Unit IV Case Study  Read the following Case Study and answer the questions below. Your paper should be at least two pages in length and follow APA guidelines, to include a title and reference page. The title and reference page do not count towards the minimum page requirement. Properly cite the textbook and all other references utilized to support your position.  Case Study Scenario:  Shortly after a fire had killed her handicapped child, a mother was asked to come to police headquarters to talk with a detective. The mother knew that her two older children had been questioned at school but had no idea what the detectives wanted with her. She was questioned for several hours at the police department. After questioning, she was arrested and charged with murder of her child, charged with deliberately starting a fire by throwing a blanket over a space heater next to the child’s crib.  Later in the investigation, the detective questioned the father. During the questioning, the detective claimed he also had a special needs child and that he and his wife often thought of hurting their child and even thought and said to one another that the child would be better off dead. The detective claimed the father repeatedly stated that “a special needs child needs to be with God and suffer no longer.”   

 CRJ 4001, Procedures in the Justice System 3 The interrogator asked the mother if she had these kinds of thoughts as well. He asked variations of this question until the mother eventually acknowledged that it was possible that she may have thought about it.  Eventually, during the interrogation, the detective also threatened to charge the two older children with murder, telling the mother that they were suspects if she was not the one who started the fire. At this point, she dissociated and responded to this threat with high anxiety, confusion, and stress. The detective falsely told the mother that they had conclusive evidence that the fire started from the space heater, although no tests had been done at that point in the investigation. He had also falsely told her during the beginning of the interrogation that there was no intention to charge her.  The evaluation of the mother indicated that she was most likely dissociating at times during the investigation. She never admitted to purposefully choosing to throw the blanket on the space heater, but only that it might have happened inadvertently without her knowledge. She never admitted to wanting the child dead but only to the possibility that part of her may have wanted that to happen.  1. Was this interrogation within the legal ramifications regarding case law? Cite case law that deals with detectives sympathizing, using deceit, or minimizing the moral seriousness of the offense.  2. Should any of the mother’s confession be admitted into court as evidence? Why, or why not? 3. Were any of the mother’s rights violated? Explain your response. 4. What are your concluding thoughts on this case scenario?   Information about accessing the Blackboard Grading Rubric for this assignment is provided below.

Unit Assignments

Unit III Presentation Outline

Research Report Part 1: Presentation Outline and Topic

Criminal Evidence and the strategies and techniques utilized by criminals to commit crimes are constantly changing. Therefore, the strategies and procedures used to collect and present criminal evidence must also continue to evolve. Your task is to develop a presentation report that explores the latest strategies, advancements, and innovations in the area of criminal evidence. You will explore this topic from the perspective of a criminal justice agent who works in the field of criminal justice.

The presentation report consists of two parts:

Part 1 – Includes your topic identification and development of your project outline

Part 2 – Consists of PowerPoint presentation of your report and will be accomplished in Unit V

Part 1A: Topic

You will need to identify a topic related to one of the four general types of criminal evidence:

1. witness testimony,

2. real or physical evidence,

3. documents or writings, or

4. demonstrative evidence.

You will need to provide a brief summary discussing what aspects of the topic you will explore and why that topic is relevant to strategies, advancements, and innovations in criminal evidence. In addition, you will need to ensure that scholarly and empirical information about strategies, advancements, and innovations in criminal evidence can be obtained. It is possible to talk about a topic in which advancements and innovations are needed. However, you will also need to be prepared to search extensively for information about current strategies and to develop suggestions for advancement and innovation with little to no assistance from scholarly and empirical sources. Part 1A will need to be a minimum of one double-spaced typed page.

Part 1B: Outline

Using the topic you identified in Part 1A, you are required to develop a topic outline with at least two tiers. Tier 1 of the outline will need to include the following components:

 Selected topic name

 Definition of key terms

 History

 Current strategies

 Current and/or pending advancements and/or innovations

 Recommended advancements and/or innovations

 Justification for recommendations

 Plausibility and logistics of the implementation of recommendations

 Anticipated impact of the implementation of recommendations in regards to the collection and utilization of criminal evidence in the criminal justice system

o At a minimum, discussions must address constitutional amendments, exclusions of admissible and inadmissible evidence, and variations in the collection of criminal evidence due to crime location.

 References

Tier 2 of the outline will need to contain information that addresses the title of Tier 1 in relation to your specific topic. You can present the information in the form of sentences or short phrases. Regardless of the format you use for providing your information in Tier 2, make sure that each item in the outline does not need further explanation.

At least 10 sources must be cited in APA format under the references heading of your outline. All sources must be scholarly, and a minimum of five citations must reference peer-reviewed sources (e.g., academic journals). Part 1B needs to be a minimum of two double-spaced typed pages. Both the topic and outline (Parts 1A and 1B) should be submitted as one document.

You can find resources on how to research a topic and prepare an outline in the Waldorf Online Library.

 For the Waldorf Online library, click here to access the tutorial, How to do Research: Introduction.

 For a step-by-step approach to formatting and citing, click here to access the Waldorf University Citation Guide.