Archive for December, 2009

I had never imagined that a few drops of alcohol could get me into so much trouble. I was always responsible when I knew that I had to drive and never indulged in alcohol. But it was a friend’s birthday and he gave me these liquor chocolates that I did not know had enough alcohol content to land me in trouble. Though I had no prior record for any alcohol abuse I was not interested to make myself an offender as I decided to get aMinneapolis DWI lawyer for my rescue. After a little research I landed on this website that was all about lawyers that could handle a case like mine and then I decided in going in for this Minneapolis DWI Attorney who I felt could give justice to my case. He was a thorough professional who take my case as seriously as possible and did all the groundwork of the things that had happened on that fateful evening and obtained all the information he needed for my case. Within a few days he was totally briefed up to the entire case and it helped greatly as he was able to handle the legal proceedings really well. The jury was able to finally see that it was all due to a minor mistake and that I hadn’t consumed alcohol while driving that helped them serve the right justice.

It has become easy to obtain a replacement birth certificate if in case you happen to lose your original. Today there are a few sites available online that help you to get a British birth certificate online that is needed everywhere for official reasons. My friend wanted a replacement for the original birth certificate as it got destroyed in the blaze that burnt his house. His house caught fire due to short circuit and most of his belongings got destroyed in it. He was weeping on my shoulders and had asked me for help. He asked me to help him get the certificate from the concerned authorities. So, I was on the job of helping my friend. I was surfing online to find if I could come across any site that offers these types of certificates. I did come across one such site that was authentic and very much professional. I browsed the site and discovered that my friend can get a replacement certificate from there. So, I informed my friend about it and asked him to furnish his details to me so that it would be convenient for me to enter in the details in it. I helped him get another certificate. He was satisfied with the effort I took.

People take the law for granted, until it fails. We assume that the man who steals our car or breaks into our house will be prosecuted and punished. What happens when that assumption is no longer valid? When the law fails to protect the citizens and punish the lawbreakers?
The small town of Skidmore, Missouri found out on July 10, 1981, when Ken Rex McElroy was shot to death as he sat in his pickup on the main street of town. McElroy had waged a twenty-year reign of terror over all of northwest Missouri, getting away with almost every crime in the book: rape, arson, kidnapping, burglary, theft, assault, you name it. The law seemed powerless to stop him; witnesses changed their stories; judges recused themselves from his cases; prosecutors dismissed indictments; the town marshal resigned.

I told the story of McElroy’s reign of terror, his shooting, and the ensuing silence by the numerous witnesses to the murder in the book In Broad Daylight, which was published by HarperCollins in 1989, and which won an Edgar Award for Best True Crime and was made into a movie starring Brian Denehey. I revisited the story in a twenty-five year anniversary edition of the book published by St. Martins Press in December 2006. This edition contains startling new information on the killing and the identity of the killers.

It is not surprising that after all this time the witnesses to the killing still have not talked about what they saw that hot July morning. You might hear them say something like “McElroy needed killing,” and what they mean is that the town believed it had no choice but to take the law into its own hands. In their view, the town had returned to the lawlessness of the frontier days, when individuals undertook their own protection at the end of a barrel. Indeed, McElroy was stalking, with a weapon, several witnesses who were scheduled to testify against him in a bond revocation hearing the next week.

You can argue whether what happened that day was morally right or wrong. On Larry King Live, King opined that taking a life outside the law was never the right thing to do. Others argue that it should have happened long before it did.

Behind the discussion is a very basic principle of civilized society, a contract between the government and its citizens: you give up the right to enforce the law and punish lawbreakers in exchange for the government’s promise to do it for you. Put your weapons away and the government—in the form of the criminal justice system—will protect you.

In general, when one party fails to a contract fails to live up to his obligations the other party is released from his promise. If the government cannot protect me, I am entitled to protect myself. If the law t cannot protect the town, the town is entitled to protect itself, to “take the law into its own hands,” as the saying goes. It’s a scary notion in many ways, and it certainly sets a dangerous precedent, in effect allowing individual citizens to decide when they are entitled to engage in “self help.”

My friend Clare has always been interested in law and justice, but growing up in a poor area of the country where opportunities were limited, she dropped out of the education system at a young age and started a reasonable yet largely unrewarding job. For years she dreamt of going to college to study for a criminal justice degree but time, family commitments and money prevented her from realising her ambitions. But only last year Clare enrolled on an online criminal justice degree and hasn’t looked back since.

I’m surprised at the pace of her learning. I’d never considered a distance learning degree could be that practical, but thanks to the popularity of using the web as a quite useful teaching tool it seems a range of studies can be delivered through online education.

Although Clare is – or rather was – completely new to studying or working in the criminal justice sector, many other students already have a career in the criminal justice profession; they are either building on their existing skills and knowledge to develop their role, or looking to progress into a new job, or even both.

What Clare is discovering and what is generally considered to be one of the greatest benefits of online study, is that it is as vocational as you need it to be, especially considering that teachers will usually have recent experience of, or still be working in, the criminal justice sector.

Clare’ experience of course is limited, but even after 3 months she’s finding the criminal justice degree that she’s studying for online to be well worth the effort of fitting in a degree course around her work and family commitments.

Because online colleges that offer criminal justice BA degrees online understand that their students will come from a variety of backgrounds, courses are especially geared to consider a wide range of often quite specific needs.

Clare’s attitude with technology is fairly pragmatic. If she doesn’t find it useful then she won’t use it. According to her, a simple understanding of the web is enough to take advantage of the incredibly easy to use online systems for studying her criminal justice degree online.