Criminal Justice Internship

Winter 2004

David A. Moran

CRIMINAL JUSTICE INTERNSHIP

Class Meetings

Class will meet on 4:00 to 4:55 p.m. in Room 2255 on the following four Mondays: January 12, February 9, March 8, and April 12. You are required to attend all class sections unless you have taken, and completed, the Criminal Justice Internship course in an earlier semester. If your schedule does not permit you to attend these sessions, please sign up for a different internship or for this internship in a later semester. If something comes up so that you cannot attend one of these sessions, please contact me in advance to schedule a time when we can meet in my office. Signed work logs are due on the date of each class session, so please remember to bring them to class. If you are not required to attend the class sessions because you have completed the internship before, signed work logs are due by February 9, March 8, and April 12 in my faculty mail box (3^rd floor, old building) or in my office.

Contacting Me

My office telephone number is (313) 577-4829, and my e-mail is d.moran@wayne.edu. My office hours are 2:00-3:30, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, and 1:15 to 2:30 on Fridays. Please do not hesitate to stop by my office (3223 in the new building) or to call or e-mail me at any time you have any questions or problems.

Pre-Registration Conference

Every student must have a pre-registration conference with Professor David Moss or Professor Erica Eisinger so that he or she may approve your internship and the number of credit hours and give you a copy of the Internship Standards, your log sheets, and the evaluation forms. If you have not already had this conference, please see Professor Moss or Professor Eisinger as soon as possible.

Course Requirements

To receive credit for this course, you must: (a) attend all of the scheduled classes (unless you have completed the internship in a previous semester); (b) participate in the class discussions; (c) timely submit your logs, signed and approved by your field supervisor; (d) submit your journals on a weekly basis by e-mail; and (e) complete the internship evaluation form.

The Classroom Component

During the classroom component of this internship, we will focus on a few ethical issues that frequently arise in the criminal law context and we will discuss the insights you have gained through your work in the office. The topics I have chosen for classroom discussion are: (1) an attorney's duty to accurately keep track of one's time; (2) the prosecutor's duty to turn over materials to the defense; (2) the obligation of attorneys to present truthful testimony and to correct false testimony.

For each topic, I will provide a short reading assignment that will be made available approximately one week before class meets. I will use the reading assignments as a springboard to discuss how prosecutors and defense attorneys deal with these issues.

Your Journals

This course is primarily an exercise in self-directed learning. In other words, you have the ultimate responsibility of ensuring that your internship is a valuable experience by insisting that your supervisors allow you to participate in the work of the office. The process of self-directed learning requires you to continually ask yourself questions such as: what am I learning from this experience, how can I apply what I am learning to other situations, how can I repeat successes and avoid repeating mistakes, what are my strengths and weaknesses and what can I do to improve upon my weaknesses, and what lawyering skills have I improved upon through this experience.

In order to provide a mechanism for you to systematically think about your internship experience, you are required to submit a journal by e-mail to me (d.moran@wayne.edu) each Friday by 5:00 p.m, beginning Friday, January 16. Your weekly journal entry should normally be no more than a few paragraphs, but if there is a particularly striking issue you wish to write about, feel free to tell me about it in more detail. Obviously, you will need an e-mail account to submit your journal, so please obtain an account immediately if you do not have one.

Your journal entry should not be a list of what you did during the week (that's the purpose of the logs), but should tell me something about what you learned. For example, you might choose to write about a particularly interesting case in your office and explain why it's so interesting. You might write about why your office functions well or poorly on an interpersonal level, or how you are succeeding or not succeeding in getting your hands on meaningful assignments. Given the classroom emphasis on ethical issues, you are encouraged to write about how your office deals with such issues when they arise.

Your journal entries will be confidential, so you should feel free to write frankly about your experience. To be as clear as possible, I will not show your journal entries to your supervisor, your classmates, or anyone else unless you expressly authorize me to do so. I might respond by e-mail to some of your journal entries in an effort to probe some of what you have written.

CLASS SCHEDULE

Date Topic

January 12 Introduction; Keeping Time Ethically

February 9 The Obligation to Present the Truth

March 8 The Prosecutor's Discovery Duty

April 12 How Did It Go? (Refreshments will be served)