According to the New York Times, nearly half of those exonerated of crimes since 1989 are black. These exonerations were murder, rape and drug related crimes. In the same fashion, the Huffington Posts states that about 20 percent of exonerations in 2015 were for convictions based on false confessions. The cases were mainly homicides that incriminated defendants who were mentally disabled, and or under 18. In the case of Fifteen- year old Brenton Butler, he was a victim of Third degree interrogation which lead to a false confession. Ultimately, this resulted in his imprisonment of 6 months, while awaiting trial for murder. Murder on a Sunday Morning documented the case and trial of Brenton Butler VS. the State of Florida. The case reflects the murder and robbery of Mary Ann Stephens. Mary Ann Stephens was a tourist visiting Jacksonville, Florida with her husband Mr. Stephens. According to Stephens a black male standing about 6’2” with a skinny build robbed and shot Mrs. Stephens.. The male then fled the scene with the gun and the purse of the victim. Two hours following the incident, Detective Williams whom was in the area spotted Brenton Butler sitting on a bench and approached him. He ook him into his car to go to the station for questioning. Before driving off , Mr. Stephens, …show more content…
For starters the reid technique assume that the anxiety of suspects who are innocent is completely eliminated. Furthermore this technique is created on the basis that guilty suspects are prone to be more nervous then innocent individuals . This can be considered a flaw because anxiety can vary from person to person. Lastly this technique can also be considered flawed because it puts faith in the suspects comfortability. Everyone doesn’t receive compassion the same ways as others. And everyone doesn’t trust easily. So the fact that the sixth step implies empathy isn’t true to every
Case Name, Citation, Year Cook v. Florida High School Athletic Association (FHSAA), 09-cv-00547 M.D. Fla. (2009) Facts of the Case: On June 16, 2009 parents of female athletes at FHSAA member schools filed suit against the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida alleging that the newPolicy 6 discriminates against female students according to Title IX by reducing school participation in completions by 40 percent at the varsity level and 20 percent at the sub-varsity level. The plaintiffs also stated a complaint that male driven sports where exempt from this action because cheerleading was not recognized as a sport thus breaking the Title IX law. Issues: Why did Policy 6 reduced the number of competitions
Although current law does not distinctly define TBIs according to mens rea or diminished capacity, a possible defense that may appropriately be applied to criminal cases is the law as it relates to mitigating circumstances in sentencing. The Florida case of Cooper v. State (1999) is just one of very few cases in the country that seemingly acknowledges the fact that recurrent or traumatic head injuries may be a mitigating factor to criminal behavior. The defendant, Albert Cooper, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder, armed robbery with a firearm, and armed burglary with a firearm after him and his partner, Tivan Johnson, killed the owner of a local pawnshop, Charles Barker, after robbing the location on May 25, 1991. The court ultimately found Mr. Cooper guilty as charged, which made him eligible to receive
According to a portion of the Sixth Amendment in the Bill of Rights, the accused has the right to be confronted with the witnesses against him. Otherwise meaning, any and all witnesses must be present for the trial to be considered fair and just. In the Supreme Court Case of Bryant v. Michigan, Bryant committed a crime, with the only witness being Anthony Covington. Bryant uses the Sixth Amendment as an aid in his trial.
Terry v. Ohio was not much of a controversial case to many but I believe that John Terry had been wrongly accused and his right were protected by the 4th amendment that mentions unreasonable search and seizure. In 1968 detective Mcfadden had been observing 3 men that he believed were involved in robbing a bank. He proceeded to stop the men and pat them down (already violating the men's rights protected in the 4th amendment). Terry was one of the two men that was found with a concealed carry. The justices voted on the case 8-1 in the favor of the state of Ohio.
Innocence Project Report on the Case of Curtis Jasper Moore Tommy Warrick Drake University According to the Innocence Project one of the greatest causes of wrongful conviction is due to eyewitness misidentification. They state that 72% of cases where defendants have been exonerated eyewitness misidentification played a role. Even though eyewitness testimony has been proven inaccurate numerous times, it can still be the decisive evidence in a court of law. This is because the law views the human memory as a camcorder which can record and repeat whatever it sees.
The Supreme Court is the highest court in the United States court system. The rulings of the Supreme Court regards protecting constitutional rights, such as freedom of speech and administrative regulations governing airline safety (Tarr, 2014). The Florida v. Joelis Jardine case was presented to the Supreme Court of the United States in regards to the constitutional right of Jardine home to be searched. According to the SCOTUSblog, the holding was due to a dog sniffing at the door of a house of Jardine where police suspected drugs being grown which establishes right to search under the Fourth Amendment. For that reason, the Miami-Dade Police Department were granted a warrant to search the home of Jardine, but proceeded into his home.
Kirk L. Odom, a convicted Washington D.C. man who served 22 years in prison, for a crime that Odom did not commit. Back in 1981, Kirk L. Odom was found guilty by a Supreme Court Judge, for the rape and robbery of a woman, in her apartment, in Washington D.C.. According to the Washington Post, since 2009 he is one of 5 of rape or murder convicts, that have been vacated based on erroneous forensics and testimony by elite FBI hair experts. Also, The Washington Post gives statistics and years, for rape and murder convictions, and who goes about trying to solve them. When the evidence proves the convicted guilty, like Kirk, the inmate should be exonerated and compensated for his time.
The duty of any criminal prosecutor is to seek justice. A conviction is the end of justice being served prior to sentencing; however justice cannot be served if an innocent person is found guilty. Even though the prosecutor(s) are there to represent the public and has the duty to aggressively pursue offenders for violations of state and federal laws, they shall never lose sight or their own moral compass of their main purpose is to find the truth. In the pursuit of truth, the United States Supreme Court has developed or made rulings in reference to several principles of conduct which have to be followed by all prosecutors to assure that the accused person(s) are allowed the proper procedures and due process of the law granted by the 14th Amendment.
This is significant because it enabled the wrongfully accused to prove that they did not commit the crime for which they falsely confessed. In 2004, Drizin and Leo studied 125 of these cases to determine the causes. Physical and psychological coercion have been found to induce false confessions, especially in children. Brenton Butler was 15 years old when he went into that
In early interrogations it was common for police officers to use physically abusive interrogation techniques such as the rubber hose to convince suspects to confess to a crime, whether they are innocent of guilty. Fred Inbau came up with a different technique that relied on presenting a large amount of fabricated or true evidence to get the suspect to confess. This technique was very effective in getting confessions, it has an 80% confession rate. Unfortunately, some of the confessions are false confessions, we do not know how many exactly. The first step of the Reid Technique, a similar coercive technique to the one Inbau devised, was to watch the suspect and determine whether or not he or she is lying during the interrogation based on behavioral analysis; which is severely flawed and does not actually help us determine if someone is lying.
State of Georgia V. Marcus Dwayne Dixon (2003) Marcus Dixon was a highly recruited high school football player. His life suddenly took a tragic turn when he was falsely convicted of raping a 15 year old girl. The elements around his false conviction could have been avoided with some reform to the criminal justice courts system. Dixon initially had many charges against him but were narrowed down to statutory rape and aggravated child molestation. There was much racial disparity surrounding the jury on Dixon’s case, in that the county that Dixon committed his “crime” was a predominantly white population.
Murder on a Sunday Morning, is an Oscar award-winning documentary that tells of the conviction and trial of 15-year-old Brenton Butler for the death of Mary Ann Stephens in Jacksonville, Florida of May 2000. The film is a 111-minute movie directed by Jean-Xavier de Lastrade. The plot originates from the incident of Mary Ann Stephens being shot in the head by a black assailant; and then begins to unravel as Brenton Butler is arrested 90 minutes after the murder has occurred. Pat McGuinness, one of the main interviewees in the movie, takes up the case and defends Brenton Butler. The documentary presents the film from the trial, as well as interviews and investigations that Pat McGuinness and his partner Ann Finnel performed to gather facts for
The main reasons for exonerations are pardons, new evidence, acquittals, and posthumous knowledge that a person was innocent ( ). The National Registry of Exonerations defines exonerations as “any case in which a wrongfully convicted person is later officially cleared based on evidence” ( ). Some data from the NRE that compares the exonerations of males and females include the fact that “women were disproportionately represented in the ‘no crime’ category” with 65% for women versus 21% for men ( ). Another analysis of the data shows that “women’s exonerations were more likely to include property, drug, and other offenses” and most of the women’s convictions were crimes involving people they knew and whereas half of the male exonerees involved
Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong In Brandon L. Garrett 's book, Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong, he makes it very clear how wrongful convictions occur and how these people have spent many years in prison for crimes they never committed. Garrett presents 250 cases of innocent people who were convicted wrongfully because the prosecutors opposed testing the DNA of those convicted. Garrett provided simple statistics such as graphs, percentages, and charts to help the reader understand just how great of an impact this was.
Imagine being in a federal prison for decades for a crime that you never committed. False confessions have been a major problem in the justice system. Having these false confessions leads to innocent citizens being convicted of a crime they have never committed. Over the past two decades approximately 254 have been exonerated by DNA evidence, which also included 17 people who were on death row according to the Innocence Project. Confessions carry powerful information for the jury, judge and also the public.