Causes of Wrongful Convictions in the United Sates judicial System - Research Paper Example

shown that wrong convictions happen on daily basis in the US judicial system, with the Bureau of Justice Statistics admitting publicly that about 8% to 12 % of all the state inmates are either factually or actually innocent (Bohm, 2011). Therefore, this research paper is going to explore the issue of wrongful conviction in the USA judicial system, establish the root causes of the problem as well as introduce possible solutions with DNA being the most viable alternative to the problem. Controversial studies have shown that USA has one of the highest numbers of inmates in the world which is said to be roughly 7.

1 million people (Free & Ruesink, 2012). Other contentious statistics estimate that about one person in every one hundred adults is an inmate with the ratio dramatically increasing if persons under probation are considered. The country has about 8 percent of prisoners in the federal prisons incarcerated for engaging in violent crimes with about 52 percent inmates being sentenced in state prisons (Free & Ruesink, 2012). It is estimated that about two-thirds of these criminals are rearrested within the first three years after their release with 52 percent of them being incarcerated.

The findings of these studies are highly alarming and more precisely because of the high number of innocent persons who were convicted wrongly and imprisoned. However, most people in the country used to hold the presumption that the country’s judicial system is fair and blind and that no individual is convicted for a crime that he or she did not commit (Tong, Bryant & Horvath, 2009). A number of factors are believed to have attributed to the wrongful conviction of innocent people in the USA with eyewitness misidentification being one of the major causes.

Many scholars believe that eyewitness misidentification is the root cause of this prevalent problem in the country. The US judicial system used to rely so much on witness brought forward by eyewitnesses when convicting suspected