Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Overburdened defence lawyers and forensic evidence: Two of the five factors pointed out by Jamilah Lemieux on News One which explain why innocent African Americans end up behind bars..."As the IFC/Amazon Studios film Crown Heights garners buzz for it’s painstaking look at the case of an innocent man who spent 21 years in prison, the persistent failures of the United States criminal justice system are again put in the spotlight."..."Sometimes innocent people are kept in jail because of errors with, mishandling of, and complete omissions of forensic evidence. Many of the wrong convicted don’t have the resources to pursue their innocence through scientific investigation. But organizations like the Innocence Project and the Equal Justice Initiative are working to solve this issue. Twenty-two-year-old African-American father Anthony Wright was convicted in 1993 for rape and murder, and sentenced to life in prison. If he had not secured DNA-testing that exonerated him in 2016, he would still be in jail. Alabama man Anthony Ray Hinton spent 30 years on death row after being convicted of two murders. In 2015, a judge dismissed the charges after forensic scientists tested the evidence and confirmed that the bullets at the crime scene did not match Hinton’s gun."