Sam Sheppard

surface-to-air missile Sheppard tallys On July 4, 1954, the wife of a handsome young doctor, Sam Sheppard, was viciously murdered in the sleeping room of their home in Bay Village, Ohio, on the shore of Lake Erie. Sheppard denied any involvement in the murder and described his own difference of opinion with the killer he described as bushy-haired. Starting on the day of the murder, the media began to attack Sheppard on any occasion they could. Stories were obtained in unethical, and nearly unlawful ways. still though they were permitted to do so by the courts, going into Sheppards house and looking through his belongings was not the most ethical practice.Also, though the courts also allowed them to get a line the testimony of Sheppard round his wifes death, they really shouldnt have agreed. Stories were written in an unscrupulous manner. The trial before the trial was a meeting between the coroner, Samuel Gerber, and Sheppard, in which Gerber laid-off questions at Sheppard in front of the entire community without Sheppards lawyer present. The media was allowed to sit in on this hearing and wrote stories about Sheppard being unfairly abandoned too much leeway as a murder suspect (law2).Finally, the amount of stories written about the trial and murder was higher than had been printed in Cleveland about a single murder. Cleveland newswritten document printed stories almost every single day for the duration of the situation. Most of these were speculation only, however, or editorials that were run on the front page and believed to be actual articles. Because of the way these stories were run, the jury and most of Cleveland believed that Sheppard was, in fact, guilty (384 U. S. 333, 363). The stories written through the duration of the murder case were one of the main things that were detrimental to Sheppards case.The jurys view of Sheppard was adversely affected by the news stories such as the most famous one of all Somebody Is acquire Away With Murder. They printed biased stories that the jury members were allowed to read, which gave them a negative view of Sheppard even before he testified. News articles run by local papers also distorted the evidence in the case. An important piece of information that was published dealt with the blood evidence. Dr. Mohammed Tahir, a renowned forensic scientist in Indianapolis, will discriminate deoxyribonucleic acid from the samples with a blood stain recovered from a closet door of the Sheppard edroom. Tahir will use a process known as DNA amplification, often used to study decomposed samples. Sir Alec Jeffreys, the British forensic scientist who invented DNA fingerprinting in the mid-1980s, describes the procedure as taking a small amount of secular and making copies and recopies in a test tube until youve got enough to type. Out of four blood samples tested, all have matched Eberlings. It gets very complicated scientifically, but essentially we have a match on the porch of Eberling, whi ch cuts down to 0. 5 percent, or even less, that it could be anybody else, he said (Affleck, A3).One of the detectives investigating the case was quoted by a newspaper stating that scientific tests at the Sheppard home have definitely established that the killer washed off a trail of blood from the murder bedroom to the downstairs section. This led the public to believe that Sheppard was lying during his testimony, and believe it, they did. However, over ten years later, the Supreme Court ruled that Sheppards trial had been unfair due to the Fourteenth Amendment that everyone shall have the right to a fair trial with an impartial jury.This, of course, was something that Sheppard had not gotten, due to the media. The court saw that, and believed it was true. So, because of the medias regularise over the jury before and during the trial, Sheppard was released from prison. Sam Sheppard was attacked by the medias unethical practices so much during his trial that journalism had set new boundaries to limit the causality of the press following the final verdict. Because of the way that the media went about getting stories for their papers and the way stories were written, Sheppard was released from prison.Journalism then set up new boundaries to assure that every psyche accused of a crime got a fair and just trial. Even though he set precedent for new practices that the media still follows, it is a disgrace that it took something as horrific as his wifes murder to allow the media to see just how much power they had over justice. Work cited Affleck, John. Doctors Exhume Sam Sheppards Body as Son Seeks to Clear Fathers Name. Associated Press. 18 September 1997 A3. . Sheppard v. Maxwell, 384 U. S. 333 (United States Supreme Court 1966). http//law2. umkc. edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/sheppard/Sheppard. htm