Terrill Swift

Hearing Terrill Swift speak today was absolutely amazing. His story and what he has gone through in his life is absolutely terrible. No person should have to spend 17 years of their life, not to mention some of their best years in their life, in jail for a crime they did not commit. One of the things he talked about was the amount of people who are wrongly convicted and have to serve jail time. I don’t recall the numbers that he was giving out but it just shows that many people around the country are being convicted of crime they didn’t do. When talking about the death penalty in Illinois, we learned that one of the reasons there is no death penalty in Illinois is because of wrongly convicted people. It is crazy that people spend years in jail for things that they didn’t do but it is terrible that people die for crimes that they didn’t commit. It just goes to show this terrible fault in the justice system. Because of the amount of innocent people being convicted, it is one of the reasons that I am against the death penalty.

I guess one of the reasons I was so interested in hearing Terrill speak is because Prison Break is one of my favorite TV shows. In the show, a man is set up and framed for a murder that he did not commit. His brother purposely goes to jail and has a plot. On the outside, the man framed for murder has lawyers fighting and working to get him out of prison before he is given the death penalty. In Prison Break, they talk about clemency, falsely convicted felons, and they try to get this guy on death row out of jail. This really connects to Terrill story about how he had lawyers fighting for him and how he never gave up fighting for his freedom. Even though Prison Break is just a TV show, it demonstrates the seriousness of innocent people being convicted. It was very inspirational to hear Terrill speak and here how he never gave up. His mind was set on being free and he did everything in his power to do that. Another lesson I got out of hearing him talk was always make sure you know what you are signing and don’t always trust what people say. Just one mistake like that can lead you to jail for a long time. Terrill really got me interested in finding out about more falsely convicted people and hearing more stories about people who have served time in jail for no reason.