Annotated Bibliography

Adapt from your White Paper

The Annotated Bibliography is an assignment you are already prepared to post if you’ve been adding bibliographic information to your White Paper since the day you first posted it. Most likely you have consulted 15 or more sources in the course of your semester of research, but restrict your Annotated Bibliography to the 15 most useful sources.

A Model Annotated Bibliography
—the first 5 sources—

1. Huff, Ronald C. “Wrongful Convictions: The American Experience.” Questia Trusted Online Research. Canadian Journal of Criminology, 15 Jan. 2004. Web. 27 Apr. 2015.

Background: This article discusses the depth of wrongful convictions in the United States as well as other nations such as Canada. It focuses on how wrongful convictions occur and on organizations that are working to try and prevent them.

How I Used It: This article helped me discover the most common reasons why innocent people end up in prison. I used it demonstrate that a mixture of intentional and unintentional actions on the part of witnesses and prosecutors most often landed innocent people in jail. The defendants were often badly represented, and the prosecutors exhibited an appalling willingness to cajole, coerce, or bargain with witnesses to get the testimony they needed to convict innocent people.

2. Liptak, Adam. “Study Suspects Thousands of False Convictions.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 18 Apr. 2004. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.

Background: This article from The New York Times focuses on a study conducted by The University of Michigan about 328 criminal cases in which the convicted person was released from prison. Upon finding this evidence, the University believed that thousands of innocent people are in prison for crimes they did not commit. While the article does not fixate on DNA exonerations, there is a large portion of it that suggests new DNA evidence can easily overturn wrongful convictions.

How I Used It: The most common way to overturn wrongful convictions proves to be the finding and presenting of DNA evidence that was ignored at trial. The study highlights exactly how large of a problem false convictions are in the United States by using a small group of convicted inmates and discovering exactly how many of them are actually innocent, something I proved in my essay on a larger scale.

  1.  “250 Exonerated, and the Need for Reform.” – The Innocence Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.

Background: This extraordinary document from “The Innocence Project”details the cases of 250 convicts falsely imprisoned, many for 20 years or more, on the basis of misidentification, false testimony, questionable evidence, or flawed test results. The Innocence Project is dedicated to helping free innocent victims that were falsely convicted. It uses DNA evidence to exclude convicts who have consistently and loudly protested their innocence of the crimes they’ve been convicted of.

How I Used It: I used concrete examples of people that were helped by the discovery or reopening of cases based on DNA or other evidence. The evidence is clear that poor defendants with or without prior convictions who feel powerless to fight a system that appears stacked against them can be coerced into taking plea deals even when they know they haven’t committed a crime.

  1.  Dewan, Shaila. “Prosecutors Block Access to DNA Testing for Inmates.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 17 May 2009. Web. 20 Nov. 2015.

Background: This article focuses on two men, one of which is in prison for a rape he insists he did not commit, and the other who says DNA evidence would prove he was falsely convicted of a double murder. The article states that prosecutors often resist reopening cases despite the fact that the re-institution of a closed case could potentially free an innocent person from prison.

How I Used It: I used the evidence of this source to demonstrate the unconscionable efforts of prosecutors to avoid reopening a case to do further DNA testing. Quite often, law enforcers are content with placing a person in prison and to them, a person in jail is a win whether they are innocent or not. This obviously is a major flaw in the justice system, which I exposed with the help of this article as it offers a backstage pass into the world of criminology.

  1. “Criminology” Beirne, Piers, and Messerschmidt, James. Criminology. Fort Worth, Texas. Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1991.

Background: This book provides background on all things related to Criminology. The chapter dedicated to false convictions helped guide my research into prosecutorial misconduct, false eyewitness testimony, and the difficulty of getting new trials even when new evidence is discovered.

How I Used It: This book did not provide me specific details of case histories, but it was invaluable as a resource for terminology and explanations of laws, court proceedings, and criminal investigations.

—continue to 15 sources—

ASSIGNMENT SPECIFICS

  • Adapt your White Paper into an Annotated Bibliography.
  • 10-15 Sources. Most likely after a semester of research, you will have a dozen strong sources or so to include. The upper limit is 15. Under no circumstances cite fewer than 10.
  • Broad Range of Credible Source Types. As we have mentioned many times, your sources are to be a blend of popular and peer-reviewed academic sources. They may also include first person reports, interviews, surveys. The model above uses an academic journal, two New York Times articles, an advocacy website, and a nonfiction textbook.
  • “How I Used It.” The “How I Intend to Use it” section no longer applies in the finished Bibliography. Alter those sections to produce the “How I Used It” sections.
  • Call your post Bibliography—Username.
  • Publish your bibliography in the Bibliography category and of course, your Username category.

BEFORE YOU POST.

Please consult this analysis of a first draft that makes common errors.

An Uncorrected Source Entry

  1. Copley, Margaret Freeman, and John B. Bodensteiner. “Chronic Sorrow in Families of Disabled Children.” Journal of Child Neurology, vol. 2, no. 1, 1987, pp. 67–70., doi:10.1177/088307388700200113.

Background:  This article is about two common words chronic and sorrow. Chronic sorrow describe the process of parent bereavement in response to life with a disabled child. It also discusses how parents and siblings have to put many hours into caring for the disabled child.

Instructor Notes:

I read the article. It is indeed about Chronic Sorrow, which, as you suggest is the condition parents suffer not at the loss of a child, but at their ongoing grief that their child was born with and will likely always live with a disability. They grieve “the loss of an idealized normal child.” You promised that the article would inform me “how parents and siblings have to put many hours into caring for the disabled child,” but that didn’t seem particularly valuable (or worthy of an academic journal article), so I went to see what you weren’t telling me. 

It describes the inescapability of the pain and sadness that must be endured indefinitely. One parent reports that he and others suffer “months and years of anguish, roller coaster cycles of elation and depression as the parents try to deny the evidence before their eyes that their child is less than ordinary or normal.” Which is poignant, and interesting, but doesn’t get to the heart of the parent-child dynamic I believe your paper wants to describe, the one between the parents and the disabled child’s siblings. I read on.

Those long hours of extra care have relevance I didn’t expect: “Solnit and Stark report that parents cannot effectively mourn the loss of the idealized child because of the unrelenting daily demands of the living disabled child.” If that’s the case, those parents, suffering their unresolved grief, will not have the psychic strength to properly nurture their “normal” children as they deserve. And that will likely cause resentment in the siblings. 

Parents who feel “helpless, hopeless, and anxious” all the time, and who react with “anger, resentment, and aggression” to the frustration of their predicament will not parent as well as they should. Nothing in the article speaks directly to the impact of the disabled child on siblings. That connection will be yours to make. My suggestion from here would be to seek articles that address how the DEATH of a sibling affects the parent-child relationship with the survivors. There will be plenty of evidence there that you can use by analogy to make a case that the siblings suffer disaffection from the parent along with the burden of being the surviving child, of whom much more will be expected and demanded.

Some indication of that family dynamic should have been in your Background section, to give a reader of your Bibliography a sense of the value of your source.

How I used it: This article proves that taking care of a child with disabilities is a hard job and takes toll on the family.

Instructor Notes:

Indeed it does, but saying so does not inform the reader. Details, please.

The Same Source after Revisions

  1. Copley, Margaret Freeman, and John B. Bodensteiner. “Chronic Sorrow in Families of Disabled Children.” Journal of Child Neurology, vol. 2, no. 1, 1987, pp. 67–70., doi:10.1177/088307388700200113.

Background: The author has collected and analyzed the psychological literature examining the Chronic Sorrow of parents who give birth to children with disabilities. She describes the ongoing grief—similar to the grief of parents whose child dies—caused by “the loss of an idealized normal child.” One parent reports that he and others suffer “months and years of anguish, roller coaster cycles of elation and depression as the parents try to deny the evidence before their eyes that their child is less than ordinary or normal.” 

The effect on normal siblings is not described in this source, but is easy to imagine from what is described. “Parents cannot effectively mourn the loss of the idealized child because of the unrelenting daily demands of the living disabled child,” which will reasonably deprive them of the psychic strength to properly nurture their “normal” children as they deserve. And that will likely cause resentment in the siblings. Parents who feel “helpless, hopeless, and anxious” all the time, and who react with “anger, resentment, and aggression” to the frustration of their predicament will not parent as well as they should.

How I Used It: I used this article to establish that parents of a handicapped child are stunted in their ability to properly nurture their other children. Then, since the parents are grieving, I sought and found articles that address how the DEATH of a sibling affects the parent-child relationship with the survivors. Those healthy siblings suffer a loss of affection from their parents along with the burden of being the surviving child, of whom much more is expected and demanded.

GRADE DETAILS

  • DUE MON APR 19 before class (11:59PM SUN APR 18)
  • Customary late penalties. (0-24 hours 10%) (24-48 hours 20%) (48+ hours, 0 grade)
  • Portfolio grade category (75%)

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