Friday, March 20, 2015

The Lies
                The court is a place were supposedly people don’t lie. You place your hand on the book and you say the oath, promising you won’t do it. Yet so many people lie and become deceptive while on the stand. There is a term for it, Perjury. Telling a lie to the jury happens all the time and it can totally ruin someone’s life and change the outcome of a decision in court.
                Eye witness testimonies and others like it are huge factors when deciding a case. If someone says they say you kill someone, you will likely be tried for murder and possibly convicted just on the one piece of evidence. It is scary that someone has to the power to false convict you of a crime you have never done quite easily. Eye witness testimonies should really have little to zero influence on a case because someone can lie too easily. People cannot have the power to just ruin someone’s life by putting them in jail by just telling a single lie. Sure there is charges against those who do lie in the court room, but how many times have people actually been caught lying? I don’t feel like it happens very much.

                False testimonies also can have a large effect based on generalizations. We have heard it from the Ferguson case and many others, some people are treated unfair and as less in the courtroom than others. In our society, a nice white girl can just say a minority did a crime and a lot of people would believe her. Society has put generalizations on certain groups of people and it isn’t fair at all. Lying and cheating the court room is so much easier if you fit the right demographics. Juries should be totally colorblind, have no preference to gender, and not look at the wealth of a person but we all know that isn’t the case. I feel like setting up some sort of blind system where the jury does not know about the victim or the criminal’s background and demographics. IT seems like the only way right now to make court fair. Our country is devoted to everyone having equal rights but discrimination and generalizations occur, even without us knowing it. So I feel the best way to stop the bias in the courtroom is to make everyone blind to the things that do not matter.  

No comments:

Post a Comment