Week 3 04/04/09

A very action filled week in the police courses, starting see some personal emotions coming through the instructors in the discussion boards,especially concerning the 9/11 discussion in Police I.

Intro to Criminal Justice I

This week we studies in our text books about criminal defenses in court. Basically falling under four categories.

• Alibi
• Justifications
• Excuses
• Procedural Defenses

An Alibi is pretty easy to understand, someone has witnesses that can prove they were not able to have committed a crime due to their being somewhere else at the time of the crime.

Justifications are reasons that led someone to commit a crime in order to prevent a greater evil from occurring. This would include self-defense, defense of others, home and property etc. Also resisting an unlawful arrest, however how many people arrested believe that they are the victims of an unlawful arrest? Your personal opinion does not justify use of force against a police officer. I would recommend full cooperation with law enforcement and let the system work out the details. That is the safest bet nobody is going to get hurt, however if an officer is using unreasonable amount of force during an arrest and you fear for your safety you may resist such arrests.

Excuses apply to things such as age,duress,involuntary intoxication,provocation and insanity, which is the focus of class discussion this week. This basically sums up that in some way a person was provoked to commit a crime such as in marital homicides and or removal of male genitalia due to some extended time of abuse. Age applies to holding children criminally responsible for their acts. Any child under seven is not mentally capable to reason right and wrong under the law and can't be taken to trial. Insanity we will discuss more in the discussion section.

Procedural defenses apply to the defendant making accusation that the CJ system made some sort of error in the way the case or evidence was handled.

In the written assignment this week we got to play the role of a defense attorney, given several scenarios, we had to determine a defense that we would try and make for the defendant and why.

In the discussion board this week we looked at the insanity plea and what it means. You may think that a person with a mental illness would be found insane, but this is far from true. Many mentally ill people are perfectly capable of being tried for a crime. Insane determines the persons ability to defend themselves in a trial. A person found to be legally insane can not stand trial, also it considers the persons state of mind at the time of the crime. Many people try and claim some form of temporary insanity, which is near impossible to prove, because the person has claimed to make a full recovery since the crime, so they can not be sentenced to a rehab facility, yet if they were insane in the commission of the crime they can not be sent to jail. Because of it's difficulty to prove the insanity plea is rarely used, duress may be much more successful,it will not keep you from prison but it does put consideration into the sentencing phase.

This week I also made another entry in my journal regarding job interview process and watched videos of Westwood instructors ,taking notes for the final written assignment of this course.

Before we move on to the next course lets look at a common thing that I hear thrown around "That's police entrapment" You know the one's, the cop had his lights off, he was hiding.. blah
Great example I hear two truckers not long ago in TX talking about an officer who would hide his cruiser in the woods and bust speeders, they swore this officer had committed entrapment, so what is "entrapment"? I think after reading this you will realize how ridiculous most claims of police entrapment are,and are rather people not taking responsibility for their own actions.

Entrapment is an improper or illegal inducement to crime by law agents. In other words the officer has to do something to make you commit a crime that you would not have otherwise committed! You were speeding long before you even knew a cop was or was not present at a location, nothing he done made you break the law. As I tell people, the officer could be hiding in the woods in the dark with lights off, under a bush, if you're not speeding, you wont get a ticket.

A successful scenario of entrapment would be if an undercover officer approaches you to buy drugs, and you say no thanks man, I'm not interested,and he goes oh come on buddy..this is some really good stuff, and you say well alright I'll buy some. See the difference, the officer has induced a person to commit a crime they had no intention of committing. Now does this apply to the undercover CB radio operations like that in West Memphis,AR? NO...That is not entrapment,if the officer gets on the CB selling drugs and YOU contact him with the intent to purchase drugs, the officer in no way induced you into that act,they only provide the opportunity, same thing as vice operations.

In intro to Police I this week we reviewed the roles of different federal law enforcement agencies and how their roles have changed since 9/11. For instance the FBI became a counter-terrorism agency rather than their old role of hunting down fugitives. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created, with 180,000 new jobs. We also studied ATF, and DEA in detail.

Written assignment this week was picking three federal law enforcement agencies and detailing their creation and role in the federal system. I chose..

• FBI
• DEA
• National Park Service : Ranger Division

I did not want to be too obvious so I that's why I chose the Ranger's for my last one, so it took a little bit of work to get the information.

The board discussion covered the effect of federal law enforcement and creation of the DHS.
Which has naturally brought out a lot of strong emotions from students and the instructor.