Annotated Bibliography: Policing And Wrongful Conviction

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Alex Campos Mr. McCanne ERWC-I, Period 5 16 January,2015 Annotated Bibliography The main topic of this research paper will be policing and wrongful convictions. How is someone wrongfully convicted? What impact does this have on their life? On the community? And how are Police departments working on putting wrongful convictions to an end? There are several reasons as to why a person can be wrongfully convicted which are are eyewitness misidentifications, junk science, false confessions,government misconduct, snitches, and bad lawyers. California has wrongfully convicted two hundred and thirteen people. Technology and DNA testing have soared and greatly lowered the number of …show more content…

“ The California Wrongful Convictions Project has found that 213 innocent Californians spent a collective 1,311 years in state or federal prisons before their convictions were reversed or dismissed since 1989. It cost the taxpayers more than $120 million for incarceration, settlement and compensation.” Americans pay taxes on prisons and etc. so we pay for people sitting in jail when they should be at home with their families and be free. Technology in DNA have soared but wrongful convictions are still occurring due to negligent attorneys and false evidence. People lose so much of their lives due to these unjust …show more content…

This has helped convicting people of crimes much easier and efficient. “For the first time, the criminal justice system now has a body of cases in which there is scientific proof that the truth finding mechanisms of the system failed.” The American justice system takes great precautions to make sure people are not falsely convicted band say that “ It is better to let 10 (or 100) guilty people go free than to convict one innocent person”. However nothing is perfect and even our justice system makes mistakes. Without DNA testing Edwin Borchard identified sixty-five cases of wrongful convictions in 1932. Not everyone who is falsely convicted is completely innocent either. They could have just been convicted of a greater charge than what they actually deserved. Most people like this live with

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