Criminal Justice Trainings

I went to a few criminal justice trainings within the past two weeks. I'll give a brief overview of each.

The first one I went to was about Crime Victims and Court Appointed Special Advocates. This training was good because it gave an overview of what services the state offers to victims of crimes. They have a crime victim's restitution fund and will notify victims about the incarceration status of the offenders in their cases (when they get released, when parole hearings are, when they get transferred to different facilities, etc.).

The CASA (court appointed special advocate) part of the training was informative because I plan on doing this while in law school. I would do it now but with everything else going on it is almost impossible. A CASA is just a volunteer that manages court cases that involve child neglect and abuse.

The next training I went to was about two hours away, outside the state capital. This training involved the transfer of juveniles to the adult criminal justice system. First speaker for this training was a psychiatrist from the place where I want to go to law school. He was VERY informative and intelligent. He also was a great public speaker.

The information he presented was interesting. Some main points:

-The Brain matures until the age of 25.

-Juveniles who offend do not always become adult offenders.

-Juveniles who get transferred to adult court have higher incidents of recidivism (you can take this two ways: a)They get socialized to offend or b)They are the juveniles who are going to be career criminals in the first place.

The second part of the training was someone with the FBI. He was there to talk about the DC Sniper cases. This case involved John Malvo and John Muhammad. John Mohammad is currently on death row and the juvenile is serving multiple life sentences (never to get out of prison).

Interesting facts that came out in this training:

-FBI estimates that the duo killed about 20 people altogether.

-First killing was in Washington-young African female who was the niece of John Muhammad's bookkeeper

-John Muhammad had Malvo touch and write everything so that he could eventually put the blame on Malvo solely.

-The two had multiple contact with law enforcement agencies during the period of the crimes (no warrants-they were let go).

-John Muhammad's sole motive was to terrorize the area. He at first said it was about his ex-wife (who lived in Maryland, outside of DC) but later his true motives came out.

Muhammad is supposed to be executed soon. That seemed to be the main question from everyone-When is he going to die? The group at the training was multi-racial. It seemed like everyone agreed that he needed to die.

So those where my trainings in a nutshell. Going out of town was also beneficial because the facility was right down the street from where my serial offender committed his first crimes (I suspect to be his first crimes, long story on that one). I drove there during lunch. It kind of just solidified what I already thought-it was committed by someone local.

Either way beneficial trip. I'll be back in court starting next week so I should have more stories for my blog :). Hope everyone has a great fourth!