Wrongful Conviction in the American Judicial Process for Adult and Juvenile



Wrongful Conviction in the American Judicial Process for Adult and Juvenile

Introduction

A wrongful conviction is a miscarriage of justice in the most fundamental sense: an innocent person gets erroneously convicted of an offense that he did not commit, and in many cases this results in years of long and difficult detention (Kassin & Kiechel, 1996). The wrongful conviction of an innocent individual is the worst nightmare to anyone who cares about justice. Despite the fact that the judicial process and criminal justice system has a number of safeguards which have been designed to make certain that wrongful convictions are avoided, and the overwhelming majority of convictions are accurate determinations of fact, it is clear however, that wrongful conviction still do occur (Charman, Gregory & Carlucci, 2009).

The Potential Impact of Wrongful Conviction in the Judicial Process

Over the years, the participants of the judicial process and the criminal justice system have been striving to act in a way which prevents future miscarriages (Kukucka & Kassin, 2012). A major aim behind this is to promote public confidence in the administration of the justice system. It is also important to get the public to have faith in police investigations and prosecutions and to understand that the executions of these processes by these systems are fair, independent and impartial (Mnookin, Cole, Dror, Fisher, Houck, Inman et al., 2011). However, it is surprising that a number of problems, issues and errors keep coming back, regardless of where the error justice has occurred. These difficulties are related to the conduct of police officers, prosecutors, of defense lawyers, judges and forensic experts, and are not limited to procedures followed in courtrooms (Mezulis, Abramson, Hyde & Hankin, 2004).

The wrongful convictions are not usually the result of a single fault, but rather a combination of events. It is also a problem that affects not one province or one administration; rather it affects the entire nation. Owing to the consideration of the fact that problems and errors occur at multiple levels, therefore, the proposed solutions must also be multifaceted (Dror & Cole, 2010).

The responsibility to prevent wrongful convictions is therefore incumbent on all those involved in the system of judicial process and criminal justice. The police, the prosecutors, forensic experts, the judges and defense lawyers have a role to play in ensuring that an innocent adult or a juvenile does not get condemned for a crime that he did not commit ( Dror, Champod, Langenburg, Charlton, Hunt & Rosenthal, 2011).

Wrongful Conviction in the American Judicial Process

From the year 2011, the "Innocence Project" has helped to free more than two hundred prisoners, a large proportion of which included adults and juveniles, through the process of DNA testing (Tangen, Thompson & McCarthy, 2011). The average duration of time served by these prisoners was thirteen years. For each inmate exonerated by DNA, nonetheless, many more innocent people serve their sentences and some of you may be sentenced to death. Under the consideration of these and other similar cases, ...