crime they had committed. However, the justice system in some cases failed to convict the right person and have sent innocent people to jail based upon misleading identification of suspects. In U.S history, several famous wrongful conviction such as the Scottsboro Boys and Ed Brown were convictions based upon race because of the racial strife from the Jim Crow era. (Grimsley). Even after the Jim Crow era, most conviction was still being caused by misleading identification from eyewitnesses claims that the suspects were African American. (Love). Most of these wrongful have been exonerated but, throughout history, the U.S criminal justice has shown to…show more content…
Both men falsely confessed to the rape and murder of an 11 year old girl in North Carolina in 1984. Both men visually showed that they may have been intellectually disabled when they confessed and spent time on death row or life in jail (Love). Another factor for a wrongful conviction is false eyewitness identification testimony. Reasons the eyewitness may misidentify a suspect can be cause by memory or cross-race identification according Earl Smith and Angela Hattery. In Freddie Allen article, “Blacks are Still Majority of the Wrongfully Convicted”, in the spring of 1974, Michael Austin, an African American man, was a victim of a wrongful conviction caused by eyewitness misidentification. A grocery store employee named Austin a suspect in the murder of a security guard. Even though Austin did not fit the description of the suspect involved in the murder, who was convicted for the crime and sentenced to life in prison because of the grocery store employee account of the suspect (Allen). A last factor that may cause a wrongful conviction can be the misuse of forensic evidence. This is when the police department fail to collect and preserve the evidence properly, mistakes conducting test at the laboratories happens, or mistakes when interpreting the data (Smith and Hattery 85). Many of these wrongfully convicted have lost decades worth of their life based upon lies and lack of evidence but just how do they spend in jail before they regain their
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