Posted: October 9th, 2022

Understanding the criminal justice system

Law
Topic:
Demonstrate Understanding of how the Criminal Justice System Works by analyzing a case where a life or death was the outcome.
Understanding the criminal justice system
Step 1. Select a current events case, in the last ten years, to analyze in the American criminal justice system. The case must be one where a life sentence or death sentence was the outcome.
Step 2. Describe the details of the case, including the nature of the offense, background of the offender, and an analysis of each component in the criminal justice system: advantages/disadvantages of police procedures, details and/or issues with court proceedings, and whether the correctional sentence was appropriate based on the nature of the offense and background of the offender.
Step 3. Conclude your paper by thoroughly analyzing the impact this case has had or will have on future criminal justice outcomes. Careful critical thinking is required here. Invest considerable effort in thinking about what you have learned over the course of the term in addressing this final aspect of the mission.
The sources you are to use to obtain information for your descriptions of the criminal justice process include the following: your text book for this course reading material, information gathered from your Experimental Project, court cases and news articles.
You can access a database on criminal justices case law, journals and articles using the HCC library resource page provided here: http://search.proquest.com/criminaljusticeperiodicals/advanced?accountid=35779′ target=”_blank”>http://search.proquest.com/criminaljusticeperiodicals/advanced?accountid=35779 (Links to an external site.)
As an academic paper, it must contain APA formatted citations throughout the paper whenever information is being presented from a source. You can find examples of citations and references through the following link:
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/APA-MLA-Chicago-Automatically-format-bibliographies-733ef2c2-fb65-4641-b3e6-91b9cc92085f?CorrelationId=c93b1c67-e897-4b92-b269-e73922504292&;ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US&ocmsassetID=HA102813283 (Links to an external site.) (Links to an external site.)
Even though you may have personal experience in the field (e.g. police officer) or use knowledge obtained in previous courses, information used in this paper must be supported through the use of citations which meet the criteria for sources indicated above. For a database on scholarly articles, case law, and related material visit HCC Library. You can also access the information through the following link:
http://search.proquest.com/criminaljusticeperiodicals/advanced?accountid=35779 (Links to an external site.)

The law of sentencing a person to death as a form of punishment for a crime is capital punishment. Capital punishment, mostly recognized as the death penalty in America, is currently used by 28 states. Its presence can be outlined since the commencement of the American colonies (Raufu, 2020). The United States of America was the first country to make known lethal injection as an execution method. The death penalty is still exercised in 2020. Currently, only four countries in the world still enforce lethal injections as a form of capital punishment. Among them, Thailand, China, and Vietnam. Studies conducted show that between the years 1967 to 1977, executions were non-existent. The Supreme Court in America nullified the death punishment in the case Furman v. Georgia in 1972. The court also mandated that all capital punishment cases be reduced to life imprisonment sentences (Bohm, 2016). It is important to note that many states in America approved the death penalty while the courts made known that capital punishment would be enforced where need be. After the case, Gregg v. Georgia presided, an alarming 7800 people were sentenced to death. In this statistic, almost 1500 of them have been executed while an approximated 170 people sentenced to death in 1972 were exonerated.
In America, the legal process of the death penalty has five stages. These stages include the prosecutor’s verdict to warrant capital punishment. The second step normally constitutes the sentencing of the criminal. After the sentencing, the case review is done to ensure that the right crime is being punished. The state collateral review follows. This is the re-examination of a passed judgment in a setting separated from the original review. Finally, the death penalty sentences once the federal habeas corpus is conducted. This is the final legal review by the federal court on a person’s incineration process and sentencing.
This paper will review a death penalty case conducted in the United States of America. The legal procedure behind the case as well as the accused or sentenced a person’s life. Robert Mitchell Jennings was executed on 30th January 2019, thirty years after he was convicted of the murder of a police officer in Huston. Born on December 13th, 1957, Jennings was only thirty-one years old when he was convicted and sixty-one years on execution. Jennings, formerly labeled as the cop killer, was arrested in July 1998. In July 1988, Jennings invaded a book store in Huston, intending to rob the establishment. A police officer named Elston Howard, twenty-four years old, had been inside the bookstore writing the owner a ticket when Jennings shot him four times.
Before his conviction for Howard’s murder, Jennings had been convicted for robbery two times. At the time of the shooting, Jennings had been on a two months parole. During his parole, Jennings had robbed 10 other establishments, including that same bookstore 12 days before the shooting. During Howard’s shooting, Jennings was shot once on the hand and rushed himself to the hospital, where he was later arrested. A year later, the jury found Jennings guilty of capital murder after about an hour of deliberation. During Jennings’s court proceeding, his mother gave a statement in which she termed the conviction as Man’s verdict and not God’s verdict. She was convinced that Jennings had been innocent. After his arrest, Jennings had confessed to the killing of Howard in a recorded tape. During his confession, Jennings said ‘I feel bad for the family, and I feel bad for myself.”
According to the Texan tribune, Robert Mitchell Jennings was placed on death row on November 10th, 1989. In his last statement before the execution, Jennings left a message to Howard’s family wishing them closure and peace. Any convict placed on death row may be executed in close to six months after the conviction without appeals. Death row appeals are costly (Steiker & Steiker, 2010). They require many legal fees and lawyers that are knowledgeable in these types of convictions as they are not very common. However, most executions are passed after sixteen years and above. In 1958 the Supreme Court presided on a case, Trop v. Dulles. With this case, the likelihood of appealing and overturning a capital crime sentence became possible (Jones, 2014). Based on Jennings’s background, capital punishment was harsher than he deserved. Although he had been arrested many times before, robberies were the worst offenses he had under his belt. Since. Howard had been a police officer, a life sentence without parole would have been a more fitting punishment. Many convictions made to a cop killer have a high chance of being executed. There are very few instances when a person convicted of killing a police officer is removed from death row. Thus were the circumstances that surrounded the Jennings case. His lawyers argued that Jennings’s previous council had not asked the jurors presiding over his case to consider his penitence to his actions.

References
Raufu, A. (2020). Book Review: The Death Penalty on the Ballot: American Democracy and the Fate of Capital Punishment.
Bohm, R. M. (2016). Deathquest: An introduction to the theory and practice of capital punishment in the United Sta Paternoster, R. (1991). Capital punishment in America (p., 20). New York: Lexington Books. Tes. Taylor & Francis.
Steiker, C. S., & Steiker, J. M. (2010). Costs and Capital Punishment: A New Consideration Transforms an Old Debate. U. Chi. Legal F., 117.
Jones, B. L. (2014). Does a Petitioner Expand an Appeal When Raising a Claim Related to Claims Accepted for Appeal, but Not a Part of the Appeal: Jennings v. Stephens (13-7211). Preview US Sup. Ct. Cas., 42, 7.

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