SEEKING JUSTICE
NEWSWIRE "Eyewitnesses, false confessions, investigations driven by tunnel visions and sometimes political pressure. In a way, it's suprising there aren't more errors." —Robert Johnson prevent people from committing murder for fear of severe punishments. But criminologists have found the opposite. “States that don’t have the death penalty have lower murder rates than states that do,” said Anne Holsinger, an information and resource specialist at the Death Penalty Information Center. “It is the opposite of what we would expect if the death penalty were to be a deterrent.” Holsinger says that open file policies, or policies that would make it easier for defense attorneys to see all the evidence in a case, can help prevent prosecutors from withholding evidence. In Gell's case, prosecutors withheld evidence of six people claiming they saw Jenkins, the victim, days after the reported day of his death. In two recent exoneration cases, suspects were pressured into false confessions. Policies that allow lawyers to play the tape recording of the interrogation along with the confession can show when investigators become too coercive. The process of getting a confession can be grueling. Suspects are locked in a room for hours, sometimes without food or water, and are told over and over that they are guilty. Some people can’t take the pressure. They start believing that they actually committed the crime and give a false confession. By hearing the full recording of the interrogation, the jury can decide when investigators cross the line between gaining a true confession and forcing a false confession out of suspects. Although these policy suggestions cannot re-
IT'S A BIRD, PLANE... WOMAN?
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iding on the unstoppable wave of their own momentum come superhero movies galore, lined up all the way to a Green Lantern reboot and a Cyborg movie in 2020. To put that into perspective, freshmen who are 18 years old right now will be 24 at that point – two years out of college. Of the 30 movies on the full lineup of releases from Sony, Fox, WB, and Marvel, three of them feature female superheroes: Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, and a Spider-Man spinoff featuring an ensemble of female superheroes. If you’ve done your math correctly, that means, yes, 10 percent of the upcoming superhero movies for the next six years will be about women. Since the failure of other female superhero movies like "Catwoman" and "Elektra," producers have been frustratingly reluctant to take a chance on a female lead again, according to an article from Forbes. But with the rise and success of youngadult movies starring empowering heroines like "The Hunger Games'"Katniss and "Divergent"'s Tris, it seems they’re finally ready to break out of the white male superhero formula and try again. -Andrea Lin
solve all the issues leading to wrongful convictions, they can help make the sharing of evidence more transparent. Gell’s case was re-examined because prosecutors withheld key evidence. Several sightings of Jenkins after the alleged day he died were not brought forward during the trial. New forensic evidence showed that Jenkins’ date of death was actually between April 8 and April 10, not April 3, the prviously estimated date. This proved Gell was innocent because he was out of town on April 8 and April 10. Gell is one of many exonerates who has spent a good portion of his life on death row. He was exonerated February 18, 2006. “It dawned on me that what I had lost is gone,” Gell was quoted as saying in “Life After Death Row," a book by Saundra Westervelt and Laura Saini is a sophomore studying journalism, law and society.
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