Unfair Trials

A trial in our history that could be considered unfair was the 1999 execution of Troy Farris in Texas. Farris was accused of shooting a sheriff's deputy near Fort Worth in 1984. The man admitted to being present during the drug deal but denied shooting the officer. Lawyers argued that the trial was unfair on a number of grounds including the claim that the court excluded a juror who openly expressed that he was against the death penalty (suspiiiiicious!). Farris was also denied a new trial by the US Supreme Court in 1990. Though in 1994 a similar case in which a juror who was also opposed to the death penalty was excluded the case was reversed. The court later admitted that they had been wrong in their sentencing of Troy Farris and in turn over ruled their prior ruling. However this had no effect on Farris's actual case because his lawyers were appealing at the federal level rather than the state level. In 1995 the Texas Legislator established severe restrictions on the rights of those on death row to launch new state level appeals. However the court refused to block Farris's execution and claimed that he did not fit into these new guide lines. Farris was executed and his lawyer Miss Maurie Levin claimed that it was both "infuriating and terrifying" and that she had never heard of a case where the Court had admitted to an error and yet refused to grant a new trial to the defendant. The court however claims that the were in the right based on the testimony of Farris's brother-in-law, Jimmy Daniels, who claimed that Farris had confessed the killing to him in private.
This case is similar to the Salem Witch Trials as depicted in "The Crucible" in that someone was unfairly executed. Hundreds of people were both convicted and hanged during the Salem Witch trials and there was no real proof that any of the men or women being accused had ever performed any type of magic at all. They are also similar cases in that the court stuck to their sentences based solely on the testimony of one person. For example, the court in Texas "stuck to their guns" based on the testimony of Jimmy Daniels who had no proof other than his word that his brother-in-law killed the sheriff's deputy. An example from "The Crucible" is that Rebecca Nurse was accused of being a witch and I believe sentenced to death at the end of the play based on the fact that all her children had survived into adulthood while all but one of Mrs. Putnam's babies had died. There was absolutely no proof to convict Rebecca and yet she died anyway just as Farris was executed based on something that he supposedly confessed to in confidence with no one else around to back up the claim.