In the summer of 2002, Brian Banks, a 16-year-old outstanding high school football linebacker from Long Beach Polytechnic High in Southern California had a promising future ahead of him. He had a verbal agreement to play for USC once he finished high school, but he had a lot of recruitment letters coming to him. Unfortunately, his future was cut short. Wanetta Gibson, a 15-year-old who also attended Long Beach Polytechnic, had accused Brian Banks of rape. That summer morning, Wanette and Brian were making out in the stairwell of the school, that night, Brian was being arrested for rape. Due to his arrest, Brian Banks could not finish high school. He spent a year in juvenile hall for a year before his trial. Banks faced 41 years to life due …show more content…
He came home from one of his jobs and noticed he had a friend request on Facebook; the name that has haunted him was in his inbox, Wanetta Gibson. He contacted her asking why she would want to be his friend and she simply responded “let bygones be bygones” and that they should “hook up” (Myers, 2015). He decided to take things into his own hands and hire a private investigator, hoping she would confess and let the truth be told. When the investigator asked if Banks had raped her, she replied, “Of course not. If he raped me, I wouldn’t be here right now. We were just young and having a good time, being curious, then all these other people got involved and blew it out of proportion.” What she didn’t know what that Banks had recorded the confession. Once she admitted it, he took the tape to The California Innocence Project, which got his case appealed (Almendrala, 2012). In one year, his record was wiped clean. Due to the confession, Gibson was ordered to repay $750,000 and $1 million to in damages to the school district. For the rest of her life, the school district will receive money from her future wages and property (Kandel,
When the girl’s mother heard that the man had identified himself as “Johnny,” she concluded that it had been 23-year-old Johnny Williams Jr., a neighborhood resident whose physical appearance was quite different than the man the nine-year-old described. Williams was black, 6 feet, 1 inch tall and weighed 250 pounds. On September 30, police showed the girl a photographic lineup and she selected Williams’ photograph—although by that time, she knew that her mother believed Williams was the attacker and she had heard her mother refer to him by his first and last name. Williams was charged with two counts of lewd conduct with a child, kidnapping, and rape. He was initially also charged with assaulting the five-year-old girl, but those
Judge Rhonda Loo sentenced him to time served (157 days), 200 hours of community service, 2 years probation, $2,400 in fines, and in a beautiful example of irony, Young was ordered to write 144 compliments to the victim. Young promised the court that he would no longer attempt to get
She was a highly ambitious young woman determined to carry out the plan she had for her life. She maintained straight A’s and planned to graduate with a perfect GPA and then marry her boyfriend Paul. However, her life as she knew it came to an end when on July 29th, 1984, she woke up to find a stranger in her room. The unidentified man proceeded to hold a knife to her throat and brutally rape her. Despite her panic, she tried to stay as calm as possible with the intention of trying to remember as many details about her attacker as she could.
20-year old , Chelsea Steiniger accused Mark Weiner, a Caucasian 52-year old male, of kidnapping and sexually assaulting her back in 2012. Wiener had seen Chelsea walking home through a convenience store’s parking lot after her boyfriend had kicked her out of his house and upon seeing her, Weiner drove Chelsea to her mother’s house. She was texting her boyfriend demeaning texts posing as her kidnapper, Mark. Her boyfriend had called the police when he received the demeaning text messages Chelsea had sent him.
Mary Therese McCormick September 15, 2017 Innocence Project Research Paper Timothy Cole Timothy Cole served 22 of his 25-year sentence before his death in 1999 while in prison for a crime he did not commit. Newly developed DNA evidence proved his innocence and exonerated Cole almost a decade later. Another man was identified as the perpetrator and sent to prison. On March 24, 1985, Michele Jean Murray, a 20-year-old Texas Tech student, was parking her car in a vacant church parking lot across from her dormitory when an African-American man approached her and asked for her help start his car with jumper cables.
The Napa Valley Register recently published an article on the hearing for the expulsion of Napa High School football player Johnny Torres. Torres, accused of, “dragging another player through the locker room and helping hold him down while the victim was groped and penetrated by other players,” was not described in the article as a rapist, nor as someone participating in the sexual assault of another individual, but instead, became the all-too familiar character of the goody-goody athlete with not a spot on his record. What is also very apparent in the article is the clear tip-toeing around what Torres and other players have been accused of, which as far as we can tell from the Register’s cryptic concealment, is gang rape. This behavior by both Torres’s family, who requested that the expulsion hearing be made public, and by the media, which in the case of the Register seems to be garnering sympathy for Torres and pulling attention from the heinous
In reviewing the Supreme Court case of Roper v. Simmons 543 U.S. 551 (2005), we review the allegation of the violation of the Eighth Amendment in the trial court’s use of cruel and unusual punishment in its sentencing of Christopher Simmons; who was a juvenile at the time of the crime; to a sentence of death. In reviewing the facts of the case, we find that Christopher Simmons, then 17 and a junior in high school, along with Charles Benjamin and John Tessmer, planned the commission of a burglary with the intent to commit murder under the perception that they were minors and as such would be able to get away with the crimes. Upon his capture, Simmons, admitted to the crimes and provided law enforcement with the details of the crimes. Because of his age and the nature of the crime, Simmons was considered to be
Wiley Bridgeman spent over half his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. In 1975 Bridgeman was one of three men falsely convicted and imprisoned for the murder of Harold Franks. Wiley Bridgeman was sentenced to life in prison after being charged with aggravated murder and robbery, but after a retrial almost 40 years later, he was found innocent and was able to spend the few remaining years of his life with his family. Wiley Bridgeman was 20 years old when he was accused of a crime he didn’t commit.
On novermber 5th, Brown was pulled over by a police officer and was asked to be a stand in for a police line up case. A female police officer took him back to the shareffs station to put orange on so he can stand in. The victim identified him as the perpertrator who raped her. After the line up four days later, Dennis Brown was taken to jail and accused him of rape. "I denied the perpetrator as him, then was taken to a holding cell" (exoneree
Based on the evidence provided in the documents, I have formulated an interpretation on the prosecution and conviction of Bridget Bishop. Bishop was a scapegoat for the problems of the people of Salem and accusations of witchcraft was a vehicle for her prosecution. Bishop unfortunately fitted the stereotype of a witch and the beliefs and bias of people during the 16th century that contributed to her conviction consequence demise. The testimonies claimed, Bishop was the sole reason for their children becoming sick and dying, murder, attacks on people, hallucinations and claims of bewitchment. The problem with these testimonies is that they lacked substantial evidence.
Next on your to do list is to make a motivational speech, and lastly pose for pictures and sign autographs. Sounds like a normal day in the life of a professional basketball player, but in fact “it is the probation record for NBA player DeShawn Stevenson, showing how he served his criminal sentence of court-ordered community service for the statutory rape of a 14-year-old girl in 2001.”(McCarthy, 1) This is a man who many people looked up to and he defiled their trust in him after having sexual relations with a fourteen year old girl. The first issue with this case is that Stevenson only received 100 hours of community service instead of jail time.
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is summed up in three different parts. Part one is just an overview of everything in Maycomb County. Part two is the trial of Tom Robinson. Lastly, part three shows what happened after the trial.
An estimated one in four women are sexually victimized during their college years. (Schwarz, Jill, et al., 1). Turner getting a light sentence just makes this statistic more real, the victim will be looked at in the future as just another statistic because of the little that was done about it. The victim was intoxicated at the time of the assault, Turner was also. This often makes the case much more difficult, “A common stereotype of sexual assault on college campuses is that the victim could have partial responsibility if they had consumed drugs or alcohol prior to the assault” (Schwarz, Jill, et al., 2).
“While there was no real evidence to support a charge of gang rape, the hysterical atmosphere surrounding the trial insured their conviction.” The nine boys were tried in court several times, with several public offenders and lawyers who did not put much effort into the
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.