Assignment 1: Crime Scene Investigation
Due Week 3 and worth 160 points

Preliminary investigations do not necessarily yield enough information to prosecute a criminal case. Despite a thorough preliminary investigation, many cases require a follow – up investigation. Use your textbook, the Internet, and / or Strayer Library to research articles on crime scene investigation.

Write a three to four (3-4) page paper in which you:

1. Assemble a set of guidelines on conducting preliminary investigation for a criminal case.
2. Propose one (1) strategy that criminal investigators should take in order to conduct an efficient follow-up investigation. Provide a rationale to support your response.
3. Select two major crimes (e.g. sudden deaths, sex related crimes) and compare and contrast the key differences in reporting the two major crimes that you selected.
4. Determine the three (3) most important characteristics of an effective criminal investigator and discuss the importance of each characteristic you determined.
5. Support or critique the argument that the criminal investigation process should maintain the balance regarding freedom of information through media outlets and privacy rights of alleged perpetrators of crime. Provide a rationale to support your response.
6. Use at least two (2) quality academic resources in this assignment. Note: Wikipedia and similar type Websites do not qualify as academic resources.

Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:

• Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; citations and references must follow APA or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.
• Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment page length.

The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:

• Describe the major components of and responsibilities involved in the investigative process.
• Recommend improvements to the criminal investigation process in selected areas.
• Describe the procedures for the preparation of field notes and the documentation of a crime scene.
• Use technology and information resources to conduct research in the criminal investigation process.
• Write clearly and concisely about the criminal investigation process using proper writing mechanics.

Assignment 1: The State Judicial Selection Process

Due Week 5 and worth 200 points

Each state within the United States has its own unique judicial selection process within its own court system.

Using the Internet or Strayer databases, research the judicial selection process for different court systems from different states within the U.S. Court System.

Write a five to eight (5-8) page paper in which you:

1. Discuss the judicial selection process of your state. Include, at a minimum, the qualifications and steps that are taken in order to select judges for the different kinds of courts within your specific state.
2. Choose a second state, and describe the qualifications and the selection process for judges within that state.
3. Compare and contrast for both states the qualifications necessary for a prospective candidate to become a judge. Next, identify the steps that the relevant persons / entities need to take in order to remove a judge from office for disciplinary reasons for each state.
4. Justify the selection process for the state that you believe has the best system in place. Justify the response.
5. Use at least three (3) quality academic resources. Note: Wikipedia and other websites do not qualify as academic resources.

Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:

• Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; citations and references must follow APA or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.
• Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment page length.

The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:

• Detail the history and organization of the levels of the American court system and the issue of jurisdictional boundaries.
• Use technology and information resources to research issues in the criminal court and the judicial process in America.
• Write clearly and concisely about the American court system using proper writing mechanics and APA style conventions.

Reingold, J., Jones, M., & Kramer, S. (2014). How to fail in business while really, really trying. Fortune, 169 (5), 80.

Lublin, J. S., & Mattioli, D. (2013, Apr 09). Penney CEO out, old boss back in. Wall Street Journal (Online). Retrieved from ProQuest.

Glazer, E., Lublin, J. S., & Mattioli, D. (2013, Apr 9). Penney backfires on ackman. Wall Street Journal (Online). Retrieved from ProQuest.

D’Innocenzio, A. (2012, January 27). J.C. Penney slashing prices on all merchandise. USA Today. Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/story/2012-01-25/penneys-price-overhaul/52787388/1

Reingold, J. (2012, March 19). Retail’s new radical. Fortune. Retrieved from http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/03/07/jc-pe…

Mattioli, D. (2012, January 26). J.C. Penney chief thinks different. Wall Street Journal.

Mattioli, D. (2012, January 25). How J.C. Penney was minted. Wall Street Journal.

There’s a lot going on at J.C. Penney in recent years. With a new CEO, J.C. Penney, confronted with pressing competition up, down, and sideways in the department store wars, is reinventing itself in terms of merchandising, supply, and pricing strategies. Here we will concentrate only on the pricing aspects of these new directions. However, this is ultimately about positioning; trying to find a space that is responsive to potential customers as well as differentiating the Penney brand from Target, Kohl’s, Wal-Mart, and Macy’s.

These articles shed additional light on the implications of Penney’s new direction:

Berfield, S. (2012, May 24), Remaking J.C. Penney Without Coupons. Bloomfield Business Week.Retrieved from http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-05-24/remaking-j-dot-c-dot-penney-without-coupons

Girard, K. (2012, March 5). Is J.C. Penney’s makeover the future of retailing? Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. Retrieved from http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6944.html

Halkias, M. (2011, December 7). J.C. Penney buys stake in Martha Stewart’s company. The Dallas Morning News. Retrieved from http://www.dallasnews.com/business/retail/20111207-j.c.-penney-buys-stake-in-martha-stewarts-company.ece

Timberlake, C., & Townsend, M. (2012, February 28). Macy’s says Martha’s dance card is too full.Business Week. Retrieved from http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-28/macys-says-martha-stewarts-dance-card-is-too-full

Case Assignment

A well-written report should have a brief introduction, headings or subheadings, and a brief concluding comment. Note that you should use some keywords as headings or subheadings such as “Johnson’s pricing strategy,” instead of a sentence or a question. Read and cite article listed above, supplemented with any other articles related to J.C. Penney, and develop a report addressing following issues.

1. Briefly describe Johnson’s pricing strategy, also providing background on the company and department store industry.
2. Explain why Johnson’s pricing strategy did not work. Support your position in terms of environmental factors such as economy, the competition, and changing consumer behavior.
3. What do you think Johnson could have done better? Take into account J.C. Penney’s segmentation, positioning, and branding strategies to explain this issue.
4. Compare J.C. Penney’s current pricing strategy and Johnson’s pricing strategy, based on your research on the most recent situation of J.C. Penney. How do you think J.C. Penney would perform in the next five years? Take into consideration the relationships between pricing and other aspects of the marketing effort such as a change in merchandising, logo, atmospherics, use of celebrity spokespersons, and so on.

Health Care Associates is a large primary care facility located in a major metropolitan area. The staff consists of eight doctors, twenty nurses, and numerous personnel that provide the administrative support for the organization. In addition to general health care services, numerous other services are provided to the patient population.

At this time, all information utilized by the organization is paper based including medical records, scheduling, and various information generated by all other operations of the organization. Procedures and processes are not formally documented by the organization and the staff is having difficulty keeping up with the daily demands of normal operations. Documentation is lost or misplaced on a fairly regular basis, putting the staff into crisis mode as they try to make things right. Dr. Smith, the leading physician on the staff, realizes that the way the organization operates must change, but does not know where to start.

Assignment instructions:

1. Write your paper on your computer using MS Word or a similar tool.
2. Name the assignment “your name”BPP with the applicable extension, for example “yournameBPP.doc”.
3. When you are done, submit your completed assignment using the link above.

How this will be graded:

Structure, Organization, Ease of reading, Grammar: 3 Points

• This Assignment had a very, very specific structure. Identify 2-4 issues. Come up with solutions for those issues and summarize them briefly. Provide a table with Pros and Cons for each, and wrap it all up with an overall (but brief) recommendation – what could have been done to help prevent this disaster from a PM perspective. DID YOU FOLLOW THIS STRUCTURE?
• Did you follow the advice given in the lectures and From Your Instructor about the format?
• Did you follow rules of English grammar, spelling, and syntax? Did you fix errors pointed out via Word’s editing capabilities (e.g. squiggly blue or red underlined text)?

Content: 9 Points

• Is it clear from reading your assignment that you read the case and understood what happened that led up to the Deepwater Horizon explosion?
• Did you ‘dig deeper’? Some people identify very technical issues – did you find the underlying reasoning that may have driven decisions to go a certain way technically?
• Did you keep your writing concise and to the point? Part of the intent of this assignment is an exercise in expressing important ideas in as efficient a way as possible.
• Was there a logical flow from your Issue Identification to your Proposed Solutions, to your Pros and Cons and to your conclusion?
• If you did have ‘extra’ information to exhibit, did you put it in an Appendix rather than in the body of the text? Again, the focus is on a concise, crisp presentation of your arguments.

References and resources: 2 Points

• Did you provide several relevant references that helped make your points? Of course you can use the main MIT/Sloan case as a reference, but did you reach out and find out more about the Deepwater Horizon from other sources?

Other things to consider:

• Did you add value from your own professional and/or personal experience?
• Did you make appropriate use of figures and tables in an appendix? Don’t substitute quantity for quality here – one good, relevant, and meaningful small table is worth 100 randomly inserted graphs and charts.
• Did you really take on the viewpoint of a project leader here, and consider the way the team was motivated, the way the different stakeholders communicated (or didn’t), the culture of the different companies?