IKWLRYDLS – The Blackacre Times

In this blog series, real GSU law students tell you about their legal research experiences over the summer.

by Carlos Becerra-Gomez , 2L

During my junior year of undergrad, I took a course called, “Eyewitness Testimony” taught by the famous psychologist, Dr. Elizabeth Loftus. Throughout the course, we learned about how unreliable eyewitness testimonies can be, but how the general public, including juries, put a lot of weight on eyewitnesses during a criminal trial. Dr. Loftus introduced us to the Innocence Project, a non-profit organization whose sole mission is to liberate those who have been innocently incarcerated. After such introduction, I was intrigued by the project, and I decided to attend law school to be somehow a part of this organization. As soon as my first semester of law school ended, I started to send out my resume and a cover letter to multiple Innocence Projects around the country. Fortunately, the project from my hometown emailed me back and offered me an internship position. It was impossible to say no, so I gladly took the position.

“I decided to attend law school to be somehow a part of this organization. As soon as my first semester of law school ended, I started to send out my resume and a cover letter to multiple Innocence Projects around the country. “

On my first day, I hit the ground running and I was immediately assigned to a case: a 1980’s homicide. This particular case was deemed a cold case for almost twenty years until our client was tried and convicted in the early 2000s. Sadly, our client has been imprisoned for almost twenty years for a crime that he consistently claims he did not commit. The managing attorney provided me with at least 1,000 pages worth of records for me to thoroughly review. The attorney asked me to read each record to find anything that could be valuable to our client and his innocence. At first, I felt absolutely overwhelmed; a human being’s life was placed in my hands. Each day I was reading these records was one more day he was spending in prison. That overwhelming feeling turned into motivation to give my best effort to help our client prove his innocence.

“Each day I was reading these records was one more day he was spending in prison.“

My primary duties were to investigate and read all police reports, identify witnesses and potential suspects, analyze the murder scene photographs and videos, analyze the incriminating DNA data, locate and interview these witnesses and suspects. Each day consisted of something different, we even spent hours driving throughout the state just to locate witnesses and suspects. I quickly realized that this type of research was completely different to the traditional research work a legal intern does, but I absolutely loved it. Every day I came into the office was a new day to challenge myself to find something helpful for our client. There were some days that were harder than others, such as watching the brutal crime scene video that showed the lifeless body in a pool of blood. Days like those made me truly realize that this was not just another day in law school, but this was real life.

One of my proudest moments during the summer was when I found a huge piece of evidence that had not been previously discovered that affected the state’s argument. In fact, the managing attorney admitted that she never had seen that piece of evidence before. I was happy to be able to contribute to the case in such a drastic way, but I was also motivated to continue to find other useful evidence. At the end of the summer, the managing attorney asked me to write an investigative legal memorandum that included my own theory of who committed the murder and why. In conclusion, I absolutely loved this experience and it only reassured my desire to work for the project or indigent defense to help those in need of justice and representation.

by AJ Murray, 2L

In this new blog series, real GSU law students tell you about their legal research experiences over the summer.

This past summer, I worked at a local firm. We dealt primarily in white collar criminal law, as well as trademark infringement. The first task I was assigned to was to work on developing a memo for multiple conspiracies. Conspiracies often come in two flavors: multiple conspiracies and multiple-object conspiracies. Multiple-object conspiracies are defined by an interest in multiple objectives that may or may not support each other, but support an overall plan of action whilst multiple conspiracies are not well-related save for a figurehead or ringleader who most of the individual conspiracies are tied to.

Our objective was to illustrate how a potential defendant might be innocent of a conspiracy to commit fraud. We wanted to argue that there were multiple separate conspiracies rather than one. We also wanted to argue that the indictment was duplicitous. As pulled from Wikipedia, “duplicity is the error committed when the charge on an indictment describes two different offenses. An indictment may contain more than one count, but each count must allege only one offense, so that the defendant can know precisely what offenses he or she is accused of.” Because there are multiple conspiracies, it is possible that one of the conspiracies could be duplicitous because it did not account for the difference between the conspiracies.

My first objective was to better understand what conspiracies were. Criminal Law classes can only cover so much! Using cases provided to me by a coworker, I used the cases’ notes of decisions, headnotes, and keycites to further develop my understanding. In addition to that, I also looked at the court websites for all eleven circuits to find their jury instructions to see how they help the jury understand multiple conspiracies. They include helpful cases in their explanation and I used those as well. Unfortunately, the memo was challenging to write because conspiracies commonly exist for drug-related purposes, not for financial abuse. You don’t necessarily want to compare fraud with the distribution and manufacturing of drugs when using cases. Plus, the more similar the case, the better its utility for offensive and defensive purposes. When all was said and done, I had provided some important nuggets of wisdom, but was unable to find exactly what my attorney needed. I read hundreds of cases in pursuit of that illustrative and similar case, but, as far as I could see, it did not exist.

I learned this summer that, while there are MANY cases, sometimes the one you’re looking for just doesn’t exist. It’s totally ok that I wasn’t able to find it. Not only did I find very useful quotes and caselaw, but because I was a first-year intern, a client could have potentially paid less for my services for researching than for that of one of our attorneys. Since I could do the grunt work of sorting, analyzing, and synthesizing cases, I provided a unique benefit that no one else at the firm could, considering no one had a paralegal or another intern. It was a wonderful and insightful summer!