Exoneration is when a prisoner who is wrongfully convicted is released from jail. Recently our class researched this. We had a choice of shows and ted talks to watch and we listened to stories of wrongfully convicted men who are saved. We also listened to a story on NPR of a man and his friend who were wrongfully convicted of rape and murder and were sentenced to years and years in jail. We heard the tale of his exoneration and the process he went through to become free and the people that helped him get there.
We looked at all of the facts and graphed the various exonerations from the Project Innocence web-page. Project Innocence is an organization that works hard to solve all of the unsolved cases that put innocent men in jail. The work load is enormous for the people at Project Innocence because there are more cases coming in every day and there are many built up over the past years when they did not take advantage of testing. The tests they use to determine if the arrested men are actually the perpetrators is DNA testing. Some tests are much easier, such as rape cases, because the DNA (semen in rape cases) is easy to test. If the DNA found is different than the arrested men, there is really no case as to if the man is innocent.
I find this very comforting because though this is not a very personal issue for me, There are more men every day that are released from a confinement caused by a crime they didn't even commit. This way we are closer to the truth with the real culprits because old cases that were though solved are opened up again for the perpetrator to be caught. This does not in any way hinder our police system for keeping the streets clean of the people, so I feel no qualms for supporting this cause. This also shows that our government system is flawed though, and that is an unsettling thought. Now the idea that the government will put just anyone in jail to close the case is reinforced, and our faith in the government decreases even more. At least the authorities are acknowledging their mistakes and taking the wrongfully convicted out of jail, which is better than nothing.
