Criminal justice programs provide students exciting opportunities to learn and apply their skills in many unique ways, such as working within the criminal justice field with law enforcement and inside a court room.
In a program through the University of Birmingham’s Department of Justice Sciences, three students invested several months working on an unsolved cold case with the Homewood Police Department. During the ten months spent on the project, the students studied reports from law enforcement, detectives, and forensic scientists, reviewed recorded statements, and scrutinized suspects and witnesses’ behavior.
Professor Beth Gardner, Ph.D. who supervised the project, says, “[T]he purpose of the project was not to solve the case, but to conduct that first step that’s very necessary for reopening any cold case.”
The work presented to Homewood Police Sgt. Doug Finch was more than he’d expected: “The work that the students did really helped us to see the case in a new way.” Because of their impressive progress and fresh perspective, the case may be reopened.
In the Houston, Texas area, criminal justice, paralegal, and court reporting students from Alvin Community College were given an exceptional opportunity to work on a mock trial with Berg & Androphy attorneys and gain valuable courtroom experience.
Criminal justice instructor Joseph Gutheinz is a retired criminal defense attorney who makes arrangements for mock grand jury trials each semester. “I have had the opportunity to see law enforcement officers take the stand for the first time and either through nerves or inexperience blow it,” says Gutheinz. “My mock grand juries and now mock trial are designed to give our future law enforcement officers experience before a friendly crowd, where they are free to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes.”
In the actual case where their client Charles Raby had been convicted and sentenced to death for murder, attorneys at Berg & Androphy brought new DNA evidence in the mock trial to see how whether this new evidence would make a difference in the outcome. Says an associate with law firm, Stephanie Gutheinz (and Gutheinz’s daughter-in-law), “[H]ad the results been available at the original trial, it is reasonably probably that Charles Raby would not have been prosecuted or convicted.”
Through the mock trial, not only did the students gain workable experience in the court room, but the attorneys also gleaned beneficial outside perspective from the students.
Thanks to shows like CSI, criminal justice is a popular and fascinating field. If you’re interested in law enforcement, law, court reporting, or paralegal, start a criminal justice program today!