4/14/2023 0 Comments Condones invisibles![]() That spirit has been devoted to working for other wrongly convicted people since his release. ![]() His story became the film The Hurricane, starring Denzel Washington, and it highlighted not only the tragic circumstances of the conviction and incarceration, but Carter's incomparable spirit. Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter was released from prison in 1985, after serving almost twenty years – many of them spent in solitary confinement, for refusing to act like a guilty man – for a triple-murder he did not commit. I used to wake up at night, bathed in sweat, stuck to my mattress.And nobody understood only the other innocent people in prison – and there are a number of them.You never give up hope, I never gave up hope in twenty-three years.' Looking back, I don't know how I'm still here. Patrick Nicholls told the English Criminal Cases Review Commission: 'It was a nightmare.It lasted twenty-three years. The stories are compelling and heart-wrenching – stories of lives snatched away for years, sometimes decades. Hundreds of innocent people have now been exonerated, most from the United States, but also from England, Canada and elsewhere. It is part of an international movement that involves more than fifty pro-bono organisations. The Griffith University Innocence Project was established a decade ago to assist wrongly convicted people in Australia. You can shout and scream to those who will listen but, even if they believe you, what can they do – how can they correct a terrible mistake in a system that has concluded through detailed, sophisticated processes that you are guilty? ![]() At least two people know the truth – the perpetrator and you – but to the rest of the world the case is closed and you are guilty. You know the truth: you are innocent someone else is not. Eyewitness identification, which can so convincingly influence a jury, is the major factor in wrongful convictions later corrected by DNA evidence in the United States. Systemic factors regularly result in the conviction of innocent people: incorrect eyewitness identification, tunnel vision, bad lawyering, withholding exculpatory evidence, incorrect scientific evidence, false confessions, informant/snitch testimony. Many circumstantial cases still result in a conviction, despite the criminal justice system demanding guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Perhaps you were the last person to see the victim alive, and the police suspected you and did not follow other leads, or your lawyer did not provide an adequate defence, or the prosecution did not inform the defence of contrary evidence. Sometimes it is just a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or witnesses mistaking what they thought they saw. Yet this scenario is not only possible, but far more likely than it should be. IT IS HARD for most people to imagine being convicted of a crime they did not commit.
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