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Marilaura Garcia
Ali M. Meghdadi
English 39C/Section 33374
May 4, 2014
You Are Innocent? Too Bad It Was Not Proven
America is typically seen as a free country in which people can strive and achieve
success in the pursuit of happinessthe American dream. Freedom given at birth can be stripped
away at any moment. This has happened to many citizens in the United States of America. This
occurs when a man or a woman is convicted of a crime they did not commit. Not many people
open their eyes to the gravity of this situation. When put in jail, these falsely accused innocents
find themselves surrounded by possibly violent, serious offenders of the law. Then they are
forced to share a compact cell with barely enough light to qualify as living conditions. They are
not allowed to any privacy and are constantly harassed by guards. Every bit of freedom that they
had is gone. Luckily for some of these falsely accused people, they are only sentenced for a short
time if they are found guilty for a misdemeanor. Then the people who are given longer sentences,
for felonies, sometimes commit suicide because of the harsh conditions they are forced to
endure. The process of convicting a person is flawed yet it is not taken seriously; people go to
trial everyday until they are either found guilty or innocent. The problem is that innocent people
are going to jail because the issue is not being announced as much as it should be.
The penitentiary system did not start off as a form of punishment but as a place to repent.
The first prisons in the independent United States were established as penitentiaries to denote
their prisoners as religious penitents, serving time for their sins (Prison History). Prisons
started as a religious institution and with the right intentions to help these people mend their sins
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and to be forgiven by God. Sadly it started to get overcrowded and dangerous, which led it to be
reformed in the 19
th
century. By the late 19th Century, outrage over prison conditions led to the
reformatory movement, which attempted to redefine prison's role as that of reforming inmates
into model citizens, by providing education, work, and counseling (Prison History). When the
system started, it was created to rehabilitate those who committed crimes. As the years went by it
became a negative place because it would overcrowd because of the need to control and manage
the people. Now rather than being a place where one can gain help and be reformed from the
crimes committed, it disintegrated and became a place where people fear to be placed. The
system started off with the right intentions that led to punishment and now innocent people are
placed in these prisons.
While the prisons themselves are broken, so is the judicial system. It is hard for the courts
to judge if someone is innocent because sometimes there is not enough evidence to prove their
innocence. The issue resides because judges can only come to a decision depending on the
information that is presented to them. The jury also has it hard because they do not know if a
person is guilty or not and can only judge based on the evidence that is shown to them by the
attorneys. The attorneys and the prosecutors are the ones who look for evidence that would be in
their favor to win the case. Besides the evidence the jury and the judge also hear the arguments
that the attorneys and prosecutors make without the need of evidence. Even though the evidence
should be enough, there is not always enough evidence or actual credible evidence. Even though
these are already issues that can be against someones favor there is other problems that reside.
Convicting someone of a crime is not an easy thing to do. Yet, one of the causes that send
innocent people to jail is false eyewitness. Even though one might claim whole-heartedly that
they are positive the person on trial is the man/woman they saw still leads to misidentification. -
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and people can reliably tell whether they remember a prior event or whether they dont
remember the event, but just know that it happened.. (Gleitman 322). People fail to recognize
the difference if they actually know or are just familiar which leads them to believe that they are
completely sure of their claim. Some witnesses are not even sure that the person they claimed
they saw is the right person. Witnesses substantially changed their description of a perpetrator
(including key information such as height, weight and presence of facial hair) after they learned
more about a particular suspect (Innocence Project). Using eyewitness testimony as evidence
for a crime is not often reliable because of the fault with someones memory. A person cannot
recall everything they have seen because memory can be contaminated. ..The new material will
lead to intrusion errors mistakes about the past in which other information is mixed into your
recall.People may confidently, vividly recall a past event thats never took place at all
(Gleitman 319). It can be contaminated because our memory can be tricked. Memory is a tricky
thing; a person cannot recollect something that happened a week ago with precise recollection.
Eyewitness becomes an issue if the witness did not get a perfect view of the criminal. These
people are evidence and even though we would like to believe they would be correct, it is not
likely. However, misidentification is not the only evidence that can be against an innocent man.
[Add more evidence. Im sure youll find something in a psychology journal]
Even though science seems to be a reliable source of evidence it can still put an innocent
man in jail. Forensic science can sometimes be unreliable and improper because
analysts fail to recognize that the biological sample could be a mixture of fluids from the
victim and perpetrator, and the victims blood type could mask the perpetrators making
it impossible to know the blood type of the perpetrator. In other cases, analysts provide
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inaccurate statistics for the percentage of the population who share the perpetrators
blood type(Innocence Project).
Though the results are correct, the person reading the evidence interpret it on their own. Since
they base it off of blood type, it can make it seem as though the innocent person is guilty. It is
really hard to base it off of blood type because there are many people who have the same blood
type. Then there are always the bad apples in society.
Within the forensic testing the people who present the information will give the wrong
interpretation of the study to the judge and jury to prove someone guilty. Then there are the
officers who give false testimony and evidence to convict an innocent man or woman to jail. It
can be done out of spite or because they were paid to give false statements. Then there are also
the informants. These are people who come in and testify and give a false statement to either
gain money or exchange it to be released from prison. It is unbelievable that people can commit
such atrocities to another human being. Yet, these things happen because the life of another
person is not taken seriously just because it is not their own skin. Sometimes even lawyers fail to
see that these are people who were put in a predicament that they cannot solve for themselves.
Negligence from lawyers leads to improper lawyering because they failed to take on the
responsibility that they are being paid to do. So because of that, many innocent people have been
jailed. Even though not much can be done about it, attorneys still fail to give all the evidence and
information to keep an innocent man out. Not only do attorneys sometimes fail to do so, the jury
is then stuck on figuring out the innocence of a person. Putting someone in jail is not an easy
Table 2 This shows the innocent people who
automatically were exonerated because of the
DNA testing that began in 1989.
Source: "Browse the Profiles." The Innocence
Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 May 2014.

Table 1 These show the most recent people who
were exonerated the latest ones being 2014.
Source: "Browse the Profiles." The Innocence
Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 May 2014.

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task, so it should not be taken so lightly. One might like to think that this does not exist in society
today and that they are errors of the past but it is not the case. The present is not so different. In
the first table it shows the innocent people who exonerated because of DNA. When DNA testing
started it helped show that these people were indeed wrongly accused. Table two shows the more
recent people who were wrongly accused and were able to prove their innocence. Three people
within this year have been proven innocent after being wrongly accused. It shows that there are
still innocent women and men in jail for crimes they did not commit.
It is not a simple task to prove the innocence of a man and it should not be taken lightly
either. For example, Michael Morton was found guilty for murdering his wife and spent twenty-
five years in jail. Twenty-five years of his deserved freedom taken by the false accusation. It was
not until Morton gained new attorneys were they able to figure out that he was in fact innocent.
An innocent man was forced to mourn the death of his wife in jail while the real criminal was
outside enjoying his or her freedom. This would have never happened if Ken Anderson, his
attorney at the time, had not withheld vital evidence that would have proven his innocence. Any
and every bit of evidence that can help a person from being accused wrongly should be
presented, but Ken failed to do that and it cost Michael twenty-five years of his life (Levs).
When he was sentenced, there was no evidence that proved him guilty but yet he was accused of
doing so. Twenty-five years of his life had been wasted in prison, yet he is not the only one who
has been wrongly accused. There are many more and he was lucky to have been able to plea his
case and be freed. Not many get the chance to be able to have another chance to prove his or her
innocence. He was not only lucky in that, but also in the fact that he was not sentenced with the
capital sentence, which is when one is killed by the state of law. The system of conviction is not
perfect but that does not mean that it should be ignored.
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Even though the system is flawed and cannot protect every innocent man from being
convicted, we can still minimize the number of innocent men sent to jail. More than two hundred
people were freed after they started using DNA as evidence, which started in nineteen eighty-
nine. It is believed that more than half of the six hundred- twenty three hundred thousand
inmates in municipal or county jails are innocent of the crimes they are accused of(Pelaez). The
numbers are drastic because only around two hundred people have proven their innocence yet
more than three hundred and eleven thousand five hundred people are estimated to be innocent,
and this is only including the municipal or county jails. Then in table three it shows the numbers
of how many people are incarcerated and it does not just include adults but children as well. Out
of so many people the chances that many of these people are innocent is pretty high. It can only
be estimated because if they were proven innocent they would not be in there but because they
were falsely accused they are forced to be in jail
and pay for the sins of the real criminal.
People and the system act like it is a
helpless situation and that it cannot be helped.
Then the other issue is that not many people feel
or know that so many innocent people are
convicted of crimes they did not commit. To
some people it is not something that matters
because they have not experienced it themselves
or had someone close whom it has happened to.
More than 200 people were freed after they started using DNA as evidence, which started in
1989. Then at least 75% of the people who were wrongly accused were found guilty because of
Table 3 Its shows the statistics of the jailing system
including juveniles and those who have yet been
convicted.
Source: "Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie ."
Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie. N.p., n.d. Web.
04 May 2014.
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the misinterpretation of an eyewitness (Innocence Project). Many people are jailed everyday
but the innocent ones are forced to live a life they do not deserve. Even though there are the
lucky ones who obtain the chance to prove their innocence after many years, there life after
being freed is not an easy one. They did not only face time in jail surrounded by criminals but
also now have a hard time adjusting to their regained freedom without any compensation from
the horror they endured. This type of injustice should be prevented in someway.

















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Works Cited
Gleitman, Henry. Psychology. 8
th
ed. New York: Norton & Company, n.d. Print.
Levs, Josh. "Innocent Man: How Inmate Michael Morton Lost 25 Years of His Life."
CNN. Cable News Network, 04 Dec. 2013. Web. 04 May 2014.
"Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie ." Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie. N.p., n.d.
Web. 04 May 2014.
McCormack, Simon. "Daniel Villegas Exonerated: Man Convicted Of Murder 20 Years
Ago." The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 14 Jan. 2014. Web. 04 May 2014.
Pelaez, Vicky. "The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of
Slavery?" Global Research. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 May 2014.
"Prison History." Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. N.p., n.d.
Web. 04 May 2014
"The Innocence Project - Home." The Innocence Project - Home. N.p., n.d. Web. 04 May
2014.