Write a Research Paper on Does the death penalty deter crime.
Length: 1500-1600 words (not including notes and works cited)
audience: academic
inline citations, notes, and works cited: MLA format
point of view: third person
your attitude: objective and analytical
goal: to shed light on a small research question that might be illuminated with data
sources: academic (Google scholar or governmental sources are good)
Cite the sources for all assertions of fact. Academic writing provides the reader with the location of your data. If you rely on a third party to provide data or results of studies, then you must acknowledge the third party as well as the person who did the original research or data collection. Cutting and pasting text without using quotation marks is plagiarism. Simply paraphrasing someone else's work is also plagiarism.
If you pick a reasonable topic (which should be approved by me) and operationalize your variables sensibly (if in doubt, discuss it with me as well as your classmates during peer review), you do not need to reach a definitive conclusion. You must simply analyze what you find rationally. You are looking for truth. You should not try to force a conclusion from ambiguous data, nor should you reach grandiose conclusions from limited data.
Sample research question: Does the death penalty deter crime?
The independent variable here would be the presence or absence of the death penalty in particular jurisdictions. The dependent variable might be the murder rate. If you look across various jurisdictions globally, you will find differences in the relationship between these variables, but these differences could be influenced by other political, legal, social, and cultural variables as well as by the presence or absence of the death penalty. You might try to eliminate or reduce some of these confounding variables by taking a closer look at jurisdictions that have changed their death penalty laws. You could compare the murder rate or the trend in the murder rate prior to the change in the law and after the change in the law. In order to reduce extraneous variables further, you might want to look at several jurisdictions that are widely separated from each other. You might want to look at both adding and eliminating the death penalty. You find whatever you find.