Assignment:
Choose a high-profile, contemporary American criminal case (within the past 25 years) to review. Create a 5-7 page paper (1250-1750 words), prepare a case write-up that incorporates all aspects of the criminal justice system-from police investigation, to arrest, evidence, court proceedings, and eventually sentencing.
Describe the nature of the case, citing it in appropriate legal format (i.e., Miranda v. Arizona, 1966). Explain the investigation. What legal foundations and constitutional laws and amendments were present? What type of defense, if any, was used? Describe the court proceedings; pre-trial hearings, indictments, the trial, defense and prosecution arguments, and court outcome-acquittal, guilty, not guilty, NGRI, GBMI, etc... Finally, describe the correctional phase, if applicable: jail, prison, probation, parole, etc...
Summarize the case and offer your analysis of the proceedings. What are your thoughts about the investigation, evidence, court proceedings, and verdict? Make sure you support your conclusions with cited and referenced materials.
You do not just report the case. You use the case to explain the steps each part of the CJ system takes to move a case along. Explain what each part of the CJ system does and the legal burdens (probable cause, burden of proof, reasonable doubt, what and appeal is. Do not forget to explain the role of corrections. Use the case facts to explain to the reader the steps after you tell the reader what the steps are and the legal burdens. Then take the part of the case you choose to illustrate the concepts.
The high profile case is below.
The Grim Sleeper Serial Killer Case
For well over twenty years, the police department in Los Angeles worked tirelessly to solve a series of eleven murders that took place between 1985 and 2007. These deaths were connected to the same suspect by ballistic evidence and DNA (Myers, Timken, Piucci, Sims, Greenwald, Weigand, & Buoncristiani, 2011). Because the killer suspect took an apparent 14-year long hiatus between 1988 and 2002, he was dubbed by the media as "Grim Sleeper." The name of the serial killer is Lonnie David Franklin Jr. Franklin was a mechanic employed by the city of Los Angeles and was arrested in 2010 in relation to the many murders.
In a long and protracted criminal proceeding, Franklin was later found guilty in May of 2016 on all the ten counts of murder and one case of attempted murder, and was sentenced to death. Despite being sentenced only for ten murders, police have indicated that it is possible that he murdered as many as twenty five women (Gloudemans, & Shamaprasad, 2015). After he shot Jackson 3 times in the chest, he proceeded to use the same weapon to kill nine other women, strangling and assaulting more, while he kept the photos of his victims as trophies in his house.
The law enforcement officials did not find an exact match between DNA found at the crime scene and any other profiles in the DNA profile base in California (Dolan, Rubin, & Landsberg, 2010). As a result, the police officers searched the DNA database for stored profiles that showed sufficient similarity to allow them to infer a familial connection or relationship.
The match resulted into similar DNA belong to the son of the suspect, called Christopher, who had several convictions of felony weapon chargers (Dolan, Rubin, & Landsberg, 2010). Franklin's case is one that received a lot of media attention and public opinion because most of the victims of the murder spree were women who were either prostitutes or drug addicts. It seemed as if the convict hated prostituted and therefore was killing them as a way of showing his hatred.