As well as doing a three-month internship, I decided that I would also like to take part in the Missouri Project. The research is dedicated to examining Missouri’s death penalty in the modern era, and the opportunity to be a part of such a potentially influential piece of research into the death penalty was something I felt I could not pass up. I knew that the work would not be as exciting as the Amicus general internships, however I recognised its value and I am pleased to say that I was involved with this research. The majority of the work included collecting intentional homicide records and data from the different counties within Missouri, as well as reading through case files and inputting the relevant data into the codebook designed by the researcher. This work allowed me to gain a greater understanding of how the trials work here in the US and which documents are usually included in a case file. Working in an office with an attorney also meant that I was able to learn about the United States criminal justice system in greater detail, as she was able to answer any questions that I had and explain things such as the reason for a sentence of ‘999 years, 12 months and 365 days.’ I definitely feel that I have gained a lot more from my second internship as a result of the information and skills that my involvement on the Missouri Project enabled me to obtain. St. Louis was also a great city to be able to explore for one month and was probably somewhere in the US that I would not have visited otherwise.
Wednesday, August 17, 2016