User:Cbaranoski/sandbox

Death Row

Most countries have abolished the death row, but Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran are still responsible for most of the executions caused by it.

Those who are eligible for the death penalty are too broad and would rather reserve the death penalty to those who have done more serious crimes.

Competence (law)

Lawyer incompetence has contributed to many wrongful convictions. Witnesses may report false findings or repeat what they heard, but it gets interpreted so differently.

For example, a girl, Cathy Woods, was accused of slitting a girl’s throat. “She was sentenced to life without parole but ended up serving 35 years in prison and locked in mental wards before she was released in 2016” (Anderson). Although forensic science contributes to numerous unjustified convictions because of analysts providing invalid testimony at the trial, bias certainly exist and will significantly pose a threat to forensic analysts. As stated by Bonventre, a guy named Santae Tribble was wrongfully convicted of murder and part of it was due to hair testimony, where evidentiary hairs excluded him as the person who committed the crime. He ended up spending 30 years in prison, only to be compensated by a judge and given 13.2 million dollars (2020). No amount of money can truly compensate for living a majority of their life in prison due to the faulty forensics evidence.

Despite wrongful convictions being unlikely, jurors don’t have an understanding of how the memory works and puts too much emphasis on eyewitness testimony. Forensic science testimony has also been invalid occasionally or the evidence gathered was misinterpreted.

Interrogators can also contaminate confessions by providing evidence to interviewers, which can incriminate confessions and make someone appear guilty when they really aren’t.

Witness

Witness identification can always help detectives get a general idea of what the criminal looks like, but they should never revolve the case around that because it can be very misleading The psychology of eyewitness identification can really convince someone that they were being attacked by one person, but in reality, DNA evidence shows it’s a completely different person.

Forensic Profiling

An example from the book, “The Psychology and Sociology of Wrongful Convictions: Forensic Science Reform,” there was a profiling error, in which this woman was raped and slaughtered by a serial killer. The suspect was named the Boston Strangler and investigators worked hard in trying to gather a profile for this criminal. Experts eventually came up with the Boston Strangler being two people and that both men lived alone, most likely schoolteachers, and one of them was homosexual. The criminal finally confessed to the crime and his DNA matched up with the scene, but his profile didn’t fit the crime. The profile the experts came up with didn’t match any characteristics of the killer (pp.6).

Creating profiles just creates tunnel vision because investigators will be focusing on finding a specific individual that the profile fits, when in reality, the profiling system is insanely flawed and is considered useless to the investigators.

Forensic Identification

Many methods that are used in forensic science evidence have been proven to be unreliable. A lot of trials have been reviewed and testimony involving mostly “microscopic hair comparison, but some included bite mark, shoe print, soil, fiber, and fingerprint comparisons” have been overturned because forensic analysts have provided invalid testimony at the trial (Garrett and Neufeld, 2009).