Research Report Part 1: Presentation Outline and Topic

Criminal Evidence and the strategies and techniques utilized by criminals to commit crimes are constantly changing. Therefore, the strategies and procedures used to collect and present criminal evidence must also continue to evolve. Your task is to develop a presentation report that explores the latest strategies, advancements, and innovations in the area of criminal evidence. You will explore this topic from the perspective of a criminal justice agent who works in the field of criminal justice.

The presentation report consists of two parts:

Part 1 – Includes your topic identification and development of your project outline
Part 2 – Consists of PowerPoint presentation of your report and will be accomplished in Unit V

Part 1A: Topic

You will need to identify a topic related to one of the four general types of criminal evidence:

1. witness testimony,
2. real or physical evidence,
3. documents or writings, or
4. demonstrative evidence.

You will need to provide a brief summary discussing what aspects of the topic you will explore and why that topic is relevant to strategies, advancements, and innovations in criminal evidence. In addition, you will need to ensure that scholarly and empirical information about strategies, advancements, and innovations in criminal evidence can be obtained. It is possible to talk about a topic in which advancements and innovations are needed. However, you will also need to be prepared to search extensively for information about current strategies and to develop suggestions for advancement and innovation with little to no assistance from scholarly and empirical sources. Part 1A will need to be a minimum of one double-spaced typed page.

Part 1B: Outline

Using the topic you identified in Part 1A, you are required to develop a topic outline with at least two tiers. Tier 1 of the outline will need to include the following components:

• Selected topic name
• Definition of key terms
• History
• Current strategies
• Current and/or pending advancements and/or innovations
• Recommended advancements and/or innovations
• Justification for recommendations
• Plausibility and logistics of the implementation of recommendations
• Anticipated impact of the implementation of recommendations in regards to the collection and utilization of criminal evidence in the criminal justice system
  • At a minimum, discussions must address constitutional amendments, exclusions of admissible and inadmissible evidence, and variations in the collection of criminal evidence due to crime location.
• References

Tier 2 of the outline will need to contain information that addresses the title of Tier 1 in relation to your specific topic. You can present the information in the form of sentences or short phrases. Regardless of the format you use for providing your information in Tier 2, make sure that each item in the outline does not need further explanation.

At least 10 sources must be cited in APA format under the references heading of your outline. All sources must be scholarly, and a minimum of five citations must reference peer-reviewed sources (e.g., academic journals). Part 1B needs to be a minimum of two double-spaced typed pages. Both the topic and outline (Parts 1A and 1B) should be submitted as one document.