Monday 3/28 - Day 6

 Criminal Law and Death Penalty Day 6 

By: Owen and Leila 


To start off the day, we began by having some time to finish up blogs from last week. We then transitioned into teaming up for our small group project for this week, which has to do with various topics surrounding the death penalty. My group chose to research the ethics of the death penalty. More specifically, is it humane? Should it be allowed based on human rights? Should it be allowed to take away someone’s personhood? We had around twenty minutes to get started on the project before listening to our guest speaker for the day, Jay Jenkins, who works for the Texas Center for Justice and Equity. Mr. Jenkins spoke to us about TCJE’s mission, what he works on at TCJE, and the unfairness of a lot of criminal cases. He also spoke to us about current issues concerning bail bonds. After this, we had another hour to work on the group project before taking a break for lunch. 


In this image, students are listening to the 

the presentation that was given by Mr. Jenkens about bail bonds.


To start off our afternoon, we all got comfortable and started watching Just Mercy, a movie following Bryan Stevenson and his work to free innocent people from death row. The movie was based on a true story, in which Bryan Stevenson successfully freed Walter McMillan from death row. McMillan was a man who was falsely arrested and found guilty of the murder of Wanda Morrison. Bryan Stevenson constantly faced challenges and losses while working on the case but believed in McMillan’s innocence and saw the injustices that were taking place throughout the process of being his lawyer. The evidence used in court was extremely inconsistent and shouldn’t have been enough to convict McMillan of murder. 

In this image, Just Mercy is

 playing. The still shot is of the lawyer Bryan Stevenson at 

the death row facility. 


The movie was very enjoyable to watch and helped tie together many of the different aspects of the criminal law system that we were focusing on while leading us into our focus on the death penalty this week. Bryan Stevenson has won reversals, release, or relief for over 100 convicted and wrongfully convicted inmates on death row. The movie also highlighted the importance of equality and fair trials for everyone in the criminal law system, as McMillan and other inmates shown in the movie faced large amounts of injustices. When we finished watching the movie, we had a short amount of time to discuss how we felt about it, and the connections we saw between the movie, the criminal justice system, and a podcast we had listened to earlier in the course. This discussion helped tie together the movie we watched with past work and was the perfect start to our week focusing on the death penalty.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Criminal Law and the Death Penalty A-Term Day 1 - Chiara Abel

Image
       On the first day of the Criminal Law and Defense A-Term, one of the first things we did in the morning was go over what we will be learning in the next two weeks. For week one we are going to be exploring Criminal Law and some major concepts and in the second week, we are going to be exploring the Death Penalty. Later in the morning, we worked on a bigger project. Everyone split into five groups and each group discussed one of five documents and how they were connected to the Declaration of Independence. The five documents that we looked at were “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., The Declaration of Sentiments written for the Seneca Falls convention, The Commonwealth club address by Franklin D. Roosevelt, The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln, and lastly, The Universal Declaration of Human Rights written by the United Nations member states. After all the small groups finished reading and discussing the documents a few students from each group share
Read more

Thursday, 3/31- Alexander McGill

Image
  Alexander McGill Day 3/31      We started our day off by working on blogs and finishing up some late work. Students worked together to get their blogs finished, edited, and submitted from the past week. We then moved into listening to podcast 13 of in the dark to give us background information before our meeting with Ms. Johnson. After the podcast, we had a short break and then broke up into our groups to work on our group projects. After an hour and a half of working, we began lunch.       Afterwards, we listened to the last two episodes of “In the Dark” that talked about the faulty evidence in the Curtis Flowers case. We then had a small 5-minute break and started to prepare questions for today's guest speaker. Once our guest speaker  (who was Curtis Flowers' lawyer in the Supreme Court case) joined us on zoom, students were able to ask her any questions they had. She spoke about what it’s like to be a defence attorney for people on death row and her personal experiences w
Read more