Innocent Convictions And The Innocence Project

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Innocent Convictions and the Innocence Project
The majority of people know that a person is innocent until proven guilty. Unfortunately, some people are guilty until proven innocent by the media. The job of helping people who were innocent, yet proven guilty in a court of law has fallen into the hands of the Innocence Project. The Innocence Project is an organization that reviews cases and tries to help people who have been held and wrongly convicted of a crime they did not commit. Of course, not everyone is innocent. Criminals will try to argue their innocence, although some know that they are in fact guilty. There have been many cases that the media has talked about and expressed an opinion on, and that opinion was heard loud and clear, and as a result, people have been tried and convicted of a crime they did not commit. It is not until a third party like the Innocence Project picks up the case that they find that the person convicted was indeed innocent of all charges and that the individual had been telling the truth the whole time; they were innocent. The tragedy is that in some cases it is too late to help the person, especially when the person who was convicted and sentenced to death is no longer here. In the case of the "Groveland Four," Earnest Thomas died before being arrested or tried. He was no longer alive to experience the truth and experience the fact that the truth had set him free.
The 1949 case of Florida 's "Groveland Four" involved four black men were being charged and arrested for a crime they did not commit. Samuel Shepherd, Walter Irwin, Charles Greenlee, and Ernest Thomas were accused of beating Willie Padgett and raping Norma Padgett (Karijeck, 2014). One of the four men, Ernest Thomas, ran away before be...

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...s final once that person has gone through the execution, there is nothing that can be done to correct the wrong or bring that person back. That act will forever represent a failure in the criminal justice system, and a failure of the media if the way they reported the crime affected the outcome of the trial in a negative way. No one is trying to take away the media 's first amendment right of free speech. However, when the media 's right to freedom of expression imposes on other people 's rights, there lies a problem. There has to be an understanding that does not put one 's rights above another. The media 's rights are not above the law and not above other people 's rights. The Innocence Project is one entity working against this problem, but the media’s influence over the court is widespread and not only affects cases by influencing people to convict the innocent.

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