Assignment Summary

The purpose of this assignment is to provide the building blocks of your research paper.

You will be responsible for picking a criminal that has been reported in news media. This offender and their crime(s) can span back as far as you would like. Once you have selected an offender, you will be responsible for finding 4 published news or magazine articles or books that reported on the offender and their crime(s). News and magazine articles must be from a different source (i.e. cannot have four articles from the New York Times). Your goal is to find out as much information about the offender and their crime(s) as possible (the more information available, the easier it will be to write your final paper).

Examples of acceptable and unacceptable magazine/news sources:

Miami Herald, LA Times, Times Magazine, People Magazine, Atlanta Journal Constitution, New York Times, Washington Post, etc. are acceptable news sources.

Encyclopedias, Netflix, Blogs, Wikipedia, Yahoo, About.com, Biography.com, CrimeMuseum.org, Murderpedia, etc. are not acceptable news sources.

If you are unsure if a source is acceptable email it to me.

Once you have found 4 sources you will write a summary of your offender, their life, and crimes. This paper should not be simply 4 separate summaries of your sources, rather write a single cohesive paper about your chosen offender.

Your assignment MUST include the following elements:

A summary, discussing the offender that you have chosen.

Any pertinent background information about the offender.

Describe the offender and their crime(s).

What type of crime did the offender commit?

Who was involved? (the offender, the victim, etc.)

Was the offender charged?

Your assignment must meet the following additional requirements.

Your summary should be, at minimum, 2 pages in length and typed (cover page, headings, blank lines, reference page, etc. will not count towards the page count).

The paper should be written utilizing double spacing, size 12 Times New Roman font, and 1 inch margins.

APA formatting guidelines should be followed.

Utilize the paper checklist and power point provided on the course website.

Your paper must have a cover page, running head, and reference page.

No abstract is required.

Do not write the paper from a first person or subjective standpoint.

This should be an objective write up of your offender.

Your paper should have an introduction and proper conclusion.

Quotations are allowed, but cannot make up more than 10% of the text.

Block quotes (quotes that are 40 words or more) are not allowed.