Guilty until proven innocent

Amara Jefferson, Assistant Sports' Editor
February 21, 2012
Filed under Opinion

Many innocent people around the world are falsely accused of very serious crimes each and everyday and end up having to spend their whole lives behind bars.

But for some lucky people, they may get a second chance to prove themselves innocent just one more time. Some people get proven innocent after years and years behind bars, with the help of private investigators to thoroughly investigate their cases again. Unfortunately, other people aren’t so lucky and have to suffer behind bars for the rest of their lives, knowing that they have done anything wrong.

This is very unfair to people that are completely innocent and have nothing to do with the crimes that they have been falsely accused for, because of the lack of effort that the investigators put into the case. If people are being paid to investigate serious cases about murder, drug busts, or any other sort of cases that may involve serious time, they should be able to do a thorough job of searching for clues and also searching for the people that actually committed the crime.

Many people are falsely accused of crimes everyday, when they are in fact innocent and usually know nothing about the crime that they are being put behind bars for. When a judge gives people the final verdict, it does not just take a couple of seconds to make up their minds as to whether or not the person is guilty or innocent, time is a major factor in most serious cases. A lot of time and effort is put into cases that are very serious, so the effort put into ones where people are falsely accused is obviously nonexistent, if investigators are missing key elements to the case.

There has recently been a show on television, where a man was put into jail after he was supposedly involved in killing a retired cop at a drug operation. The man had no idea what was going on when he went to jail. When witnesses where asked to identify who the killer was, they had no idea they were choosing an innocent man, that would be put behind bars for the rest of his life.

In the past ten years, he has been writing to private investigators, begging and pleading for them to review his case files. Eventually, they decided to review the files, he ended up having an alibi and was proven innocent. The man who had committed the crime was thrown in jail and the man that was innocent sued the state and was given some money for having to spend time in jail.

Private investigators should be able to do their jobs without making mistakes and putting innocent people in jail.