Michael Mongin

English 1201
Professor Stalbird
February 6th 2017

Research Proposal

Thinking through the many themes and stories presented in Just Mercy, I have found

myself wondering more and more about the statistics and trends on race and charges of those

who are able to have their death row or life imprisonment without parole sentences overturned. I

grew up in a middle class rural community, in a neighborhood on the lower end of the income

scale for the area and a lot of my best friends were African Americans that I attended school

with. I always wondered why a lot of their fathers were not around. Later in life I found out that

a lot of them were incarcerated and it broke my heart. I am specifically interested in this topic

because I would like to see the trends surrounding what these people are being charged for, who

these people are, their race, economic status, level of education, and more.

I know that our justice system in the United States is flawed and I believe the byproduct

of our inability to fix it is the mass incarceration of certain people groups namely African

American men. I think that by identifying certain trends within the worst of all sentencing one

can help the process of revitalization of the people effected and advocate for those attempting to

fix the system. I feel that these issues can only be resolved if people like myself; a straight, white

working class, protestant, male, who make up the majority of the population in the U.S., decide

to take a closer look at these issues and agree that they need fixed. I feel like I have a

responsibility to speak out against the racial injustices being done by our government.

I need a lot of data. I need to know approximately how many sentences have been

overridden in the last few years and of those sentences, the racial groups associated and crimes
that they were charged with. Two research questions I would like to answer are; What are the

racial percentages of those whose death and life imprisonments sentences have been overturned?

Within those racial groups, what crimes were they falsely accused of committing and is there a

geographical trend prevailing from that data? I hope to learn about trends within this data.

Whether its racially, geographically, or economically driven. I also understand that I will have a

limited amount of definitive evidence on racial bias because I will be looking at overturned cases

which require more expensive legal assistance which is statistically less likely to happen with

racial minority groups.