It ’s these types of injustices that make people want to exchange the felonious system .
One of our legal system’s biggest failures is the wrongful conviction of innocent people across the United States. According to theChicago Tribune, the rate of wrongful convictions is between 2-10%. Those numbers don’t seem like much until you take into account the estimated prison population being around 2.3 million. That means there are possibly 46,000 to 230,000 innocent people serving time for a crime they did not commit.
There are many factors that go into a wrongful conviction from terrible police investigations to prosecutorial misconduct to bad judges and poor defense attorney practices, which can lead innocent people to serve sentences they shouldn’t have ever had to. Though I understand no system is perfect, the fact it still takes so long to overturn a conviction when new evidence points to the mistakes that were made is astounding. It also is wild to think that states like Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming don’t have compensation laws for wrongful convictions.
It’s an embarrassment for our legal system to want to hold people accountable for their crimes but won’t hold themselves accountable for their negligence and at times downright despicable legal process when it comes to victims. Thankfully, there are organizations like theInnocence Projectthat make it their mission to help those that have been wronged in our legal system. We also have a boom in true crime podcasts that have also helped investigate cases where they felt people were wrongfully convicted. Here are 10 cases where the convictions were overturned due to the legal system getting it wrong.
1.Sheldon Thomas
2.Central Park Five
3.Henry McCollum and Leon Brown
4.Kimberly Long
5.Lamar Johnson
6.Mack Howell
7.Randolph Arledge
8.Marvin Anderson
9.Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam
10.Thomas Raynard James
