Blind Injustice is a very popular honors seminar among current UHP students, after being urged by a lot of my friends to take it I decided to enroll for it during the spring 2022 semester. I can confidently say that, this was one of the most impactful and eye opening classes I have taken as an undergraduate student so far. The seminar, as the name suggests, is based around wrongful convictions; it aims to highlight the systemic flaws in the criminal justice system that lead to wrongful convictions, as well as the psychological, political and social underpinnings that create and perpetuate these flaws. The seminar was very well paced and distributed throughout the semester, it was broken down into classes, guest speakers and a final field trip to the Ohio supreme court in Columbus, Ohio. We had speakers from various different backgrounds present at the seminar, giving us an overview of the problem from different and often contrasting viewpoints. I really liked that particular aspect of this class, being introduced to this diverse train of thoughts helped me put into context a lot of the classroom concepts that were being taught. Interacting with people that were wrongfully convicted and spent decades in prison, including time on death row, for crimes they did not commit was an eye opening experience for me.
Our class with Ohio supreme court justice Mike Donnelly. Photo credits : Joe Fuqua
My final project was on the Atlanta child murders, I had to gather data on how the alleged killer was convicted and if the process of that conviction was legitimate. I read about the case, listened to podcasts and watched videos to come up with a timeline and supporting story. During my preparation for the presentation, I learnt a lot about the history of the US criminal justice system and its struggles with racial tensions. This seminar has helped me learn a lot about the US criminal justice system, it has highlighted the need for constant innovation and change in such systems of massive scales. Unfortunately, the bigger the system the more inertia it has against change and we as a society need to work towards dismissing this notion. I would highly recommend this seminar to students who are interested in social change and law.