Exploring Racial Disparities in Sentencing and Appeals within the US Death Penalty Cases

There will be one major assignment for this course, a short research paper. The purpose of this assignment is to become more familiar with one aspect of criminal justice covered in this course. This will be done by examining a topic that must have some element of controversy or debate about it. Please conduct a research paper on a topic of interest to you using secondary sources: criminological journal articles (4-5) and/or books (1-2). The first step in this project is to choose your research topic. You might want to develop a topic related to something that you are interested in, but you have to narrow it down to a specific research interest. For example, if you are interested in deviant behavior you might want to consider as a research topic something like the following: “deviant behavior among the elderly”, “deviant behavior among suburban youth” or even “new trends in white collar crime”. There are several topics that you might want to choose to look at. My best advice is to start with some general idea that intrigues everyone (you might even want to use the textbook to find some suggestions or ideas). Once you have narrowed down your topic, you need to develop your research question. Other paper requirements: 1. Description of your research topic, 2. Your question and hypothesis, 3. Identification of your dependent and independent variables, 4. What the literature says and doesn’t say about your research topic, and 5. Short Bibliography.