Criminal Cases & Due Process

The volume of criminal cases being tried across the United States, coupled with many agencies being understaffed, makes it challenging for agencies to stay current on legal issues. As a result, your supervisor has asked you to make a presentation on current legal issues by locating cases that involve the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments. Your Fourteenth Amendment case should involve the Equal Protection Clause. In this activity you will practice your research skills, while refining your presentation skills, by providing a summary of selected legal cases most associated with the criminal justice system.

Your task is to prepare a presentation for delivery to local criminal justice stakeholders. This presentation will be a minimum of 23 slides.

Complete the following for this assignment:

Using this Web site, locate five different cases involving criminal law and procedure. Each case should involve one of the following Amendments-Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and the Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection Clause. You will locate a different case for each amendment, for a total of 5 different cases. The cases should have been decided within the last 7 years. Here are some research tips.

Avoid choosing a case from the current Supreme Court term, which runs from October through June, because these cases likely have not been decided yet by the Court. You will see the word “pending” listed under Citation heading for pending cases.

1. Make sure that the case is a criminal case rather than a civil case. Often times, for a criminal case, the name of a state or “United States” is in the name of a criminal case.

Watch a video that demonstrates how to search the Oyez site for cases. 

Take the following steps to create your presentation. Before you begin, watch this Powerpoint presentation video example. 

• Create an introductory slide for your entire PowerPoint presentation to provide the reader with your project’s purpose and scope. This slide introduces your entire presentation and could include language as simple as listing the Amendments that the presentation will cover.
• Next, create 4 slides for each case that you have chosen:
• The first slide will provide the Name of the case, the Amendment that the case addresses and a brief summary of the facts of the case, or what happened.

The second slide will list how the lower courts ruled in the case as the case wound its way through the court system, also known as the procedural history of a case. Depending upon where the case was originally filed, the case originally could have been filed in a state trial court, then appealed to the state court of appeals and state Supreme Court before it reached the U.S. Supreme Court. (In some states, a case may skip one of these steps before it arrives at the U.S. Supreme Court.) If a case was originally filed in a federal district court, it likely would have been appealed to the Circuit Court of Appeals in the federal system and then moved on to the U.S. Supreme Court, if the Supreme Court agreed to review the case.

The third slide will provide the key legal question(s) or issues that the Court was being asked to answer concerning the Amendment.

1. The fourth slide will discuss the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling and reasoning in the case. You should list whether the Court affirmed, reversed, vacated, remanded or any other holding. You can find the holding at the end of the majority opinion. The Court’s reasoning explains why the Court ruled the way that it did. Briefly summarize the Court’s reasoning.

After you have completed all your slides for all your cases, next create a conclusion slide for your entire PowerPoint presentation that wraps up the entire presentation and provides the reader with your thoughts on the cases that you located.