Eye-witness accounts

[qwhip]

I'm reading a lot things I shouldn't be because I have a lot of work to do. I mean, a LOT.

But I happened upon a blog which posted up an 'Awareness test' which I found interesting. The blog went on further to discuss the implications of eyewitness accounts, and mentioned the Julius Earl Ruffin case

Comments

[somnistra]

Wow, that is really tragic. :( I think it makes it even sadder that Ruffin forgave her so quickly. A good man accused, convicted and punished for something so heinous. The injustice indeed! :(

[qwhip]

exonerate.org, the website for the mid-Atlantic innocence project (an organisation dedicated to exonerated innocent convicted criminals through DNA evidence) gives a whole list of freed individuals that were convicted and sentenced to years due to faulty eye-witness testimonies. I couldn't read all of them, they just made me feel worse and worse. Some of these guys were only teenages when they were put in jail. On Aug 6th 2008, another man, Aaron Michael Howard, was released after nearly twenty years. He had been sentenced 21years to life, and I watched one of the clips they had of him on Fox 5 News. He sounded so quiet, so serene. You wanted him to get angry, to show the world what twenty years in jail will do to someone - if they weren't a criminal beforehand, they sure will turn to crime after. But he was so damn forgiving. Despite everything. How do these guys do it?? Is it because they know they're innocent, so they can hold only their humanity? In the clip, Howard says that he learnt to be a man, to do what's right, in

[joiboi21]

random :P says:
you mean that there's no one you can really blame?
joy says:
yeah
i mean u can blame ppl
but at the same time everyone is doin their job
but yeah that aint a real excuse
hmm i mean u can pick people out and say why this and that
but ya everyone did what they though was "right"
i think what i would feel is, sympathy and sadness for the guy who had to endure it all
den again at the end of the day my sympathy wont do anything or mean anything
i think from this we as a society should be more careful about people going though it all again and take steps to prevent it

[qwhip]

Who is 'Random'?? Why are you having imaginary conversations with yourself? Who are you? How did you escape the mental ward?

But everything you said - that sense of being pulled all directions...there are reasons to be angry, and yet reasons to not be angry. There are reasons to be sad, and yet there are reasons to not be sad. There are people to blame, and yet you can't blame them. That's what's frustrating - you just don't know how to feel, but just that it has to be some extreme emotion for such an extreme injustice. But what emotion?

[nunuunuuu]

Oh my GOODNESS how many posts did you add since I last checked here?! And I swear it wasn't that long ago that I read your eljay. Did I forget to log in when I loaded your page?

Hang on... four posts in the last week.