Criminal Law and the Death Penalty -- A-Term 2022

  Criminal Law and Death Penalty Day 6  By: Owen and Leila  To start off the day, we began by having some time to finish up blogs from last week. We then transitioned into teaming up for our small group project for this week, which has to do with various topics surrounding the death penalty. My group chose to research the ethics of the death penalty. More specifically, is it humane? Should it be allowed based on human rights? Should it be allowed to take away someone’s personhood? We had around twenty minutes to get started on the project before listening to our guest speaker for the day, Jay Jenkins, who works for the Texas Center for Justice and Equity. Mr. Jenkins spoke to us about TCJE’s mission, what he works on at TCJE, and the unfairness of a lot of criminal cases. He also spoke to us about current issues concerning bail bonds. After this, we had another hour to work on the group project before taking a break for lunch.  In this image, students are listening t...

Criminal Law and Death Penalty Day 5  By: Camila, Frederika, and Shyla  Criminal Law and Death Penalty Day 5  By: Camila, Frederika, and Shyla  On day 5 of criminal law and death penalty we started off with catching up on blogs and other assignments. Once we finished catching up on blogs we listened to episode 5 of “In the Dark '' which was about Odell Hallmon and his role in the Curtis Flowers case.  Once we finished listening to the podcast we walked to the Cobos Law Firm where we presented on different issues in the criminal law system. Dr. Cobos brought some snacks for us to enjoy while each group presented. The first group made a poster board to share their findings on human trafficking and how it relates to law. The second group presented the issues of the juvenile justice system using a slide show. The third group presented on artificial intelligence and how that plays a role in criminal cases and used a slide show. The fourth group made a short video ill...

       Today we continued our podcast In the Dark . In this episode the narrator digs deeper into the confessions that were instrumental in the original Curtis Flowers conviction. The investigators seek out people who Flowers had confessed the murders. All of the people who had testified that flowers had confessed to them later came out and said that it was a lie and that flowers had not confessed to the murders. We learned about how in return for money or lighter sentencing people convicted will give or try to gain information that will benefit the police. While this is legal in the case of Curtis Flowers’ snitch 15,000 dollars was promised by John Johnson, the prosecutor, and never delivered.  (Students take notes during our seminar about In The Dark .)

This morning we started off with group work on our Friday presentations and gathered with our groups to finish these up. Groups are dealing with a wide variety of issues including cybercrime, human trafficking, and more. We are using a number of different media forms to display their work. My group is concentrating on human trafficking and has found many fascinating examples as well as the roots and causes of this issue. Today, we finished up our written information, printed out our photos, graphs, and specific writing sections, and organized everything on a trifold. Following a 10 minute break, we listened to the 4th episode of the "In the Dark" podcast pertaining to the Curtis Flowers' case where they discussed false witnesses and the corruption of both the police and prosecutors in convicting Curtis. It was an episode detailing the inaccuracy of many people claiming to see Curtis near the time of the murders or even hear him confess. They also talked about bribery via ...

We began our first Wednesesday of A-Term by reading the U.S. Constitution. We read the preamble, undoubtedly the most famous part of the founding document. Afterwards, we continued our reading by taking a look at the Article III, the Bill of Rights, and Amendments 10 through 27. This reading helped us make a lot of connections between the Constitution and the other work we've done in the class. We then read an article about the Curtis Flowers case, helping us gain context for the next episode of the podcast, which we listened to after a short break. We then transitioned to working on our group projects on specific criminal law issues, like cyber crime, Artifical intelligence, and so many more interesting issues. Students piece together processes, principles, and understandings of state and federal court systems.   Oscar 

 On our third day of studying Criminal Law and the Death Penalty, we came back from a nice lunch ready to learn more. We started off by getting into groups and preparing presentations on topics that we learned from the day before from our guest speaker. These topics include the difference between state and federal court, misdemeanors and felonies, double jeopardy, and many other topics. My group and I studied the stages in a criminal case. When the time came to present to the class, we all started realizing that each of the topics the groups had studied correlated to one another. All topics were lining up in a certain order, so it was nice to see everything come together to create a solid understanding of criminal law. For these presentations, we also made posters and made the topics we were studying fun to look at by drawing illustrations and creating structures that were interesting and easy to understand. Once all of the presentations were complete, we all took a little break to...

         In the afternoon the class split into groups to work on a newly assigned project about major issues in criminal law. Every group chose a different topic. For example, my group is working on juveniles and school policing. We were given some ideas to think about that could help us dive into our projects.      Students listening to Dr. Cobos talk     After we worked on our project we listened to the first episode of the second season of the podcast In the Dark . It is about a man, Curtis Flowers, who got tried six times for the same crime! The podcast dives into why he was tried six times. Obstruction of evidence, double jeopardy, and unfair jury picking are just some of the problems with the Curtis flower case that the podcast covers. They talk about how each of these problems occurs in the case and what happened because of it.