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Bridge Program: Generate Ideas

This guide has information that will show you how to find a crime report in a newspaper, and also show you where to look for statutes.

Crime Report Assignment

You are required to do weekly crime finds in this class. 

For the Crime Find:

  1. You must find a current news article (18 months old or less) relating to the week’s assigned crime (see below for weekly assignments).
  2. Compare your article with the elements of the appropriate Minnesota statute  to determine whether the article contains information about each element of the crime.
  3. Prior to the start of class each Thursday, you will post a summary of your article, a link to the article and a link to the relevant statutes into a discussion post on D2L.
  4. Come to class on Thursday prepared to discuss your article with your group.
  5. On each Thursday, we will split into groups and discuss the crimes you have found (and the statutes) and compare the articles.  You need to come to class prepared to show the article and the relevant statute(s) to your group, discuss whether the article discusses all of the elements of the crime(s), whether the article leaves out information or includes information that seems important or unnecessary. 
  6. Your group will then collectively select your favorite article, determine whether the article contains information about each element of the crime, determine what information is missing from the article that would be relevant to your decisions and what the maximum sentence is for the crime.

Criminal Charges - FindLaw

From the award-winning FindLaw site, this section contains information on the major types of crimes, including homicide, drug charges and sex crimes.

Ideas

* Take note of the terminology used. Take a minute to read the description, if provided.