Nichol Burton Case

According to the above petitions filed on 09/25/17, by Portsmouth Police Officer R. Flaherty, the following incident took place in the City of Portsmouth. “On September 24, 2017 at approximately 0016 hours, police were responding to a loud party at 1126 Virginia Avenue when a large group of individuals was observed loitering in the breezeway at 1112 Virginia Ave. Remonds Delbridge ran from the location and was observed tossing an item into a dumpster at 2406 High St before being taken into custody. Delbridge had an existing detention order on file for violation of probation. Search incident arrest yielded a 45 caliber bullet in Delbridge’s right front pants pocket. Police later recovered a Black Springfield XDS sn: S3189810 from inside the dumpster at 2406 High Street. The firearm had previously been stolen between August 6th, 2017, and August 20th, 2017. The ammunition in the Springfield matched the ammunition inside Delbridge’s pocket. Delbridge is 17 years old and has been convicted of robbery.

The defendant John Bass, alleged that the prosecution was seeking the death penalty against him because of the color of his skin and was granted a motion for discovery regarding the government's capital charging practices. The sixth circuit court found that Bass made a threshold showing evidence based on national statistics that "the United States charged blacks with a death-eligible offense more than twice as often as it charges whites." However, the Supreme Court reversed the Sixth Circuit, holding that a discriminatory effect could not be found because " raw statistics regarding overall charges say nothing about charges brought against similarly situated defendants."( United States v. Bass,536 U.S. 862 (2002) (per curiam)). The Supreme

The case I chose is about a man named Barry Gibbs. He was convicted of a crime he did not commit in New York City. On November 4, 1986, a body of an African American woman was discovered under a blanket. She was found near a Brooklyn highway and was strangled to death. A man named Louis Eppolito was the lead investigator in the case. He interviewed a man that had been jogging near the scene of the crime. The jogger told the investigator that he observed a white man pull out the African American woman out of a car, laid her on the ground, and put a blanket over her.

Spohn, Beichner, and Davis-Frenzel do not conduct a field study as Frohmann does, instead they examined all sexual assault cases cleared by arrest in Miami Florida in 1997. They did however replicate Frohmann’s design of interviewing a sample of the prosecutors who handled the cases. By using this different method of research, Spohn, Beichner, and Davis-Frenzel’s are able to show the frequency in which prosecutors used discrepant accounts and ulterior motives to reject cases. This extends upon Frohmann’s research. Their findings that, “charging decisions primarily reflect the prosecutor’s assessment of the likelihood of conviction” (Spohn, et al. 2001, p. 206) is consistent with Frohmann 's Findings. They also agreed with Frohmann’s categories of typifications, however they found that a substantial amount of cases were rejected for reasons other than discrediting the victim such as, the victim’s failure to appear for a pretrial interview, refusal to cooperate in the prosecution of the case, or admission that the charges were fabricated (Spohn, et al. 2001).

Darryl Hunt is an African American born in 1965 in North Carolina. In 1984, he was convicted wrongfully of rape and murder of Deborah Sykes, a young white woman working as a newspaper editor. This paper researches oh his wrongful conviction in North Carolina. Darryl Hunt served nineteen and a half years before DNA evidence exonerated him. The charges leveled against him were because of inconsistencies in the initial stages of the case. An all-white bench convicted the then nineteen-year-old Hunt, even though there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime. A hotel employee made false claims that he saw Hunt enter the hotel bathroom, and later emerge with bloodstained towels. Other witnesses also fixed Hunt to the case.

Forcelli explains his displeasure of our broken criminal justice system when he states, “The sad part is that getting an innocent man out of jail is way, way, way harder than putting a guilty man in jail.” When detectives are constantly pressured to close cases and produce high conviction rates it can cause in accuracies in convictions. Garry’s case is a perfect example of how a case with minimal evidence can result in an innocent getting placed in prison. Garry has sat in prison for over 20 years waiting to appeal his case and plead his innocence. The ease of convicting an innocent man should be consistent with difficulty of exonerating an innocent man. In Garry’s case he awaits a decision from a judge where the judge has three options, to exonerate him, grant a retrial, or

In the case of Robert Tolan and Marian Tolan vs. Jeffrey Wayne Cotton, I will be discussing what interest me about this case. I will also deliberating on the liability and criminal liability of this case. The Tolan vs. Cotton case interests me because the United States have so many police that are brutalizing citizens. In some cases the police officers are getting away with it. After reading, reviewing, and studying this case I have learn a lot about the criminal system and laws that men and women should obey. I will explain how the nine judges on the Supreme courts all came to a verdict against the police officer Jeffrey Cotton after he shot an innocent suspect. This people

The relationship between law enforcement and prosecutors, which goes hand-in-hand, can’t be overlooked. Evidence of a crime that detectives and law enforcement discover is as equally important as a good trial on part of the prosecution. If detectives aren’t able to find good solid evidence – that case usually isn’t bothered in being pursued. Several years ago, in the late 80’s, there was a murder case in Southeastern Oklahoma which now serves as a tragic example to the need for honest, constitutional work in the criminal justice system. Disreputable investigative procedures, fraudulent sources, and bad evidence were the foundation of this case that shattered innocent lives.

The justice system’s failure to prosecute police brutality is a hot topic since most riots and acts of public violence surround this issue. One of the obstacles with prosecuting police brutality is a lack of evidence. As stated by Andrew Walter in an overview of police brutality, the failure to prove police brutality cases “stems from...difficulty in

Today’s justice professionals are in the public eye more than ever. There are a multitude of devices out there that allow civilians to capture every move a street officer makes. It is more crucial now than ever that these officers arm themselves with the knowledge of ethics along with the items on their utility belt. The wrong choice in any decision a justice professional makes will have the public ready and willing to lash out. These difficult ethical decisions are all part of the job that they have taken. Taking the time to learn about what is right and wrong is essential to their positions in society.

During recent studies from several researchers it has been concluded that there is a fault within our criminal justice system. Researchers discovered there is a high wrongful conviction rate within the United States judicial system. After, extensive research, it was found that wrongful convictions are caused by eyewitness error, false confessions, flawed forensic science, an informant, bad lawyering, and government misconduct. Without a doubt, this issue has shocked society, due to the fact we rely on the system for pure justice. Within my findings, it is apparent that victims of wrongful convictions suffer numerous affects when

“Wrongful convictions happen every week in every state in this country. And they happen for all the same reasons. Sloppy police work. Eyewitness identification is the most- is the worst type almost. Because it is wrong about half the time. Think about that.” (Grisham). Wrongful convictions can happen to anyone, at anytime. Grisham implies wrongful convictions happen for the same reasons, careless police work as well as eyewitness identification. An eyewitness identification is a crucial aspect in detective work because it essentially locates the person at the crime scene. This is the worst cause of wrongful convictions because it is wrong half the time.

Since 1923, when Judge Learned Hand said that the American judicial system “has always been haunted by the ghost of the innocent man convicted,” the issue of wrongful conviction has been acknowledged to man (Halstead, 1992; Huff, Rattner, Sagarin, & MacNamara, 1986). After the judge made his innocuous statements, serious study of this phenomenon began. Contrary to the statement the judge made, time and technology have revealed that an unquantifiable number of wrongfully convicted persons have served prison terms and even been executed for crimes they did not commit and some that did not even occur. Research into wrongful conviction was virtually nonexistent until Professor Edward Brochard of Yale University published his book Convicting the Innocent in 1932. This book documented 65 such cases, addressed the legal causes of miscarriage, and offered suggestions to reform. Subsequently, numerous other researchers began conducting case studies and publishing findings that affirmed that wrongful conviction represents a systematic problem within the American judicial process (Huff, 2002).

Almost everyone who has seen a cop television show or movie has heard the saying “You have the right to remain silent”. In America, people are raised to believe that the justice system never fails, and that no matter what happens justice will always prevail, though for some people this safety net has failed them. Since the late 1980s six studies have documented 250 interrogation-induced false confessions. Police-induced false confessions are the result of multistep process and sequence of influence, persuasion, and compliance. Imagine that a solider of the U.S. military is brought in for questioning, kept locked up for sixteen hours in an interrogation room, constantly threatened with the death penalty if they did not confess to the crime, and the whole time left without representation. In 1997 this was the case for four individuals from Norfolk, Virginia held without representation and forced to give false confessions.

Being the only black male on the case, I decided to do as my attorney advised. But once the judge made his decision everything that was guaranteed to me went out the window, and I was sentenced to three years in prison while my co-defendants walked away with a slap on the wrist. My co-defendants had paid attorneys who made sure they would get probation only, while my court appointed attorney did the minimum for me. My co-defendants were white females whose family was well known in the city (Davis 2013)”. The investigator asked Davis if he felt that he was being discriminated against, and if so why? The response that was received was, “Yes, and because everyone on the case including the attorneys and judge were white (Davis 2013)”. Although the information obtained from Davis is just a mere opinion of his, this is just an example of how some minorities are treated when they can’t afford an attorney, and live in the South, or along the Bible Belt. And being that the investigator is from the South, she has also seen firsthand how attorneys do the less work possible when they are appointed to represent you by a judge.