Posters for Change

POSTERS FOR CHANGE JULIA KLINE VISC 204 ANDERSON

Table of Contents

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ROUND 1: RESEARCH

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ROUND 2: THE PITCH

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ROUND 3: POSTER SKETCHES

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ROUND 4: POSTER MOCKUPS

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ROUND 5: COMPOSITIONS

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ROUND 6: MY ARTICLE

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ROUND 7: EDITORIAL SKETCHES

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ROUND 8: EDITORIAL MOCKUPS

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ROUND 9: FINAL DELIVERABLES

ROUND 1: RESEARCH

To start the project, we researched organiztions or social issues that were interesting or important to us.

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Innocence Project Research

We exonerate the innocent through DNA testing and reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice.

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Jailhouse Informants

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Inadequate Defense

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Misused Forensic Science

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Access to Post-Conviction DNA Testing

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False Confessions

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Eye Witness Misidentification

Netflix Documentary- The Central Park Five Robert DuBoise was exonerated from all charges in the 1983 rape and murder of a young woman in Tampa, Florida. DuBoise was released from prison on Aug. 27 after new DNA testing on evidence from the victim’s rape kit that was thought to have been destroyed, excluded him as the assailant and identified another individual.

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The Truth about Cancer Research

Issue: FDA only approves chemotherapy, surgery, and ra-

more money to be made treating patients than curing

diation as cancer treatments. They don’t allow mainstream

them. The cancer industry generates well over $100

healthcare to accept or promote natural alternatives.

billion each year.

Globally, about 1 in 6 deaths are attributed to cancer,

“At TTAC, we’ve shared testimony from hundreds of doc-

and more than a third of all humans will develop cancer in

tors, researchers, and patients about how a holistic cancer

their lifetime. Unfortunately, the conventional cancer treat-

treatment is the best way to treat the entire body – instead

ments may be more likely to kill you than the cancer itself.

of just the symptoms. Our bodies are unique, and finding

In fact, chemotherapycan actually cause new cancers!

the right cancer treatment for you is essential.”

Because the medical industrial complex has such an im-

This is important to me because I lost my mom this past

mense influence over Western medicine, cancer patients

spring to cholangiocarcinoma liver cancer. Doctors told

are often given little choice when it comes to treatment.

her she wasn’t allowed to get surgery without going

Doctors will tell you how long you have to live, and insist

through chemotherapy due to FDA regulations. But in her

that chemo, radiation, and surgery are your only chance.

case, chemotherapy doesn’t fight against her cancer, so

But what these doctors don’t tell you is that there are a

it would’ve just been weakening her and killing her good

number of ways to treat and beat cancer naturally! Drug

cells.

manufacturers will promote their new cancer treatment as a miracle cure, but these drugs are expensive and won’t fix the underlying cause of the disease.

In fact, some of the most promising cancer treatments have been outlawed in the United States! That’s because there’s

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ROUND 2: THE PITCH

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My original pitch idea was to do the Innocence Project narrowed down to “Free Albert Wilson.” But then I ran into some trouble. I didn’t like where everything as going during the mockups stage, so I decided to refine my organization to something else.

What is “Free Albert Wilson?”

Albert Wilson’s life forever changed one night in September 2016. Albert, a college student who was passionate about impacting the world and reshaping the narrative of Black identity through journalism, was falsely accused of raping a young woman he met at a bar. The interaction between them lasted only 15 minutes, but it changed Albert’s life forever.

Albert was convicted despite no physical evidence of sexual intercourse, an impossible timeline, and a biased jury. An innocent young man was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

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THE NEW & IMPROVED PITCH

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I decided to redevelop my idea and organization because I wasn’t liking my first mockups which you will see in my process.

I didn’t like how specific it was and for me personally it felt hard to just single in on Albert Wilson.

What is “The Equal Justice Innitiative?”

The Equal Justice Initiative is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rights for the most vulnerable people in American society. EJI challenges wrongful convictions and exposes the unjust incarceration of innocent people that undermines the reliability of even the most serious cases.

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What is the issue?

More than half of wrongful convictions can be traced to witnesses who lied in court or made false accusations.4 In 2018, a record number of exonerations involved misconduct by government officials.5 Other leading causes of wrongful convictions include mistaken eyewitness identifications, false or misleading forensic science, and jailhouse informants.

Faulty forensics also lead to wrongful convictions. Many forensic techniques aren’t scientifically validated. These “junk science” techniques include: • • • •

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Hair microscopy Bite mark comparisons Firearm tool mark analysis Shoe print comparisons

The Goal: Criminal Justice Reform

The United States incarcerates its citizens more than any other country. Mass incarceration disproportionately impacts the poor and people of color and does not make us safer. EJI is working to end our misguided reliance on over-incarceration.

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Who is the target audience?

They are trying to target the system responsible for the injustice brought to the exoneeres. Their audience ranges from family’s of victims and the victims who have been wrongfully imprisoned, to anyone who is willing to help donate or shed light to the issue. It also can be a people with a deep passion for justice and reforming the legal system.

For my poster, the audience would be students around the KU campus who may be interested in the subject or be moved by it.

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What is the message?

The message I want to get across is how corrupt the legal system can be and how it can take innocent people’s lives and ruin them.

I also want to show the people wronged by case law and how they knew they were innocent, but couldn’t do anything about it. I would want to evoke empathy or rage from my poster and hope people respond to the issue.

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Who is the Audience Persona?

A specific person I would like to target this to is someone exactly like Albert Wilson who was wrongfully convicted, a male his race and his age. Someone who goes to KU, on their way to getting a degree. Someone who goes to all the same places on Mass Street, tailgates on gamedays, and walks down Jayhawk Boulevard every day. The reason for this is to show that it could be them instead that is in that situation. A normal person on campus who had a path in life and wasn’t able to take it.

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ROUND 3: POSTER SKETCHES

I started off first by making a mind map of the ideas and concepts I wanted to think about while coming up with possible layouts for the poster. Then I sketched out several image and type based posters.

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Image Based

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Type Based

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ROUND 4: POSTER MOCKUPS

I picked five of my sketches and put them into the computer. I used different media such as charcoal, newspaper, and different images and played around with them. After doing the mockups for image, I decided to choose a different direction.

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Image Based

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Type Based

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ROUND 5: COMPOSITIONS

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I decided to redevelop my idea and organization because I wasn’t liking my first mockups which you will see in my process.

I didn’t like how specific it was and for me personally it felt hard to just single in on Albert Wilson. I decided to go just stick with End Wrongful Conviction and Free the Innocent insteand of Free Albert Wilson.

Image Based (Albert Wilson)

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Image Based

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Type Based

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ROUND 6: MY ARTICLE

I found my article from the New York Times on the causes of wrongful conviction. The purpose of finding an article is to create an editorial art piece that goes along with it.

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“A Leading Cause for Wrongful Convictions: Experts Overstating Forensic Results”

BY HEATHER MURPHY

More than 150 men and women in American prisons were exonerated in 2018, according to a recent report by a registry that tracks wrongful convictions. Combined, these individuals spent more than 1,600 years in prison, a record for the database, which has data back to 1989.

The leading culprit in convicting innocent people was official misconduct, according to the report by the National Registry of Exonerations. Nearly one third of these cases involved a police corruption scheme in Chicago through which a police officer framed individuals on drug charges.

Another prominent factor in wrongful convictions across the country was misleading forensic evidence. A close look at these cases reveals how experts in fields like hair analysis, bite marks and DNA analysis have used

Criminology, Law and Society at UC -Irvine.

That includes offering up invented odds like “one in a million” or “1 in 129,600,” the registry says.

“A lot of the problem with forensic testimony is that the diagnosticity is overstated,” said Barbara O’Brien, a professor at the Michigan State University College of Law and author of the report. A hair sample at the crime scene that resembles a suspect’s hair “gets dressed up with this scientific certainty that isn’t justified,” she said.

Here are three examples from the study’s case files.

The tool: microscopic hair comparison In 2013, the F.B.I. reported that testimony asserting that microscopic hair comparison could produce a “match” between two hairs was scientifically invalid.

Four years later, a man named Glenn Payne was

In court, a lab analyst testified that the hair on the butcher paper had a 1 in 2,700 chance of matching someone other than the victim, and the hair on the tablecloth had a 1 in 48 chance of belonging to someone other than Mr. Payne. He then multiplied these figures together to get a “1 in 129,600” chance of anything other than a random occurrence.

In 2017, lawyers who were reinvestigating the case reached out to the analyst. He acknowledged that the statistical evidence was invalid. He said he should have indicated “that the hair sample found on the defendant could have come from the victim, and the hair sample found on the tablecloth used to cover the victim could have come from the defendant.”

A new medical report also suggested that the charges were a product of a misunderstanding. The little girl

This pseudoscience cost Steven Chaney decades of his life. In 1987, Mr. Chaney was charged with murdering a couple who sold him drugs.

At trial, a medical consultant testified that he’d compared a wax model of Mr. Chaney’s mouth to a mark on the male victim’s arm. Mr. Chaney’s upper and lower arches “matched” the bite, he said, adding that “only one in a million” people could have made that impression.

In 2018, an appeals judge concluded that “scientific knowledge underlying the field of bite mark comparisons has evolved” since Chaney’s trial “in a way that contradicts the scientific evidence relied on by the State at trial.”

Though this was an extreme example, Mr. Cole said, exaggerated odds are common. “Often they are just

in court.”

The tool: touch DNA amplification DNA evidence analysis continues to be far more scientifically respected than the older methods of matching hair samples and bite marks, but the case of Mayer Herskovic is a reminder of how testimony about genetic odds can be misleading in court.

In 2013, as a group of men was attacking a victim, an assailant grabbed the victim’s shoe and flung it onto a nearby roof. The genetic sample collected from the shoe was too small to be useful.

But the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in New York had developed software that it claimed could amplify samples. At trial, an expert testified that the probability that the shoe sample contained Mr. Herskovic’s DNA was 133 times greater than the likelihood that it came from an

exaggerated statistical claims to bolster unscientific assertions.

Once experts meet the qualifications to take the stand in a courtroom, there are few limits on the words that come out of their mouths.

“An expert can say whatever they want,” said Simon Cole, the director of the registry and a professor of

still grappling with the consequences of three sets of misleading odds. In 1990, when he was 28, he was charged with sexually abusing his 2-year-old neighbor. Upon arrest, Mr. Payne was asked to disrobe.

A hair was left behind on a sheet of butcher paper.

Investigators located a second hair on a tablecloth draped over the girl.

wasn’t suffering from abuse, it concluded: She had a strep infection.

The tool: bite marks matching Ms. O’Brien said bite mark analysis was even more bogus than hair comparisons. Often you can’t even tell if a wound is a bite mark, she said. “It doesn’t even get past the barest suggestion of scientific reality.”

saying this person is the source of the bite mark or it’s practically impossible that they are not the source of the bite mark,” he said.

He remains concerned that, even though this type of analysis has been widely disavowed by forensic scientists, “not one court in the entire United States has said that bite mark evidence shouldn’t be admissible

unknown person.

He was convicted. Two years later, a higher court concluded that the expert witness had oversold this newfangled technique. Mr. Herskovic was exonerated. And the medical examiner’s office abandoned the amplification tool.

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ROUND 7: EDITORIAL SKETCHES

For the editorial sketches, I decided to focus on the criminal evidence that leads to wrongful conviction. My article mentioned hair samples, DNA matches, bite marks, and fingerprints that can be misleading. I first started out by making a mind map of ideas from my article along with evidence and ideas surrounding the topic and then I came up with sketches based off of these ideas.

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ROUND 8: EDITORIAL MOCKUPS

We took five of the editorial skethes frm last round and put those into the computer. I decided to create a variation of my favorite one which is why there are six.

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ROUND 9: FINAL DELIVERABLES

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For the final deliverables of the project, we were to have two posters: a typographic and image based that directly reflects the ideasof our issue and organization as a whole. We also created an editorial art piece that correlates to our article as well as our organization.

Image Based Poster

For my image based poster, I showed the breaking of the hand cuffs with arrows, to represent breaking the continuous cycle of wrongful conviction and mass incarcertion. I used red for the cuffs to symbolize that they are bad and not needed. I felt that navy and an off-white/yellow fit the aesthetic of criminal justice reform in the United States.

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Type Based Poster

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My typographic poster was originally created as an image poster, but then I realized I had manipulated the text to convey my message. I used a gavel to smash down on the word innocent with an expressional “bang” symbol to show dramatic movement. I used an off-white to represent “Innocent” and warped the text to seem like the gavel wash smashing the innocent. This conveys that wrongful conviction hurts the innocent but it also shows that the gavel should go down as the innocent verdict. I used the gavel imagery to show that the there needs to be criminal justice reforms in the courts.

Editorial Art

For my editorial art piece that reflects my article, I decided to illustrate a scientific “expert” tampering with DNA evidence.To do this, I showed one of these “experts” knitting a DNA strand. I made plastic medical gloves on the hands and used a scalpel medical tool as the knitting rods. It shows barbed wire on the yarn to show how when they tamper with the evidence, they cause a lot of wrongful conviction and send people who are innocent to jail. I used texture to capture the yarn material and created a plastic highlight on the gloves. I illustrated all of it in Illustrator using vectors. It was interesting to create imagery that reflected a body of text instead of using type to tell the message.

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