The American Legal System In The Innocence Project By Randolph Arledge
The American legal system is supposed to be fair. In recent times, majority of minorities will argue against the fairness and that there are inherent biases embedded throughout the system. The issue of those biases is a separate case, however, the legal system can be wrong, even in instants of murder and rape. The story of Randolph Arledge illustrates how the legal system is not perfect. The law failed him for 29 years, but after DNA testing, he had his justice. The Innocence Project illustrates and explains how someone can be imprisoned for many years, and then, suddenly be set free.
Randolph Arledge was accused of murdering and raping 21-year-old Carolyn Armstrong on August 30, 1981. She was found on a dirt road in Navarro County, naked from the waist down with 40 stab wounds in the chest and neck area. Her car was also found a couple of miles away with a partially smoked joint and a black hair net in it. At the time of the murder, Arledge was in Corsicana visiting family and one day after, he left to go back to his home in Houston. As he got back to Houston, he met up with Bennie Lamas and Paula Lucas to go on a road trip in a stolen van. They made it to Tennessee before getting apprehended in connection with an armed
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The Innocence Project continues to explain that Lamas and Lucas testified that Arledge murdered the women in Corsicana because Arledge told them. Truth be told, they were looking for a plea deal for announcing the link between Arledge and Armstrong, and Lucas did in fact receive a favorable sentencing (probation). There was plenty of witness accounts, but lacked physical evidence. Maurice Possley highlights in The National Registry of Exonerations that the closest thing that linked the murder to Arledge, was his knife, that was close enough in size to the stab wounds on Armstrong. The evidence in favor for Arledge was apparently not enough, as Possley
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