For the last month I've spent every day researching, scrutinizing and simply pondering trying to figure out why a father would kidnap and rape his own daughter or why anyone would rape a three-year-old girl and how DNA evidence and rape kits may lead to wrongful convictions. It's been hard to find information with very little access to anything or anyone closely related to this case. The case within itself seems vile and ignoble.
And I am not a private investigator or the real life version of Sherlock Holmes, or at least I don’t pretend to be. But, yes, every day for the past month that I've been assigned this project for my English class I've been trying to figure out what went wrong with DNA evidence and rape kits that has led to wrongful
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These are all speculations that I've had to recreate in my mind over and over again. Now imagine that you're in my position and you have to think critically. Because that’s the situation in that story I've been researching where a man was falsely accused of kidnapping his own daughter and another man was falsely accused for rapping his girlfriend's three-year-old daughter, which after collecting all the facts just doesn’t make sense to me. I've finally came to the conclusion that false DNA evidence and rape kits are an issue in our justice system and here's the reasons why: it wrongly convicts other people, it makes investigation harder to find the actual person at fault, and often time DNA evidence and rape kits just aren't a reliable source of …show more content…
First, Kennedy Brewer's girlfriend had been working all day so he had been babysitting her three-year-old daughter as well as a few other children. Later on during the day his girlfriend at the time had come home from work and met them all at home. Eventually they decided to go to sleep for the night and the three-year-old ended up laying down at the foot of the bed. By this time all the other children that Brewer had been babysitting during the day had gone home. While they were sleeping the three-year-old victim had been kidnapped from her home, raped, and was found dead in a creek with bite marks all over her body. There were no sounds or signs of windows being broken into the house during the night. Kennedy Brewer was automatically accused and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
First, false DNA evidence and rape kits wrongly convicts innocent people who's had no part to play within this story or who simply just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. DNA evidence has exonerated guilty people that are imprisoned and to me this raises questions about what they're actually being convicted of. The list gets longer with bite marks which aren't even bite marks made by the accused Kennedy Brewer. They were marks made by insects biting on the corpse of the dead victim, 19 of them to be
As we learned this week, DNA databases are used by various governmental agencies for several different purposes. We all have seen new magazine shows such as, 20/20 or Dateline, that show the collection of DNA samples from suspects in a case that is compared to those collected at the scene of the crime. But what happens when the sample is an incomplete match, compromised, or contaminated? The answer is the wrongful conviction of innocent citizens. The case that I have decided to highlight, is the wrongful conviction of Herman Atkins. In 1986, Atkins was convicted of two counts of forcible rape, two counts of oral copulation, and robbery in the state of California. It was alleged that Herman entered a shoe store, and raped, beat, and robbed a
In today's society no crime is a perfect crime, with the use of DNA testing and modern advancements in health and forensics even the smallest piece of someone's genome can be cultured and used to identify even the most devious of criminals. The use of DNA testing was able to help change the life of Gene Bibbins for the better and further proved how DNA testing is able to be used to help clarify who the culprit actually is. Gene Bibbins life was forever changed the night that he was unjustifiably arrested for aggravated rape which resulted in his being sentenced to life in prison, only for his case to eventually be reevaluated sixteen years after his conviction, leading to his exoneration.
1) PROVING THE CASE: DNA EVIDENCE IN THE OJ SIMPSON CASE. (n.d.). Retrieved October 9, 2014, from http://phobos.ramapo.edu/~jweiss/laws131/unit3/simpson.htm
Cases of incestial rape by father's upon their daughters, where actually rarely reported (Brown, 131). Most mother's and daughters kept incidents like these secret from the public or rarely even confronted their husbands and fathers for fear of experiencing further harm. Not to mention that it was a hard crime to prove (Brown, 112). Incest has been against the law for a long time- so the father of a household could be jailed a short while for the crime, but shockingly, girls only needed to be older than ten years of age to give consent to sex (Brown, 60). Thus making it easy for defense attorneys to establish reasonable of doubt rape and making the father guilty of incest instead (Brown, 89).
InnocenceProject.org, “The Fact Sheet”. Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. 13 July 2011. http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/Facts_on_PostConviction_DNA_Exonerations.php.
In July of 1994, a little girl named, Megan Kanka, was raped and strangled. They found her body near her home in Hamilton Township, New Jersey. The story of thing young girl has shocked the nation. The man responsible for this brutal act is named, Jesse Timmendequas. He had been convicted twice prior to this attack.
I personally feel that this is a much more reliable and accurate than relying on the testimony of witnesses. I believe through the use of science we as a society can now make sure that the guilty are caught and punished while the innocent are protected from wrongful prosecution. However the eyewitness should not be completely left out of the case against the possible offender. After it is determined through scientific evidence, in this case DNA, that the physically involved in the crime then witnesses can be brought in to give testimony that the offender was present at the crime scene or the victim can be sure that the accused was truly the one involved in the actual crime.
... the crime scenes contain many mixtures of more than one person’s DNA, which can lead to false accusations. Even if there is evidence of a DNA match at the crime scene doesn’t mean that they committed the crime it depends on the evidence towards the person. Again criminals could still mess with the DNA and evidence of a crime scene, which can lead to many suspects of a crime. For example someone who wanted to falsely accuse a certain person could have planted a cigarette. But just because DNA of a person was there doesn’t mean it was them. DNA shouldn’t be the final proof because there could be many other things to prove a person’s innocence or guilt like getting a video of something that could possibly connect to the crime. Witnesses could be a big part in a crime as well because they could document everything they saw or heard and be used against a person in court.
Forensic evidence can provide just outcomes in criminal matters. However, it is not yet an exact science as it can be flawed. It can be misrepresented through the reliability of the evidence, through nonstandard guidelines, and through public perception. Forensic science can be dangerously faulty without focus on the ‘science’ aspect. It can at times be just matching patterns based on an individual’s interpretations. This can lead to a miscarriage of justice and forever alter a person’s life due to a perceived “grey area” (Merritt C, 2010) resulting in a loss of confidence in the reliability of forensic evidence.
From the time that they’re children, American citizens are taught to associate the words “...Liberty and Justice for all,” with their country. However, there’s at least one group of people being greatly deprived of justice: survivors of rape. It comes as no surprise that approximately sixty-eight percent of rapes are not reported in a country where approximately ninety-eight percent of rapists are never jailed (Rape - Definition, Examples, Cases, Processes). Victims of this horrible crime are going through possibly the worst trauma of their lives, so it’s very difficult for them to want to come forward to law enforcement and somewhat have to relive their trauma, especially given the previous statistics. Perhaps one of the greatest contributors to these horrifying statistics, therefore, a reason rape survivors are unlikely to come forward, is the backlog of things called rape kits that many jurisdictions in the United States currently have.
Officers often believe that sexual assault is not a crime and rape kits do not need to be tested for that it has no meaning. Some cops think like the “ sheriff in Idaho tells a news reporter that the legislature shouldn't be mandating the testing of rape kits because "the majority of our rapes that are called in are actually consensual sex”, which means that officers do not take the victim’s story serious(Khadaroo). The officer believed that sexual assault is consensual which portrays a serious problem when officers don’t take a crime for what it is. Officers will not take sexual assault crimes serious, which means that they will not make labs run tests on the evidence from the victim, so the evidence from each crime just keeps stacking up in storage. While some cops believe that rape does not exist, others won’t have evidence tested for that they think that they will bigger crimes to solve. DNA will not be analyzed for that officers do not believe the victim’s story or believe that the victim is not in the right mind to provide proof of the trauma that they went through. Detectives “do not request DNA analysis,” for that, “ of a blame-the-victim mentality or because investigators mistrust the survivor's story,"(What Is the Rape Kit Backlog?)(Reilly). Officers of law enforcement do not want to waste time or fundings on crimes that could not lead to a conviction or be false. Cops believe that there are more serious crimes for them to work on than a crime that won’t go anywhere for that the victim is either lying or does not remember to give evidence to prove what happen. Sexual Assault crimes do not appear as important to officers for that it provides to be unnecessary for there are more serious crimes that need to be solved. It requires a good amount of funding for labs to test rape
The semiconservative nature of DNA replication. In a round of replication, each of the two strands of DNA is used as a template for the formation of a complementary DNA strand. The original strands therefore remain intact through many cell generations. In a round of replication, each of the two strands of DNA is used as a template for the formation of a complementary DNA strand. The original strands therefore remain intact through many cell generations. There were three models of replication possible from such a scheme: conservative, semi-conservative, and dispersive. In conservative replication, the two original DNA strands, known as the parental strands, would re-basepair with each other after being used as templates to synthesize new strands;
According to Charles Darwin, evolution is a concept in which all life is related to a common ancestor by descent through modification. Evolution is a broad subject, and it is a heavily debated topic whether or not it is factual. One may argue that the theory of evolution is not true partly due to his/her belief system or religion. Religion and evolution should not be associated with each other, as each subject was made to answer different questions. Science was created to explain events coming in nature while religion was created to explain phenomena beyond natural occurrences. Evolution is seen as a natural occurrence based on the amount of evidence found supporting its theory. Fossils have been found in many parts of the world. Fossils show that organisms in the past were different from what they are in today’s world. Aside from fossils, scientists found that human DNA is similar to those of a chimp, a likely common ancestor. With the evidence found, scientists can discover patterns that can potentially help us humans learn more about our species and how we can relate to other species. Evolution is important in today’s world because it has laid a foundation for modern biology.
All living things are made of DNA; DNA is contained within strands called genes. The genes within any organism are what decides what the organism will look like, act like, and how it lives. Naturally, through breeding, the genes are confined within a species or a pair of like species. There is a way to break the confines of a species and add or remove genes from an organism. The implications of this technology are astronomical. The Human race could gain so much from just a little more research. Genetic engineering should be practiced, funded, and perfected because the potential benefits are well worth the risks associated with it.
Human evolution is a huge topic to discuss and a topic that at the same time isn't really thought about. When human evolution is brought up, the main things that may come to mind is people developing a third eye or having x-ray vision. Human evolution is humans changing over the years not just physically but also mentally and doesn't really have anything to do with a third eye in this case.