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Capital punishment and the protection of the innocent
Capital punishment and the protection of the innocent
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The innocent man is the story of Ron Williamson who was unjustly convicted of murder and spent twelve years on death row before being exonerated by DNA evidence. Ron Williamson was born in Ada, a small town in Oklahoma. His future looked bright when he was young and he was an exceptional athlete who was drafted by the Oakland Athletics. After an unsuccessful career in the minors Ron Williamson became a drug addict and an alcoholic whose life steadily got worse. He could not keep any job and he began spending most of his time in bars, and living with various friends. He soon accumulated a criminal record that included DUI?s, check fraud, and two rape charges that did not result in conviction. He became a heavy user of prescription drugs on top of his alcohol abuse, and after his baseball career ended he developed several mental llnesses and began to spend brief spans of time in mental hospitals. When a waitress who worked at a bar he often frequented was raped and murdered he became a suspect. Eventually he was convicted of the crime which he did not commit and was sentenced to death. A friend of his, Dennis Fritz was also wrongfully convicted as an accomplice and sentenced to life in prison. It was a terrible ordeal that Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz suffered being wrongly convicted of a murder. They both spent 11 years in prison, fritz serving a life sentence and Williamson on death row, locked up with heartless killers and treated like an animal. The book also has a subplot revolving around the abduction of another girl in Ada who to this day has never been found. Two men, Tommy Ward and Kurt Fontenot were convicted of a rape and murder and are currently serving life sentences. Although no concret... ... middle of paper ... ...tem. It is unbelievable how lax, inadequate, and unjust the justice department can actually be in our country that we thought was civilized. It is ludicrous that many of the same people who convicted two innocent men of crimes and nearly got one killed are still working in the same offices even after they were proven unethical, and disrespectful to their duty. This book was not written help Ron Williamson or Dennis Fritz, they have already been exonerated and have received compensation. It was probably not written for money, John Grisham stated in a speech that he feared a lawsuit. (law.virginia.edu) This book was written to make a political point. Even though this book is somewhat biased against the death penalty it still should enrage an American citizen who believes that a person is ?innocent until proven guilty,? and ?has a right to remain silent.?
first person about his struggles in the beginning of his baseball career, and how he miraculously turns his
Roger played baseball in the American Legion program during the summers, since the North Dakota high schools with the cold weather did not have a program. He led his American Legion team to the state championship. With his excellent speed, Roger was a standout in football as well. In one game against Devil's Lake his senior year, he scored four touchdowns on kickoff returns to set a national high school record.
Books read by adolescents contain both positive and negative values. Bleachers, by John Grisham is one book that contains many positive values. This book is about high school all-American Neely Crenshaw, who was probably the best quarterback ever to play for the legendary Messina Spartans. Fifteen years have gone by since those glory days, and Neely has come home to Messina to bury Coach Eddie Rake, the man who molded the Spartans into an unbeatable football dynasty.
The non-fiction text I decided to read that led me to my topic of Capital Punishment is titled, Just Mercy by attorney-at-law Bryan Stevenson, and it provides stories of a lawyer who wanted to bring justice to the court system by helping men, women and children, sentenced to death row by helping them obtain their freedom. The book first begins with a back story of the Mr. Stevenson. Bryan Stevenson is a graduate from the law soon of Harvard. His interest in Death Row cases grew when the law office he was interning for sent him to talk to a man, Walter McMillian, who was sentenced to death row after wrongfully being accused of a murder he did not commit and was framed for. Mr. Bryan helped him, and Walter was eventually released about six years in death row. In the book, Mr. Stevenson goes through many cases that he has taken upon, some failures and some great success. The people Bryan helped were mostly minorities who faced racial bias at the time of their trial. He represented not only men, but also children. There’s stories about how a woman whose baby was born dead was sentenced to prison
“Corruption is like a ball of snow, once it’s set a rolling it must increase (Charles Caleb Colton).” Colton describes that once corruption has begun, it is difficult to stop. Corruption has existed in this country, let alone this very planet, since the beginning of time. With corruption involves: money, power, and favoritism. Many people argue today that racism is still a major problem to overcome in today’s legal system. American author (and local Chicago resident) Steve Bogira jumps into the center of the United States justice system and tells the story of what happens in a typical year for the Cook Country Criminal Courthouse, which has been noted as one of the most hectic and busiest felony courthouses in the entire country. After getting permission from one of the courthouse judges’ (Judge Locallo) he was allowed to venture in and get eyewitness accounts of what the American Legal System is and how it operates. Not only did he get access to the courtroom but: Locallo’s chambers, staff, even his own home. In this book we get to read first hand account of how America handles issues like: how money and power play in the court, the favoritism towards certain ethnic groups, and the façade that has to be put on by both the defendants and Cook County Workers,
In John Grisham’s, Bleachers, this fiction story takes us through a small town in Messina, Mississippi. Everyone who is anyone attends their local high school football games. Thousands of locals come to the Friday night football games to watch the Messina Spartans play each week. Bleachers takes place in a present time setting in which former players talk about past games. The legendary coach of the Messina Spartans is getting close to the end while the former players await his death. Former players from different years are sitting on the bleachers of Rake Field talking about past games and memories. Because this is a fiction story, none of the characters or events are real. There are characters in this book that could portray real people, because the things these characters go through are common in today's world. Characters like Neely Crenshaw, an all-American whose career ends up short with a career ending injury. Then there is Coach Eddie Rake, a coach that leaves a legacy in a small town by making an unbelievable winning streak during his prime years. Almost everyone who played for Coach Rake hated his guts. Fictional characters in this book are believable. Even events like a coach who hits their athlete, and starts a brawl seem believable. Although this book is fiction, the majority of the events and characters could exist and are believable.
Jeffrey Reiman, author of The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison, first published his book in 1979; it is now in its sixth edition, and he has continued to revise it as he keeps up on criminal justice statistics and other trends in the system. Reiman originally wrote his book after teaching for seven years at the School of Justice (formerly the Center for the Administration of Justice), which is a multidisciplinary, criminal justice education program at American University in Washington, D.C. He drew heavily from what he had learned from his colleagues at that university. Reiman is the William Fraser McDowell Professor of Philosophy at American University, where he has taught since 1970. He has written numerous books on political philosophy, criminology, and sociology.
... fair to say that Williamson’s conviction and death sentence resulted from a combination of mental illness, junk science, political pressure, unscrupulous police work, and incompetent counsel.” (Coyne)
The worst thing in life is paying for another man's mistake. Sadly, this is something that occurs frequently. After watching a video about the wrongful conviction and the imprisonment of Ronald Cotton, I was baffled. I find it absurd that an innocent person can lose their freedom for a crime that they were not involved in. Ronald Cotton is not the only unfortunate individual who has endured wrongful imprisonment. Bennet Barbour, James Bain, and many others have been convicted of crimes that they did not commit due to faulty eyewitness testimonies.
To support their conclusion the board tells the story of two men who were exonerated after spending thirty years in prison for a crime they did not commit. Days after the rape and murder of eleven year old Sabrina Buie, half-brothers Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown confessed to the crime. Not only were their confessions made under pressure without parents or an attorney present, but the prosecution failed to present multiple pieces of evidence to the defense lawyers, DNA evidence that proved McCollum and Brown were not responsible for the murder. In fact, the DNA belonged to a Roscoe Artis, who was a suspect all along and was convicted of a similar crime just weeks later.
“Without Conscience" by Robert D. Hare is one aimed towards making the general public aware of the many psychopaths that inhabit the world we live in. Throughout the book Hare exposes the reader to a number of short stories; all with an emphasis on a characteristic of psychopaths. Hare makes the claim that close monitoring of psychopathy are vital if we ever hope to gain a hold over Psychopathy- A disorder that affects not only the individual but also society itself. He also indicates one of the reasons for this book is order to correctly treat these individuals we have to be able to correctly identify who meets the criteria. His ultimate goal with the text is to alleviate some of the confusion in the increase in criminal activity by determining how my of this is a result of Psychopathy.
An Eye for an Eye was written by Stephen Nathanson. Mr. Nathanson, like many, is against the death penalty. Mr. Nathanson believes that the death penalty sends the wrong messages. He says that by enforcing the death penalty we “reinforce the conviction that only defensive violence is justifiable.” He also states that we must, “express our respect for the dignity of all human beings, even those guilty of murder.”
Usually when someone is murdered, people expect the murderer to feel culpable. This though, is not the case in war. When in war, a soldier is taught that the enemy deserves to die, for no other reason than that they are the nation’s enemy. When Tim O’Brien kills a man during the Vietnam War, he is shocked that the man is not the buff, wicked, and terrifying enemy he was expecting. This realization overwhelms him in guilt. O’Brien’s guilt has him so fixated on the life of his victim that his own presence in the story—as protagonist and narrator—fades to the black. Since he doesn’t use the first person to explain his guilt and confusion, he negotiates his feelings by operating in fantasy—by imagining an entire life for his victim, from his boyhood and his family to his feeling about the war and about the Americans. In The Man I Killed, Tim O’Brien explores the truth of The Vietnam War by vividly describing the dead body and the imagined life of the man he has killed to question the morality of killing in a war that seems to have no point to him.
In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted of murdering civil-rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963. Then, just last year, the FBI reopened the 1955 Emmett Till case after finding that as many as 10 more people may have been involved in his abduction and murder. And now Killen will likely go to prison for the rest of his life for his part in the brutal 1964 murders of civil-rights activists Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney.
boy who was killed by two ten year olds in 1993. They beat him until