Preview

Who Is To Blame In 48 Hour's Grave Injustice?

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
648 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Who Is To Blame In 48 Hour's Grave Injustice?
Most think that the justice system gets it right most of the time. Unfortunately this is not the case. Many people go to prison or end up on death row despite being innocent, like Anthony Graves. In 48 Hour’s “Grave Injustice” we see Anthony Graves’ case; Graves was put on death row for a crime he did not commit. In this case like many others out there the fault is not in the system itself but the people. In the Graves case there were many discrepancies that came to light after the conviction.. Once the trial started in 1994, things got ugly. Carter changed his testimony on more than one occasion. Carter’s allegations went from including Graves to not including Graves and his story went back and forth this way. Just before he hit the stand Carter recanted once again; his lawyer, Charles Sebesta decided not to tell anyone about this change in testimony. According to Sebesta, “I [Sebesta[would have hated to have gone to the jury without Carter's testimony.” …show more content…
The murder charges were dropped and Anthony Graves became a free man. The state of Texas paid him $1.4 million saying it was what 18 years of being locked up was worth. The amount of money paid out might seem like a lot but there is more than monetary loss at hand. Graves missed out on his kids growing up. There is no price for that. I don’t think there is enough money in the world to compensate for all the things taken away when someone is erroneously convicted. In Anthony’s case the main reason behind his imprisonment was Sebesta. Sebesta corroborated witnesses, held information from the court, and threatened witnesses of the defense. Had there been no foul play Graves would have not been sentenced to death and the justice system would have provided justice. Unfortunately the system is run by people therefore justice is compromised on occasion. This case is one of few that work out; what about the cases where there is no intervention and the truth is

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Powerful Essays

    Wrongful Convictions

    • 3217 Words
    • 13 Pages

    Every year in the United States of America, millions of crimes are committed that violate and harm the individual rights, properties, and freedoms that are not only guaranteed to American citizens of this country, but also naturally inherent to mankind as whole. Based on the founding principles of our country, which are derived from the Constitution of these United States, justice is dealt accordingly to the perpetrators of these crimes. While this justice is usually fair, due to certain rights given to those who may be charged with crimes, sometimes an error is made. A simple mistake, a missing or broken link in the chain that represents the investigation and trial processes, causes an innocent bystander to become caught up in an investigation, and in many cases, can result in a wrongful conviction. This mistake can come in many forms: a mistaken eyewitness identification, a false confession, misconduct of the governing authorities, improper forensic investigation, or even lazy or unskilled litigation by the defense attorneys. Legal miscarriage like this is not something that should be taken lightly, especially since those affected must not only endure the years spent in prison, but also deal with lost wages, isolation from friends and family, scrutiny from potential employers, and ostracization from their community. According to C. Ronald Huff, director of the Criminal Justice Research Center at Ohio State University, roughly 10,000 United States residents who are not guilty of a crime are convicted every year, a "conservative" estimate of 0.5% of the 1,993,880 index crimes used for his research that was completed in 1990 . Even more alarming are the 138 Death Row inmates who have been exonerated sine 1973 as a result of further DNA testing; while anywhere between a concrete group of 8 and another 31 "possible innocents" have been executed in the United States…

    • 3217 Words
    • 13 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    • For every innocent person wrongfully convicted, a guilty person roams free. It is unsettling to know that thousands of people are wrongfully convicted resulting in thousands of guilty people still roaming the streets and flying under the radar. We continue to walk the streets with murderers and rapists while innocent men and women sit in prison and are even executed. It is sad to think how flawed our justice system can be. It is completely unacceptable for thousands of people to be convicted based on little to no evidence. Many wrongfully convicted people miss out on decades of their lives and their families’ lives, and even if they are exonerated it doesn’t account for all the lost time nor does it change the fact that…

    • 356 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.” ( J.R.R. Tolkien). No one knows the exact number of innocent people that were executed. However, since 1973, 156 people Have been exonerated. In the article, Governor Ryan’s Execution Moratorium in Illinois: Killing the Innocent, Governor George Ryan reduced the sentences of inmates facing capital punishment in Illinois. The anti-death penalty citizens praised the governor. Many people are innocent on death row. The innocence projects work extremely hard help those wrongly convicted. The innocence project members are lawyers and good citizens who work to find the truth using DNA testing. Sadly, sometimes…

    • 1182 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    There is always the problem of someone being wrongly convicted. “At least 4.1% of all defendants sentenced to death in the US in the modern era are innocent, according to the first major study to attempt to calculate how often states get it wrong in their wielding of the ultimate punishment”(Pilkington). Even though the number of innocently convicted people is not that high once an innocent man or woman has been executed there is no way to undo what has been done. The criminal justice system is not perfect and they too sometimes make mistakes. “Whether our criminal justice system has executed an innocent man should no longer be an open question. We don't know how often it happens, but we know it has happened. Cameron Todd Willingham's case proves that. As long as our system of justice makes mistakes -- including the ultimate mistake -- we cannot continue executing people” (Scheck). Sometimes people make mistakes but innocent people being convicted and executed for a crime they didn’t commit is a mistake that can be prevented by making sure the death penalty isn’t an option for punishment any more. Innocent people don’t have to worry about this anymore if the death penalty is no longer possible there are also other options of punishment besides…

    • 789 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Wrongful Convictions A conservative estimate is the 1 percent of U.S prison population, approximately 20,000 people, is falsely convicted (Schwartzapful & Levintova, 2011). The death penalty is higher than most cases. Gross says, for two reasons: First capital cases are high profile, emotional cases in which prosecutors face a lot of pressure to secure a conviction. On the other hand, because of the seriousness of the crime, capital defendants are afforded many more legal protections than those facing lesser penalties (Schwartzapful & Levintova, 2011). Prosecutors can sometimes make a mistake because they’re afraid they may make a wrong decision. Therefore everyone has to think before making a hasty decision that can affect someone for the rest of his or her life. Wrongful convictions don’t just fall on the prosecution; it can be false evidence and…

    • 1456 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Wrongful Convictions

    • 1783 Words
    • 8 Pages

    Mayleika Pizano Wrongful Convictions- Inmates on Death Row Lately, there has been an increasing public awareness and significance of wrongful convictions in America. The growing awareness among policy makers and U.S. citizens have resulted mainly due to highly exposed post-conviction DNA exoneration of inmates who served lengthy prison sentences, as well as the growing eradication of the use of death sentence in America. Recent inquiries involving the likelihood of error in capital cases have further helped to create this growing attention - including a sense of urgency - to the problem. A recent study indicates that at least twenty-three innocent citizens have lost their lives through execution. Further research into the issue of errors, on cases filed between 1973 and 1995, indicate that, nearly seven in every ten, capital sentence cases had serious reversible errors, indicating the possibility of numerous cases of wrongful executions and convictions. Although; the errors usually result in numerous wrongful convictions, most do not face life in prison or the death sentence. However, these errors often lead to inmates’ wasting many of their productive years behind bars although it is not warranted. Even as, this happens, the real offenders remain among the public, and are free to commit further crimes, thus posing as a threat to public safety. This paper mainly focuses on wrongfully convicted inmates, particularly those on death row (Huff & Killias, 2010).…

    • 1783 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Justice Is Not Blind

    • 552 Words
    • 3 Pages

    TJ Dougherty ENG101 Argument essay “Justice” in America Every day people are convicted of crimes they did not commit. It has been a long time since the trials of the Scottsboro Boys or George Whitmore, but our justice system has not changed. People of foreign race and lower social status receive different treatment in the justice system. These victims are often wrongfully accused, or even abused by the ones paid to protect them. The United States justice system gives unfair treatment and trials to our poor and minor races.…

    • 552 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    “A wrongful conviction is when a subsequent investigation finds that an individual who has been tried and found guilty of a crime is, in fact, innocent of that crime” (Bako). A wrongful conviction is not just a simple mistake, lives and families are devastated. This happens more often than people think it does. Even though this person very well may be innocent, it takes years to even appeal their case if they can even get that far. The key issues with wrongful convictions are that prosecutors rely on unreliable evidence such as eyewitness identification of a person that does not really know what he or she saw on that specific date and much, much more. The Innocence project strives to exonerate those whose rights have been unconstitutionally taken away from them through the use of DNA evidence. “The development of DNA testing has allowed the Innocence Project to help exonerate 344 innocent Americans - 20 of whom were on death row (Bako).” These 344 exonerees represent how the American criminal justice system can fail the people she was designed to protect. The innocence project works to raise awareness to the issue our justice system faces when it comes to minorities in particular. Continued research and advocacy, as well as improving the effectiveness of the criminal justice process itself, are all necessary steps to ensuring the innocence of those wrongly accused of a crime. Over 75% of…

    • 1488 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Unjust Conviction

    • 1450 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Looking at the death penalty system in action, it is fundamentally flawed in use and there is a serious risk of executing innocent people. Many unjust convictions have shown that serious flaws such as: Lack of eyewitness identification, False confessions, and the access to have DNA testing have caused our countries criminal justice system to convict many innocent individuals, who were sentenced to death.…

    • 1450 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Such mistakes that have been made must be prevented for the future, so that the innocent don 't continue to suffer. In fact, the Innocence Project, an organization that emphasizes the faults in our death penalty system, states that the inmates falsely accused of their crimes "...were convicted in 11 states and served a combined 209 years in prison – including 187 years on death row – for crimes they didn’t commit." (Innocence Project). To be exonerated after years and years must leave unfathomable mental trauma. If that many innocent people have been forced to wait on the edge of death for this long, it wouldn 't be hard to believe that some won 't be lucky enough to be saved from the mistakes of our unacceptably inefficient court system. Killing a person, even sentencing them to death, is only just if they truly deserve it. That is what Dexter argues, yet our country continues to ineffectively implicate capital punishment by making the innocent suffer through unnecessary torture. We must end capital punishment, or at least make it more efficient. There are lives at…

    • 1974 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    1. The justice system makes mistakes. a) Jennifer Givens, an assistant professor and legal director at the University of Virginia: School of Law, wrote a scholarly essay in June 2017 which states “Recent research suggests that the rate of wrongful convictions in capital cases where a death sentence was imposed is approximately four percent which means that approximately 120 of the roughly 3,000 inmates on death row in this country are not guilty” (Givens).…

    • 1696 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Today there are too many murder victims whose lives are taken by criminals who have such little regard for our justice system, due to the leniency in punishment for these crimes. A prime example of this scenario is the criminal trial of People of the State of California v. Orenthal James Simpson, also known as the O.J Simpson murder case. In this controversial trial professional football player O.J Simpson was accused of and tried for the murder of his wife Nicole. Simpson hired and spent millions of dollars on an elite defense team in which he hoped would acquit him of the charges he was clearly guilty of. After a year of investigating and reviewing evidence, Mr. Simpson was found not guilty for the murder of his wife Nicole Simpson. Women’s rights groups along with people across the United States were outraged. It is cases that are handled in a manner such as these and with such an inappropriate outcome that forces the public to become so frustrated with our legal system and government. State officials must realize that there is no way to justify the murder of another human being without an extreme punishment including the death of any person who commits that crime.…

    • 1059 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    One major purpose of the death penalty is to punish people for their horrible crimes. However, the death penalty has put many innocent people on death row. Since 1973, 156 people have been exonerated (released from death row/evidence shows they aren’t guilty). The average time between getting the death sentence and exoneration is about 11 years. This is already terrible, forcing innocent people to believe that their life is nearly over, because of a crime that they didn’t commit, but it gets worse. It is very likely that people living in the United States have been wrongly executed. Multiple cases have evidence that proves that the “criminal” is actually innocent. In 1991, the house of Cameron Todd Willingham was destroyed by a fire, killing the three children who were sleeping inside. Willingham escaped and his wife was shopping at the time. Prosecutors stated that Willingham had purposefully set the house on fire to cover up the abuse of his children. He was executed by lethal injection in 2004. However, there is a proof that shows that the fire was not caused by Willingham. Unfortunately, nothing can be done now because these people have already been executed, but it does teach us one thing: If the death penalty cannot be used to punish the real offender and risks the lives of innocent people in the process, it can’t be used by our…

    • 1868 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    This issue seems to be an imminent problem that is growing in today's society because of the increasing number of people who are wrongly convicted each year. Recalling the lecture Brian Stevenson had given us in the fall, there are still many individuals who are tragically executed for crimes that they did not commit. As St. Edward’s commits to stressing the importance of social justices, showing the screening of “Incendiary: The Willingham Case”, along with many other films, will help to spread the awareness of the amount of people who are wrongfully convicted and…

    • 697 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The U.S. justice system is not perfect, is a hard task to separate the innocent from the guilty, many times the guilty have been freed and the innocent put away, because of the way our justice…

    • 389 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays