For the Portfolio Project I am choosing Option 2; Refuting that “justice” was achieved. I will draw upon my own concept of justice, the legal concepts of justice, studies, articles and empirical research to allow for my conclusion. Furthermore, I will consider the victims, (plural), and the impact of Richards sentence on his life. The Case of Richard Mijares At the outset of this class we were instructed to watch videos of Richard Mijares, a youthful offender who shot and killed his mother when he was aged seventeen years. This crime was committed at the family residence in Woodland Park, Colorado a short drive northwest of Colorado Springs, Colorado. In the videos Richard admits committing the crime and later disposing of the body. An article in December 2011, 5280 Magazine entitled Direct Fail concerning Colorado’s …show more content…
They had an argument, and he went downstairs with a gun to think-to see, really, if he had the guts to shoot himself in the head. When his mother, still arguing, came down the stairs, he just pointed the gun at her and squeezed. He wrapped her corpse in a blanket, buried her some 15 miles away, and spent a week pretending she was missing for the cops. It didn’t work, he eventually confessed”. (Gardner,N., 5280 Magazine, December, 2011, pg. 183). It is unknown whether the author’s research includes court documents, trial transcripts or she watched Richards videos herself but this is the same account Richard makes on the videos. The article goes on, on page 184, to say “We’ll never know what a psychiatrist would have said about Mijares’ mental health when he agreed to a plea bargain. Or how Mijares’ lifetime of abuse impacted his mind on the day of the murder. Mijares says his father would beat his mother, beat her so badly…(edit for space)…..He recalls a time when he dropped a clean sock on the garage floor and was beaten.
On 2nd August 1994, 13 year old American boy Eric Smith was charged with the murder of a 4 year old boy called Derrick Robbie in Savona. Derrick Robbie was walking alone to a summer camp just down the road from where he lived, when Smith saw him and lured him off the path and into a small patch of woods on the way to the camp (Leung, 2004). It was there where Smith went on to strangle Derrick Robbie and unearthed some rocks nearby which he used to beat him to death. After this Smith sodomised the 4 year old with a stick he’d found and left him there to be found (Staas, 2014). A couple of days after the body was found by the police Smith went to the police station to see if he could help with the crime, Smith denied seeing Derrick Robbie at
On the night of July 22, 1991, Milwaukee enforcement officers took notice of a man running and stumbling down the street. When confronted, he said that a man had threatened him with a butcher’s knife. After arriving at Jeffrey Dahmer’s apartment, Dahmer allowed the police to search the apartment. When the officials entered, they were hit with a putrid odor and had discovered various body parts scattered about his apartment that belonged to 11 of his victims, as well as Polaroid pictures of his victims' post-mortem in indecent poses. Dahmer was arrested on sight and taken into custody (“Serial Killers”).
The case against Hubert Morgan for the “murder and felonious assault” on correctional officer William Hesson was an appropriate case for a plea bargain. Had Morgan not agreed to the plea bargain, he could have been charged with life without chance of parole for kneeing the correctional officer in the chest while they were both voluntarily wrestling in the laundry room. The plea bargain attempted to reduce the sentence to a maximum of ten years in prison for Hesson’s death. Although I disagree with the charges, it was much more appropriate for Morgan to be sentenced to seven years than to a life sentence without parole. However, even still it would have been more accurate to charge Morgan as a juvenile because he was only seventeen
Mary cannon (age 75) the same thing happened to her as Patty higgins. After the many victims of slit throats and beatings. He kept on with that along with breaking in and enterings, shootings, rape, and robbing. One day he robbed a car and drove off after a robbery. His robbing attempt failed and he fled in the car, but a man Erickson and a teenager wrote down the strangers license plate and got prints that were able to match with Richard.
In the present year of 2016 there has already been 7 school shootings around America. The rhetorical analysis of the court document “Kinkel vs The State of Oregon”. The document was written to explain the arguments of both sides of the court and to justify the decision made by the court and judge Haselton through facts and rhetorical accounts of events that transpired of Mr. Kinkel and his actions of the school shooting. Judge Haselton clearly uses Ethos, Logos, and Pathos within the analysis which is used to his advantage. Judge Haselton was writing to many audiences, the most important and crucial are the defendants and the victim’s family members present.
In the book Just Mercy: A story of Justice and Redemption Bryan Stevenson details his story of his experiences as a lawyer fighting for justice. This story encompasses over twenty-five years worth of impactful cases and how policy changes, due to major Supreme Court cases, were dealt with locally. The main issue that he was dealing with was the death penalty, and how it was systematically being misused. The main focus of the book to showcase this was on the case of Walter McMillian. After the murder of Ronda Morrison, a well known white woman in the area, there was a lot of pressure exerted by the community on the sheriff to make an arrest on the case.
“On July 30, 1992, an innocent person was convicted of a heinous crime”. Guy Paul Morin, an ordinary man, was arrested, imprisoned and convicted of first degree murder. The victim was Christine Jessop, a nine-year-old girl from Ontario, Canada. She was found murdered in a field about fifty kilometres from where she lived. Due to the investigation team’s carelessness and tunnel vision, the systematic failure of the justice system, and the poor handling of evidence by the crown there was not only one, but two victims in this case.
In Boulder, Colorado, and around 1pm mountain time, the body of a six year old would be found murdered in her own home, sparking a colossal surge in the media, and a finger-pointing case that remains unsolved. This innocent little girl will forever be remembered by her childhood, homicide, and the suspects surrounding
Today, there is nearly a total of three thousand serial killers and ten thousand victims of their violent rampage in the United States. Part of those ten thousand victims are the eight, casualties of Dayton Leroy Rogers, aka The Molalla Forest Killer. Although their deaths were unfair and tragic, Roger’s experience allowed for more information to be contributed to help solve and prevent future crimes. Born in Idaho on September 30, 1953 and quickly moved to Oregon, Rogers was enrolled into a life full of crime, already shooting cars with BB guns in the seventh grade. By the time he was nineteen his desire for crime was fulfilled when he reached over to kiss a girl on their second date, but “according to police reports, he stabbed her in
William Mullins-Johnson, a victim of wrongful conviction, spent more than 11 years in prison for a crime that never occurred, due to egregious errors made by the physicians who conducted the post-mortem examination. On June 26, 1993, twenty-two-year-old William Mullins-Johnson, or Bill for short, babysat his four-year-old niece, Valin. Valin had been running a fever earlier that day before she went to bed. The next morning Valin’s mother went into her daughter’s room and found Valin dead.
For the Application of the Criminal Justice System project of the Criminal Justice course, I chose the arrest of John Burke. This case is about the arrest and sentencing of John Burke who had shot and killed Joseph Ronan. Twenty-five year old John Burke agreed to meet with 22 year old Joseph Ronan at Ronans home, in Reading, Massachusetts on Monday, August 15, 2011 around 1pm, with the intent of purchasing Percocet pills. (Boston.com, 2013) However, shortly after entering Ronans home, Burke opened fire (News, 2011), and after shooting Joseph Ronan several times, with the belief that Ronan was involved in a robbery at Burkes apartment in April 2011 (Boston.com, 2013), fled the home.
Richard Ramirez’s first crime was on June 27, 1984 in a small community in the city of Glassel Park with a population of 42,000 (Carlo). He parked the stolen car on Chapman street where he sat and made sure no one was watching him while he put on the colored gardening gloves. As he got out of the car he walked along the dark green cemetery wall, staying hidden in the shadows looking for a place to break into (Carlo). That night the sky was ink-black with clouds that blocked the stars. Richard had stopped in front of a two-story pink apartment building that was fifty feet wide and a hundred feet deep (Carlo).
Chase dragged her corpse into the bedroom slit her neck a few times and drank her blood. After the murder of Teresa Wallin FBI agents created a profile based on the evidence at the scene. They Determined that the fugitive was tall, malnourished, a loner, physically unclean, and the most important fact, they believed that he would kill again. A week after the mass murder Nancy Holden, Chase’s high school classmate who refused to give him a ride, told police that she believed that Chase could be the killer. The police looked into what they had in their system about Richard Chase, and they saw that he had registered a .22-caliber semiautomatic pistol that was linked to the spree of murders.
Throughout history there has been many different movements and revolts that changed society for the better ,but in the process hurt many people mentally and physically and caused several devastating fatalities .Although at the end of most movements and revolts the desired outcome is granted , there were still many obstacles and points of struggle. In different parts of the world there are different laws and obligations and because citizens find them outrageous it will cause them to show acts of disobedience until the most fair and agreeable outcome is obtained. Luckily for us there are legislators who help instill the most justified laws so that the people in our society will remain satisfied and peace will brush through our neighborhoods. Even with that being said our circumstances will in no way lower
Today our justice system has a multitude of options when dealing with those who are convicted of offenses. However, many argue that retributive justice is the only real justice there is. This is mainly because its advantage is that it gives criminals the appropriate punishment that they deserve. The goals of this approach are clear and direct. In his book The Little Book of Restorative Justice, Zehr Howard (2002), illustrates that the central focus of retributive justice is offenders getting what they deserve (p. 30).