Critical Investigation
A miscarriage of justice can result from non-disclosure of evidence by police or prosecution, fabrication of evidence, poor identification, overestimation of the evidential value of expert testimony, unreliable confessions due to police pressure or psychological instability and misdirection by a judge during trial.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/uk/2001/life_of_crime/miscarriages.stm
THE MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE
The miscarriage of justice has been around for arguably as long as the idea of justice has however it has only recently become a prominent subject within society for the 21st century.
A lot of cases particularly during the times of slavery and an extreme racial divide (To Kill a Mockingbird) people were incarcerated or killed (as a form of punishment) for a crime that there was no evidence to suggest that they had committed.
VIEWS ON DISABILITY
Similarly, with the miscarriage of justice, disability has always been a taboo subject. In the Greek mythology babies born with a physical disability where left on a cliff.
Acknowledgement of mental disabilities was a major factor in the Victorian era, however it was always associated with madness and occasionally witchcraft due to a lack of understanding.
Disability is often represented as supernatural and dangerous across media. This could have the detrimental effect on people talking about it as they may be feared or labelled/stigmatised which means they will be avoided (SOLELY NEGATIVE)
MY IGNITE PRESENTATION
o Institutions - Netflix - Bias - Law Enforcement
Netflix Bias accusation
O Siding with Avery and Family
1st episode is based on his innocence
Playing on emotions (His Parents)
O ‘Extreme Villainization’ of Law enforcements
All law enforcers
Trying to Change Lawyers
O Dramatisation
Focusing on possibilities rather than the facts
‘domestic perspective’ constant focusing on his home
O Leaving out the facts
To pursue domestic perspective
O Failing to talk about Dassey’s intellectual disability
Recent re-trials – He is now being released
Institutional bias against family
- Class
- Education
- Prejudice
O Forcing perspectives and certain ideologies
Getting his story across
Lack of faith in the system
Believes his innocence
o Genre - Documentary - Changes to it over the years.
O Confused approach – Documentary vs Drama
O Distribution to a large audience
o Representation of Law enforcement - Negative -
People with disabilities - Vulnerable, law breakers?
Working Class - Gold diggers? e.t.c
o Audience - Impact - Passive vs Active – Influence
o Uses and Gratifications
o Surveilance ‘Unseen footage of making a murderer police interview’
o Escapism
O Typical Narrative – Intro – Climax – Resolution - Constant Climax
Favour of Dominant Ideologies
Fragility of justice system
Fragility of documentaries
Vulnerable to influence – Audience appeal + Institutional ideologies
BOOKS
O Media student share > Resources > A Level > Critical Investigation > Disability > Images of Disability in Popular Television
MEDIA MAGAZINE
MM56 - It’s all in the Mind: Detectives on Screen. Malcolm Hebron investigates the representations of mental illness in TV crime drama.
O ’ Series like Luther point to a serious issue in
the crime genre: the representation of mental
illness. Even though the vast majority of cases of
psychiatric illness do not lead to violent episodes,
axe-wielding madmen and scheming serial
killers are a staple of the crime genre, reinforcing
the notion that psychological disturbance is
sinister and threatening. Popular crime stories
can thus stigmatise psychiatric disorder and
give a misleading picture of the world.’
MM54 - ‘The More You Deny Me the Stronger I Get’: Trauma, Repression and Catharsis in The Babadook. Gabrielle O’Brien explores a genre-bending Gothic movie which probes the inner world of the mind.
MM38 - Attacking America: A decade of Documentary Dissent
O Horror Genre
O ‘he exhibits aggressive behavioural
tendencies that mark him as a troubled child.
When Samuel is expelled from school
for bringing in a dangerous weapon to ‘kill monsters’,
O ’forcing her to threaten
Samuel’s safety.’
O mental health and the supernatural – does it mean failing to talk about mental illnesses in texts is better than representing it as supernatural and dangerous?
ONLINE ARTICLES
O http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/what-making-a-murderer-reveals-about-the-justice-system-and-intellectual-disability-20160111
Dassey’s Lack of understanding was manipulated and rarely talked about within the show.
O Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_a_Murderer
‘claims that key evidence from the trial was omitted from the documentary’
‘"very one-sided" and feels that viewers are "only getting one side of the story’
‘Jodi Stachowski, a former fiancée of Avery's, defended him in the documentary. But, during an interview on HLN's Nancy Grace in January 2016, she was asked whether she believes Avery killed Halbach. She said, "Yes, I do, because he threatened to kill me and my family and a friend of mine." Stachowski also said that Avery forced her to lie to Netflix producers, threatening that otherwise she would "pay for it." She quoted other alleged hearsay comments by him.
O THREAD OF Making a Murder Articles: http://www.usatoday.com/topic/290ef6c6-a047-4dda-a9a9-977a6bc3f7e9/Making-A-Murder/
THE SHOW ITSELF
Non Linear Narrative – Constantly goes between time which the said offences occurred and the trials.
Constant Disequilibrium – Hint at equilibrium – new equilibrium is the current state – dassey being freed e.t.c.
And almost multi strand narrative – victims – accusers – family members – law people.
S1 EP1
Penny Beerntsten - Victim of sexual assault + attempted murder in 1985
Stephen Aver was wrongfully convicted, sentence to 32 years and served 18
Strength of institutional bias (verging brainwashing like ideas)
O Denial of DNA - The amount of people involved potentially a blind eye.
S1 EP 2 Eugene Kusche.
" My sketch looks more like Steven Avery than Gregory Allen"
In response to the reliability of DNA Testing
O Other Texts –
Orange is the New Black S4 – Poussey’s death – Piper causing Alex to remain in prison e.t.c.
http://kmest4.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/mest4-critical-investigation-to-what.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0327z4t/the-people-detective-5-maybrick
Amanda Knox – Netflix Documentary
BRENDAN DASSEY IS BEING RELEASED – CONFIRMED TUESDAY 15TH NOVEMBER
http://news.sky.com/story/judge-orders-release-of-making-a-murderers-brendan-dassey-10658177
Court documents described Mr Dassey as a slow learner who has difficulty understanding language and speaking.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3935558/Judge-orders-Making-Murderer-accomplice-Brendan-Dassey-released-10-years-prison.html
Viewers saw police officers apparently coerce Dassey - the teenager with an IQ of 70 - into confessing to the murder of Halbach along with his uncle Steven Avery.
The documentary also heavily suggested that Avery was framed for the murder by police officers with a grudge.
U.S. Magistrate Judge William Duffin ruled in August that investigators tricked Dassey into confessing he helped Avery with the crime
In perhaps the most shocking scene, viewers of the show had seen footage of officers pressuring Dassey, who has a mental age of nine, into a making a ‘confession’.
The boy was also shown being bullied and manipulated by his own defence team.
'The investigators got into my head saying that if I confessed they would let me go, but when I did they locked me up. They tricked me. I was afraid of them back then.’
He called the trial a ‘witch hunt’ and added: ‘The prosecutors don’t care what they do. They just want a conviction.’
Smallgreenbouncyone, here, about 7 hours ago
Derek Bentley, Tim Evans, Stefan Kizco, Barry George, The Cardiff Three, all victims of bullies and perjurors in police uniform!
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYOaIDxirHE
Depending on the reading, Dassey could be represented as the victim, the interrogators as the villains. However it could be the complete opposite where the interrogators are the heroes seeking justice and Dassey is the villain who is not only a rapist/murderer but is trying to refrain from revealing the truth.
Stereotyping the disabled/lower class?
No lawyer – historically this is a familiar factor of miscarriages of justice where the confession has come from an interrogation where no lawyer/representation is there.
CAMERAWORK: High angle – makes Dassey seem small and irrelevant.
(scene from documentary)
Binary opposition between – Dassey’s/Avery’s and the Law and enforcers.
The clip shows a guidance towards the confession and shows that ideas and important facts were told to Dassey and what he replied with was an extended repetition.
Regardless of whether Dassey really had an involvement or knew the facts beforehand – the fact that the officers told him results in that specific piece of evidence losing credibility as his previous knowledge cannot then be proved.
If the officers had knowledge of Dassey’s intellectual disability. It wouldn’t be too far to suggests that they would have used this to their advantage.
THE DISABLED AND THE JUSTICE SYSTEM
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/australian-justice-system-disability-indigenous/7326240
During 2015, at least 65,000 people flowed in and out of Australian prisons. Half of these prisoners have disabilities. People with disabilities who are poor, disadvantaged, and Aboriginal are overrepresented in the prison population.
What kind of mental disabilities do we see?
Mental disabilities include disorders such as clinical depression, schizophrenia, anxiety and psychosis. People can experience these for a short time or throughout their lives.
Cognitive disability covers impairments such as intellectual disability, acquired brain injury, dementia and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. These are ongoing impairments in comprehension, reason, judgment, learning or memory.
A person with one or both of these disabilities may have poor control over their behaviour, not foresee the results of their behaviour, act on false or distorted beliefs and react impulsively in a stressful or threatening situation.
The study draws on a unique data set of over 2,700 people, a quarter of whom are Aboriginal, who have been imprisoned in New South Wales. We analysed data from police, courts, legal aid, juvenile justice and corrective services—as well as government housing, disability, health and community services.
Historical This group of Aboriginal people is funnelled into the criminal justice system earlier in life. They receive little sustained support from community or disability services or the education system.
These children, young people and adults are often just seen as badly behaved and too hard to control, and are left to police to manage.
This is in contrast to those with multiple disabilities who come from areas and families with more resources who are supported through school, health and social and private services and who rarely become enmeshed in the criminal justice system.
In the absence of appropriate support, regular police contact from a young age sets this group up for a lifetime of 'management' by the criminal justice system. These children's unmet disability, care and protection needs compound into a complex web criminalising them and trapping them in systems of control rather than care and support.
But interviewees, including police themselves, told us that they often don't recognise that someone has cognitive disability and don't know how to deal with the situation.
This means an interaction can escalate quickly and end badly with an Aboriginal person with disability arrested and charged. Aboriginal people with multiple disabilities therefore can accumulate long histories of offending.
Summary or minor offences like offensive language, resisting arrest, driving without a licence, as well as breaching orders, make up the bulk of these offending histories. These were common offences for everyone with disability in our cohort but especially prominent for Aboriginal people. This resulted in police 'hyper-surveillance' of this group, further tightening the web of criminal justice management.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/mar/18/miscarriages-justice-history
Stefan Kiszko served 16 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of the 1975 murder of the schoolgirl Lesley Molseed in West Yorkshire. He was freed on appeal in 1992. Later, Ronald Castree's DNA was found to match samples taken from semen on the 11-year-old's clothes. He was jailed for life for the murder in 2007.
Stephen Downing was jailed for 27 years for beating to death the typist Wendy Sewell in Bakewell. His conviction was quashed in 2002 after a campaign by the then editor of the Matlock Mercury, Don Hale, who said Downing had been interviewed without legal representation and his signed confession had been written by a police officer.
Derek Bentley, 19, was hanged for involvement in the murder of the police constable Sidney Miles in 1953. His family campaigned to clear his name, saying he had severe learning difficulties and a mental age of 11. In 1998, his conviction was overturned by the court of appeal because the trial judge had misdirected the jury on points of law.
Judith Ward spent 18 years in jail for the IRA killing of 12 people on board an army coach on the M62 in February 1973. Her conviction was quashed in 1992 after her lawyers argued the trial jury should have been told of her history of mental illness. Three appeal court judges concluded Ward's conviction had been "secured by ambush" and that government forensic scientists withheld vital information.
Babysitter Suzanne Holdsworth spent three years in prison for murdering Kyle Fisher, a neighbour's two-year-old son, before she was cleared in a retrial last year. She had been jailed for life after being convicted in 2005 of killing the toddler by repeatedly banging his head against a wooden bannister at her Hartlepool home. The appeal court ruled her conviction was unsafe after new medical evidence emerged suggesting Kyle may have died from an epileptic seizure. She was found not guilty at the retrial.
To Kill a Mocking Bird
http://www.gradesaver.com/to-kill-a-mockingbird/q-and-a/how-is-tom-robinsons-death-related-to-the-miscarriage-of-justice-that-occurs-to-blacks-in-southern-towns-such-as-maycomb-247925
Aslan – 15/04/2015 - Tom Robinson was innocent to begin with: they did not need a trial if people only looked at the facts of the case. Unfortunately Atticus was the only person looking at the facts and he was defending a black man. The irony is that most of the town and all the jurors knew that Tom was innocent. Furthermore they knew the darker truths about what Bob Ewell did to his daughter. Sadly, the jury could not get past their own blind prejudice to uphold justice: true justice was only for white people. Blacks were disposable to them and that is exactly how Tom Robinson ended up.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/18/mockingbird-questions-good-justice
‘All are participants within a criminal justice system with a responsibility to the truth, but who choose to ignore it in order to achieve what they consider the "right" result, based on their personal morality.’
from Amtiskaw,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/uk/2001/life_of_crime/miscarriages.stm
THE MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE
The miscarriage of justice has been around for arguably as long as the idea of justice has however it has only recently become a prominent subject within society for the 21st century.
A lot of cases particularly during the times of slavery and an extreme racial divide (To Kill a Mockingbird) people were incarcerated or killed (as a form of punishment) for a crime that there was no evidence to suggest that they had committed.
VIEWS ON DISABILITY
Similarly, with the miscarriage of justice, disability has always been a taboo subject. In the Greek mythology babies born with a physical disability where left on a cliff.
Acknowledgement of mental disabilities was a major factor in the Victorian era, however it was always associated with madness and occasionally witchcraft due to a lack of understanding.
Disability is often represented as supernatural and dangerous across media. This could have the detrimental effect on people talking about it as they may be feared or labelled/stigmatised which means they will be avoided (SOLELY NEGATIVE)
MY IGNITE PRESENTATION
o Institutions - Netflix - Bias - Law Enforcement
Netflix Bias accusation
O Siding with Avery and Family
1st episode is based on his innocence
Playing on emotions (His Parents)
O ‘Extreme Villainization’ of Law enforcements
All law enforcers
Trying to Change Lawyers
O Dramatisation
Focusing on possibilities rather than the facts
‘domestic perspective’ constant focusing on his home
O Leaving out the facts
To pursue domestic perspective
O Failing to talk about Dassey’s intellectual disability
Recent re-trials – He is now being released
Institutional bias against family
- Class
- Education
- Prejudice
O Forcing perspectives and certain ideologies
Getting his story across
Lack of faith in the system
Believes his innocence
o Genre - Documentary - Changes to it over the years.
O Confused approach – Documentary vs Drama
O Distribution to a large audience
o Representation of Law enforcement - Negative -
People with disabilities - Vulnerable, law breakers?
Working Class - Gold diggers? e.t.c
o Audience - Impact - Passive vs Active – Influence
o Uses and Gratifications
o Surveilance ‘Unseen footage of making a murderer police interview’
o Escapism
O Typical Narrative – Intro – Climax – Resolution - Constant Climax
Favour of Dominant Ideologies
Fragility of justice system
Fragility of documentaries
Vulnerable to influence – Audience appeal + Institutional ideologies
BOOKS
O Media student share > Resources > A Level > Critical Investigation > Disability > Images of Disability in Popular Television
MEDIA MAGAZINE
MM56 - It’s all in the Mind: Detectives on Screen. Malcolm Hebron investigates the representations of mental illness in TV crime drama.
O ’ Series like Luther point to a serious issue in
the crime genre: the representation of mental
illness. Even though the vast majority of cases of
psychiatric illness do not lead to violent episodes,
axe-wielding madmen and scheming serial
killers are a staple of the crime genre, reinforcing
the notion that psychological disturbance is
sinister and threatening. Popular crime stories
can thus stigmatise psychiatric disorder and
give a misleading picture of the world.’
MM54 - ‘The More You Deny Me the Stronger I Get’: Trauma, Repression and Catharsis in The Babadook. Gabrielle O’Brien explores a genre-bending Gothic movie which probes the inner world of the mind.
MM38 - Attacking America: A decade of Documentary Dissent
O Horror Genre
O ‘he exhibits aggressive behavioural
tendencies that mark him as a troubled child.
When Samuel is expelled from school
for bringing in a dangerous weapon to ‘kill monsters’,
O ’forcing her to threaten
Samuel’s safety.’
O mental health and the supernatural – does it mean failing to talk about mental illnesses in texts is better than representing it as supernatural and dangerous?
ONLINE ARTICLES
O http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/what-making-a-murderer-reveals-about-the-justice-system-and-intellectual-disability-20160111
Dassey’s Lack of understanding was manipulated and rarely talked about within the show.
O Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_a_Murderer
‘claims that key evidence from the trial was omitted from the documentary’
‘"very one-sided" and feels that viewers are "only getting one side of the story’
‘Jodi Stachowski, a former fiancée of Avery's, defended him in the documentary. But, during an interview on HLN's Nancy Grace in January 2016, she was asked whether she believes Avery killed Halbach. She said, "Yes, I do, because he threatened to kill me and my family and a friend of mine." Stachowski also said that Avery forced her to lie to Netflix producers, threatening that otherwise she would "pay for it." She quoted other alleged hearsay comments by him.
O THREAD OF Making a Murder Articles: http://www.usatoday.com/topic/290ef6c6-a047-4dda-a9a9-977a6bc3f7e9/Making-A-Murder/
THE SHOW ITSELF
Non Linear Narrative – Constantly goes between time which the said offences occurred and the trials.
Constant Disequilibrium – Hint at equilibrium – new equilibrium is the current state – dassey being freed e.t.c.
And almost multi strand narrative – victims – accusers – family members – law people.
S1 EP1
Penny Beerntsten - Victim of sexual assault + attempted murder in 1985
Stephen Aver was wrongfully convicted, sentence to 32 years and served 18
Strength of institutional bias (verging brainwashing like ideas)
O Denial of DNA - The amount of people involved potentially a blind eye.
S1 EP 2 Eugene Kusche.
" My sketch looks more like Steven Avery than Gregory Allen"
In response to the reliability of DNA Testing
O Other Texts –
Orange is the New Black S4 – Poussey’s death – Piper causing Alex to remain in prison e.t.c.
http://kmest4.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/mest4-critical-investigation-to-what.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0327z4t/the-people-detective-5-maybrick
Amanda Knox – Netflix Documentary
BRENDAN DASSEY IS BEING RELEASED – CONFIRMED TUESDAY 15TH NOVEMBER
http://news.sky.com/story/judge-orders-release-of-making-a-murderers-brendan-dassey-10658177
Court documents described Mr Dassey as a slow learner who has difficulty understanding language and speaking.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3935558/Judge-orders-Making-Murderer-accomplice-Brendan-Dassey-released-10-years-prison.html
Viewers saw police officers apparently coerce Dassey - the teenager with an IQ of 70 - into confessing to the murder of Halbach along with his uncle Steven Avery.
The documentary also heavily suggested that Avery was framed for the murder by police officers with a grudge.
U.S. Magistrate Judge William Duffin ruled in August that investigators tricked Dassey into confessing he helped Avery with the crime
In perhaps the most shocking scene, viewers of the show had seen footage of officers pressuring Dassey, who has a mental age of nine, into a making a ‘confession’.
The boy was also shown being bullied and manipulated by his own defence team.
'The investigators got into my head saying that if I confessed they would let me go, but when I did they locked me up. They tricked me. I was afraid of them back then.’
He called the trial a ‘witch hunt’ and added: ‘The prosecutors don’t care what they do. They just want a conviction.’
Smallgreenbouncyone, here, about 7 hours ago
Derek Bentley, Tim Evans, Stefan Kizco, Barry George, The Cardiff Three, all victims of bullies and perjurors in police uniform!
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYOaIDxirHE
Depending on the reading, Dassey could be represented as the victim, the interrogators as the villains. However it could be the complete opposite where the interrogators are the heroes seeking justice and Dassey is the villain who is not only a rapist/murderer but is trying to refrain from revealing the truth.
Stereotyping the disabled/lower class?
No lawyer – historically this is a familiar factor of miscarriages of justice where the confession has come from an interrogation where no lawyer/representation is there.
CAMERAWORK: High angle – makes Dassey seem small and irrelevant.
(scene from documentary)
Binary opposition between – Dassey’s/Avery’s and the Law and enforcers.
The clip shows a guidance towards the confession and shows that ideas and important facts were told to Dassey and what he replied with was an extended repetition.
Regardless of whether Dassey really had an involvement or knew the facts beforehand – the fact that the officers told him results in that specific piece of evidence losing credibility as his previous knowledge cannot then be proved.
If the officers had knowledge of Dassey’s intellectual disability. It wouldn’t be too far to suggests that they would have used this to their advantage.
THE DISABLED AND THE JUSTICE SYSTEM
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/australian-justice-system-disability-indigenous/7326240
During 2015, at least 65,000 people flowed in and out of Australian prisons. Half of these prisoners have disabilities. People with disabilities who are poor, disadvantaged, and Aboriginal are overrepresented in the prison population.
What kind of mental disabilities do we see?
Mental disabilities include disorders such as clinical depression, schizophrenia, anxiety and psychosis. People can experience these for a short time or throughout their lives.
Cognitive disability covers impairments such as intellectual disability, acquired brain injury, dementia and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. These are ongoing impairments in comprehension, reason, judgment, learning or memory.
A person with one or both of these disabilities may have poor control over their behaviour, not foresee the results of their behaviour, act on false or distorted beliefs and react impulsively in a stressful or threatening situation.
The study draws on a unique data set of over 2,700 people, a quarter of whom are Aboriginal, who have been imprisoned in New South Wales. We analysed data from police, courts, legal aid, juvenile justice and corrective services—as well as government housing, disability, health and community services.
Historical This group of Aboriginal people is funnelled into the criminal justice system earlier in life. They receive little sustained support from community or disability services or the education system.
These children, young people and adults are often just seen as badly behaved and too hard to control, and are left to police to manage.
This is in contrast to those with multiple disabilities who come from areas and families with more resources who are supported through school, health and social and private services and who rarely become enmeshed in the criminal justice system.
In the absence of appropriate support, regular police contact from a young age sets this group up for a lifetime of 'management' by the criminal justice system. These children's unmet disability, care and protection needs compound into a complex web criminalising them and trapping them in systems of control rather than care and support.
But interviewees, including police themselves, told us that they often don't recognise that someone has cognitive disability and don't know how to deal with the situation.
This means an interaction can escalate quickly and end badly with an Aboriginal person with disability arrested and charged. Aboriginal people with multiple disabilities therefore can accumulate long histories of offending.
Summary or minor offences like offensive language, resisting arrest, driving without a licence, as well as breaching orders, make up the bulk of these offending histories. These were common offences for everyone with disability in our cohort but especially prominent for Aboriginal people. This resulted in police 'hyper-surveillance' of this group, further tightening the web of criminal justice management.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/mar/18/miscarriages-justice-history
Stefan Kiszko served 16 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of the 1975 murder of the schoolgirl Lesley Molseed in West Yorkshire. He was freed on appeal in 1992. Later, Ronald Castree's DNA was found to match samples taken from semen on the 11-year-old's clothes. He was jailed for life for the murder in 2007.
Stephen Downing was jailed for 27 years for beating to death the typist Wendy Sewell in Bakewell. His conviction was quashed in 2002 after a campaign by the then editor of the Matlock Mercury, Don Hale, who said Downing had been interviewed without legal representation and his signed confession had been written by a police officer.
Derek Bentley, 19, was hanged for involvement in the murder of the police constable Sidney Miles in 1953. His family campaigned to clear his name, saying he had severe learning difficulties and a mental age of 11. In 1998, his conviction was overturned by the court of appeal because the trial judge had misdirected the jury on points of law.
Judith Ward spent 18 years in jail for the IRA killing of 12 people on board an army coach on the M62 in February 1973. Her conviction was quashed in 1992 after her lawyers argued the trial jury should have been told of her history of mental illness. Three appeal court judges concluded Ward's conviction had been "secured by ambush" and that government forensic scientists withheld vital information.
Babysitter Suzanne Holdsworth spent three years in prison for murdering Kyle Fisher, a neighbour's two-year-old son, before she was cleared in a retrial last year. She had been jailed for life after being convicted in 2005 of killing the toddler by repeatedly banging his head against a wooden bannister at her Hartlepool home. The appeal court ruled her conviction was unsafe after new medical evidence emerged suggesting Kyle may have died from an epileptic seizure. She was found not guilty at the retrial.
To Kill a Mocking Bird
http://www.gradesaver.com/to-kill-a-mockingbird/q-and-a/how-is-tom-robinsons-death-related-to-the-miscarriage-of-justice-that-occurs-to-blacks-in-southern-towns-such-as-maycomb-247925
Aslan – 15/04/2015 - Tom Robinson was innocent to begin with: they did not need a trial if people only looked at the facts of the case. Unfortunately Atticus was the only person looking at the facts and he was defending a black man. The irony is that most of the town and all the jurors knew that Tom was innocent. Furthermore they knew the darker truths about what Bob Ewell did to his daughter. Sadly, the jury could not get past their own blind prejudice to uphold justice: true justice was only for white people. Blacks were disposable to them and that is exactly how Tom Robinson ended up.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/18/mockingbird-questions-good-justice
‘All are participants within a criminal justice system with a responsibility to the truth, but who choose to ignore it in order to achieve what they consider the "right" result, based on their personal morality.’
from Amtiskaw,
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