Political and Technological Development - Body Worn Cameras - Assignment Example

For many years, writers, mostly lawyers, journalists, and human rights groups have discussed many arrests, convictions, and killings of civilians who are innocent civilians and described the causes of these actions and consequences. Nevertheless, only recently, after decades of neglect, have a critical number of researchers and social scientists emerged to investigate the problem (Leo 2005). This heightened interest in the issue is unquestionably correlated to political and technological developments.

With the advent of Body Worn Cameras and video use in prosecutions and appeals, many convicts and suspects have been acquitted in the last few decades after many years of wrongful arrests and imprisonment, sometimes sentenced to death (Scheck et al. 2000). In the last decades of the twentieth century, there had been many magazine articles, newspaper stories, and television documentaries speaking about the wrongful arrests and conviction of innocent persons than ever before. Consequently, there have been ongoing concerns in the political arena that the wrongful arrest and imprisonment of innocent people are real. For example, in America, there have been numerous such cases – a situation that has existed since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries leading newspaper documenters, book writers, magazine articles, and television documenters to highly focus on the issue.

There has been much documentation about the miscarriages of justice in the countries such as the United States starting with Edwin Borchard’s work titled Convicting the Innocent (1932). Borchard highly challenged the conventional wisdom which stated that there are no innocent people who are imprisoned in United States prisons by detailing a total of sixty-five cases in which innocent people were wrongfully arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. Borchard avoided using the research question, “whether innocent people are wrongfully arrested and imprisoned to “why and what can be done about the issue.” Borchard documented a number of causes of wrongful arrests and convictions including perjured testimony, eyewitness misidentification, and prosecutorial and police wrongdoing as well as policy solutions to the problem. Years later, several solutions have been devised and some implemented to eliminate the problem of wrongful arrests and convictions.