innocence project

Lucy Delibrado

Mrs. Irving

American literature

21 April 2016

The Innocence Project

Larry Youngblood was a middle-aged black man with a disfigured eye that most people don’t acquire. He became a suspect of a case on child molestation, sexual assault, and kidnapping. A 10 year old boy was abducted from a carnival in Pima County, Arizona, in October of 1983. The victim was molested and sodomized repeatedly for more than one hour by an age middle aged man with the same features as Larry Young. He was tried but later on he was proven innocent by the Innocence Project. He died in 2007 before receiving any compensation for his conviction. What brought Larry to this incarnation was the description of the assailant that the victim gave. The police matched them with the features of Larry. However, there were no serological test done before his trial. Even though, the staff from the hospital collected semen samples and the clothes of the victim from when the assault occurred. Believing that it was actually him, he was sentenced for 10 years and 6 months in prison. This relates to the crucible because a lot of innocent people would get accused of being witches and hung based on “eye witnesses”. Furthermore, shows how our system has yet to change for our people. That’s why the Innocence Project has tried change these problems our country have had since the beginning of time.

The connection between the crucible and Larry Youngblood’s case shows how immoral our society has been and still is till this day. The Innocence Project has been trying to exonerate the wrongly convicted people and prevent future injustice such as the case of Larry Youngblood.

[Ethos] The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 and is a non-profit legal organization that is committed to exonerating wrongly convicted people through the use of DNA tests and have had years of experience. “The Innocence Project acting as a consult, the police department tested the degraded evidence using new, sophisticated DNA technology: those results exonerated Larry and he was released from prison in August 2000. The innocence project proving Larry was actually innocent displays their actions and reliability for wrongly convicted people. In the contrary the crucible didn’t have this type of program back in the day. So they relied on “witnesses” which wasn’t very accurate.

[Pathos] They say that the best thing to give someone is your time, because it’s something you can’t ever have back. However, what if time was taken away from you? You’re stripped from your life. You don’t get to live and experience because you’re stuck behind bars for a crime in which you did not commit. You don’t get to spend time with your family. Grow old with your spouse or watch your children grow. All because of a mistake that the system has caused. “Sadly, Youngblood died in 2007, without receiving any compensation for his wrongful conviction.”. He wasted his valuable time for another man’s crime. The system can only apologize to his family because they can’t change their mistake. In relation, to the crucible when Procter got hung along with other innocent people for accusations. Later on, they started to see their error in believing what people said with no evidence. However, it was too late for that.

[Logos] In Larry Youngblood’s case since there were no serological test the court of appeals set aside his conviction due to the destruction of potentially exculpatory evidence because it violated his rights. However, in 1993 he returned to prison when the Arizona Supreme Court reinstated his conviction. Since he was convicted base on appearances the Innocence project used a lot of new sophisticated DNA technology. They got a match with a man named Walter Cruise who had the same physical features as Larry. However he was already serving time in Texas for other charges. He was only sentenced for 24 years in prison for molesting and raping a young boy.

In conclusion, we have to change the way the system is run so mistakes like Larry’s and many more innocent people don’t occur. We have one life we have to cherish it as much as we can. We have to stand together and be better than our past generation to better our society and world. The bigger picture is to make the world a safer better place for our future children, grandchildren, etc. to protect them from people like Walter Cruise. The innocence project is one out of many programs who are doing someone good for this world and we have to join them.