Offender Presentation

You are currently a pro bono junior attorney working for a legal team that specializes in criminal defense. You have been asked to gather background information on a defendant of your choosing. In order to help the team build a solid defense, you must provide a 10-15 minute oral presentation (using Microsoft PowerPoint) explaining 2 biopsychosocial risk factors that could have contributed to their antisocial behavior.

You can choose any offender for your presentation, but you must be able to find enough publicly available information to provide a good defense. The legal team will be using the presentation to determine whether you would be a good addition to their legal team for their next case. There are 3 main parts to this presentation:

Topic Scope: 

The legal team first needs to know the scope of your presentation and whom you want to defend. Thus, you should identify the offender that you want to defend, describe the relevant history of the offender, provide clear details of their crimes, and identify 2 specific biopsychosocial risk factors that the offender has that seem relevant in explaining their antisocial behavior.

Explanation: The legal team also needs to evaluate how strong your defense argument will be. You should clearly, thoughtfully, and thoroughly explain how or why the biopsychosocial factors could have contributed to the offender’s antisocial behavior. You should try to use scholarly sources to help you make connections between the biopsychosocial factors and the offender’s antisocial behavior.

Sanction: 

Make a specific recommendation for what sort of sentence or punishment you think the offender should receive (this might not be the same sentence/punishment that they actually received in real life — remember that you are supposed to be their legal representative!). Be sure to explain why this would be an appropriate sentence/punishment based on the biopsychosocial factors/explanation you identified — in other words, explain why the sentence/punishment you are recommending would be relevant and effective for your defendant. Please also explain why this punishment is more appropriate than what the prosecution would recommend (this means you need to clearly identify what the prosecution would argue for!).