Since 1977, the majority of death row inmates in the United States have been executed for killing white people. Yet, studies have shown that African Americans make up almost half of all homicides victims. For this reason, for years, capital punishment has been a source of a lot of controversy among human rights advocates and the american government. The book Dead Man Walking depicts the journey of a nun, Sister Helen Prejean, against the biased judicial system in the United States. Focusing in the death penalty issue, Prejean share her deepest thoughts while she experiences being the spiritual adviser of a “dead man walking”, a man convicted to death. Initially, Sister Prejean is naive, and she has no clue about how flawed and racially biased the death penalty in the United States …show more content…
The book provide examples of authorities, such as the Governor Edwin Edwards, who acknowledge that the criminal system is flawed and demands reform. Yet, because of political reasons, they prefer to ignore facts and not be the one responsible for contradicting the system and risking their job. Prejean proves that by choosing to let injustice to happen, even if it is not in their power to change, those authorities are being as immoral as the penal system itself. I find that the most valuable message the author is trying to provide us is how important personal responsibility is in order to fight for justice. By the end of the book, the reader understands that we are responsible not only for our own actions, but also for the fact that we are aware of injustice and, yet, chooses to do nothing about it. Even though we are not the person who is pushing the button of the electric chair, or the judge prosecuting a biased trial, we are equally responsible if we don’t make any effort to fight for what it is
David Feige’s Indefensible: One Lawyer’s Journey nto the Inferno of American Justice invites people from all walks of life to a second hand experience of the criminal justice system hard at work. What is most interesting about Feige’s work is its distinct presentation of the life of a public defender in the South Bronx. Instead of simply detailing out his experiences as a public defender, Feige takes it a step further and includes the experiences of his clients. Without the personal relationships that he carefully constructs with each of his defendants, Feige would not be able to argue that the criminal justice system is flimsy at best, decisions always riding on either the judge’s personal attitudes or the clients propensity towards plea bargaining.
The case of Cyntoia Brown is about an innocent victim, who had been punished for finding the courage to fight against the ones who had hurt her. Ultimately, this case is the greatest injustice act against a person ever yet. Her whole life, she had been facing abuse and inequity. She was only 16 when she has murdered Johnny Allen in 2004, and is now serving a life sentence, with an eligible parole on her 69th birthday. What the jury hasn’t been told about is that Cyntoia has been repeatedly drugged and physically and sexually
According to Alexander, “Today, most American know and don’t know the truth about mass incarceration” (p. 182). Before reading this book I did know of the inequality towards people of color in the criminal justice. book has made me realized how easily we as humans, jump into conclusion without thinking twice and judging a person by their look or race without trying to get who they are. Although most people know better and know how wrong it is to judge a book or person on their cover we often find ourselves doing just that when we first come into contact with a different culture. This book “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander has made me realized how the United State has one of the largest population in prison.
The results of the trial in Stamford was that Mercy Disborough was temporarily convicted of witchcraft while Goody Clawson was acquitted. The consequences for Mercy Disborough were that despite months and jail and continued peer accusation, she was acquitted. The consequences for the townspeople are blurrier, but it is evident that persistent hysteria was not one of them. The results of the trial in Stamford were largely reigned in from the massive hysteria and mass convictions associated with contemporary witch trials by the law.
Using 3 of the Six Aspects of the Human Person, describe how Sister Helen Prejean employed these in the movie. How did these affect her in the process of becoming a moral agent? The movie “Dead Man Walking” shows many examples of what we have been learning in our religion class, one of those things being The Six Aspects of the human person, Sister Helen Prejean employed all of these in the movie. Three of the most evident that I would say were shown by her throughout the movie would be, The Importance of Others, The Importance of Developing one’s Conscience as well as The Importance of having Direction in Life.
After arguing the failure of prisons, Mendieta establishes his agreement with Davis’ anti-prison rhetoric without introducing the author, her book, or other various abolitionist efforts, “I will also argue that Davis’s work is perhaps one of the best philosophical as well as political responses to the expansion of the prison system...” (Mendieta 293). The article’s author also assumes that readers are familiar with specific torture tactics used on prisoners,“...the United States is facing one of its most devastating moral and political debacles in its history with the disclosures of torture at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and other such prisons…” (293). Mendieta’s act of assuming that readers will already be familiar with Angela Davis and her work, as well as the specific methods of torture used by certain prisons, may cause readers to feel lost while reading the
The definition of the word “injustice” means “a violation of the rights of others; unjust or unfair action or treatment”. Injustice and corruption are recurring themes in the novella, they are also crippling issues in prisons in our country and around the world. For example, the United States maintain the largest incarceration rate in the world, at 1.6million. Human rights research found that the massive over-incarceration includes a number of elderly people whom prisons are unequipped to handle, an estimated 93000 youth under 18 in adult jails, along with 2200 in adult prisons. Hundreds of children are subjected to solitary confinement in the hopes that they will reform.
Jail is a place no one ever wants to go. People go to jail for many reasons: robbery, murder, hate crimes, and there are people who are sitting in jail for a crime they did not commit. People have their different views on the justice system and how it works. People’s religious beliefs and personal beliefs in stereotypes play a major part in their convictions. In A Lesson before Dying Earnest Gaines reveals how different values and racism in a small community are seen through the characters Jefferson, Grant, and Tante Lou and their experiences and reactions.
In the eyes of Martin Luther King Jr., Justice within a society is achieved through the implementation of just laws. Furthermore, “just laws are regulations that have been created by man that follow the laws of God for man” (“Clergymen’s Letter”). Any law that does not correspond with the ideals of God and morality are considered to be unjust or a form of injustice. King identifies that injustice is clearly evident within the justice system. This injustice can truly be seen through the misconduct imposed toward the African American community.
Eventually down the road, Wilbert has lectured at universities, seminars, national and international conferences, and at meetings of organizations for the reform of the criminal justice system and against the death penalty. He also has been a consultant to both federal and state capital defense teams on dozens of cases around the country. Lastly, he also become an author writing about the American criminal justice system and the prison system. In the final analysis, from Wilbert Rideau becoming a strong positive representative to the lack of empathy that Vincent Simmons received, even though his case seemed a bit open and shut, to Eugene ‘Bishop’ Tannehill making a full turn around becoming a preacher to his once fellow inmates.
The prisoners had seen and experienced so much brutality, endured repeated beatings, and humiliated beyond imagination, so one more death did not affect them. Their emotions hardened to the point of being non-existent… or so they thought. Although the prisoners seemed hardened and unaffected by death, a different hanging did deeply affect them.
To much of the common citizen’s disbelief, the spike in the mass incarceration of citizens in America is not necessarily a result of the national increase in violence, but rather an operation fueled by the corruption within our own legal system. Although many individuals in the United States would stand to believe that there is no particular way that anyone could stand to profit from the mass incarceration of Americans–they are wrong. The standing profiteers for mass incarceration is the private prison industry. The name to their game is simple, the more that the public good suffers from mass incarceration, the more government money the companies can obtain. As a result of these efforts, the private prison industry cuts corners at the expense of public safety and prison security in order to maximize profits by obtaining government money, resulting in the mass denial of American citizen’s liberty.
Bryan Stevenson knew the perils of injustice and inequality just as well as his clients on death row. He grew up in a poor, racially segregated area in Delaware and his great-grandparents had been slaves. While he was a law student, he had interned working for clients on death row. He realized that some people were treated unfairly in the judicial system and created the Equal Justice Institute where he began to take on prisoners sentenced to death as clients since many death row prisoners had no legal representation of any kind. In Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson focuses on some of these true stories of injustice, mainly the case of his client, Walter McMillian.
Her central thesis is that mass incarceration is “The New Jim Crow,” or the new system of control used by the government to uphold racial class in the U.S. This book will be helpful to my research because it directly discusses the topic of race and the criminal justice system. Amnesty International. (2003). United States of America: Death by discrimination
Few remember that not just the indicted are changed in the prison system-the authority figures become different, too. Thousands of people go to detention facilities and stay there from minutes to decades, but the authority figures stay there with every influx of new prisoners. The wardens, in particular, are a monumental part of the system. They regulate the prisoners causing them to adapt to situations, whether positive or negative. Samuel Norton, the warden in the adaptation of Stephen King’s Shawshank Redemption, is embodied by the atmosphere of the prison.