Assignment Requirements
You have analyzed and scrutinized the evidence, so now it is time to make your case as the prosecutor! First, you need to decide who to prosecute for the murder of Chelsie Vapolt. Then, you will write a legal brief that utilizes the facts and evidence from the case to make an argument for why the defendant is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
This legal brief should contain the following elements:
- Your hypothesis for the case. The hypothesis should clearly state who the defendant is, the crime that they are being been charged with, and their motive. (Note: there can only be ONE defendant!)
- Possible charges include :
- Murder: Suspect intentionally killed the victim and planned out the entire crime beforehand.
- Intentional manslaughter: Suspect intentionally killed the victim in the heat of the moment. A crime of passion without forethought.
- Accidental manslaughter: Suspect accidentally killed the victim. The murder was unintentional.
- Possible charges include :
- A narrative of the case — You should provide a brief overview of the key facts of the case and a timeline of events, explaining how they support your hypothesis. You can utilize the timeline and character web diagrams that you developed in CSI week 1 as part of your narrative. (Make sure that you provide a text explanation for any diagrams that you include!)
- A discussion of the key evidence that supports your hypothesis. An effective brief will include multiple types of evidence from the case file, autopsy report, hair analysis, UV light testing, Kastle-Meyer blood test, and DNA analysis. Do not discuss every single piece of evidence that you analyzed for the case. Rather, you should select the key pieces of evidence that support your argument. To receive full credit, you must include a minimum of three different pieces of evidence. For each piece of physical or DNA evidence that you discuss, you should clearly and concisely explain the results of your analysis and how those results support your argument. Make sure you describe how the evidence fits into the larger narrative about your case.
- Rebuttal of the arguments that the defense could use to show reasonable doubt about the guilt of the defendant. Pick a minimum of two facts or pieces of evidence and describe how the defense could use them to bring doubt to your case. Explain how you would counter the defense’s argument. To support their argument, the defense may utilize different pieces of evidence than you did or they may use the same pieces of evidence but provide a different interpretation.
Your legal brief should be a minimum of 250 words, be well-organized and present a clear, convincing narrative of the case. Be sure to avoid arguments that rely upon emotions or are not supported by the evidence or facts of the case.
Before you begin writing, I recommend that you review the previous CSI assignments as you will need to incorporate your findings from those assignments into your brief:
Submission Guidelines
This assignment will be submitted via Turnitin. You can submit it by uploading a file (pdf, doc, docx) (Links to an external site.) or submitting the link to a Google Doc (Links to an external site.) by clicking ‘Upload assignment’ on the dashboard below. This is an individual assignment, so please ensure that all work submitted is your own.
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