Week 4

Hi everyone! As I got into Week 4 I uncovered more and more stories about people who had gone through this process themselves. The pain that they felt, and the steps they had to take to be set free. I wanted to find these autobiographies and stories because I wanted to add a more insightful and introspective touch to my essay. But first, I wanted to talk about solutions to the causes of wrongful convictions. Like I mentioned before, snitch testimony is a big cause of wrongful convictions, and there are a couple ways to solve this: 1) Written disclosures of witness compensation 2) Pretrial hearings that discuss whether the testimony of the informant is even reliable or not 3) Cautionary jury instructions that warn them about the reliability issues of the informant testimony 4) Requirement that in-custody informant testimony be corroborated. Solutions to eye-witness misidentification accounts are minimal. The only solution that I could particularly think of is to tell the jury to not place a disproportionate amount of weight on their story, as many factors such as state-of mind, and post traumatic stress could alter recall of events. Solutions to junk science have also not been yet found. One of the main parts of a trial is the jury. The fate of the defendant lies with the jury. My next week's task is to focus on the jury, how they are chosen, what the results entail, and what jury tampering is, and how this can be solved.

Since I wanted to add a introspective touch to my paper I have decided to add a story of the day to the end of each of my blog posts. At the end of the SRP, I will compile these stories to have the essay I want.

Story of the Day: In 1986 Herman Atkins was a recent high school graduate wanted to join the military. His dreams were altered as his adolescence was taken away from him by the State of California. He was accused of raping a woman during a robbery in a shoe store, and was sentenced to 45 years in prison. DNA testing was not available at the time of his trial, but in 1993 the Innocence Project requested to test the evidence. The semen found on the victim's sweater, turned out to be, surprise surprise, not Herman's. He was exonerated after serving TWELVE years for a crime he didn't even commit.