8 minute read
The Justice League
The Criminal Justice Students Who Launched a 20-Year Winning Streak
It was 2003, and a van full of students was on its way to Orlando, Florida. There would be no fairytale welcome when they arrived; they were headed to the scene of a homicide.
But that was just one thing on their minds. There would also be shooting, which is why they were glad to have sharpshooter Major Richard Gillespie, ’02, on their side. Not to mention hundreds of other young people like them from across the country, whom they would have to take on face-to-face.
Scott Chenault, ’02, ’04, was their leader, in his first year of graduate school in the Criminal Justice program at what was then Central Missouri State University (now the University of Central Missouri). He’d learned the ropes as an undergrad, and he was sharp as a tack. He’d cracked cases like this before, taking home badges of honor in the most nerve-racking tests of crime-fighting prowess and physical agility.
Chenault and Gillespie took turns driving through the night. When they arrived at the crime scene, Chenault and two of his top teammates were briefed on the situation. They slid on their latex gloves and shoe coverings, then pushed open the door to the room where the homicide had taken place.
Standing in the doorway, they took in every detail, making note of things that were awry — questions they’d need to ask witnesses, objects and surfaces they’d want to test for fingerprints, debris left behind that they would send off to the lab — in short, everything they would do if they were real crime scene investigators.
CMSU was a small fish in a big pond, with much larger teams from schools across the country — including doctoral universities — competing for the American Criminal Justice Association Lambda Alpha Epsilon (ACJA-LAE) national title. They did not yet have official team practice sessions, but these students had one of the nation’s best Criminal Justice programs as their training ground in Warrensburg.
“Very few teams just went out there and competed with what knowledge they learned in the classroom,” says Josh Peery, ’03, one of the students who helped revive CMSU’s team in the early 2000s and now serves as deputy director of the Northern Parole Region for the Kansas Department of Corrections. “We weren’t anticipating coming back with so many trophies and had to make room in the van.”
Instead of a van, students in the university’s LAE Gamma Epsilon Delta (GED) chapter now take a bus to the competition. A roster of fewer than 10 has grown to more than 30 members who practice two to three times a week. But what hasn’t changed is the level of education that gives them a solid foundation in the knowledge and skills necessary to rival teams from even the most prestigious universities in the LAE national conference.
Real-Life Learning
In addition to faculty members with decades of experience in the field, what continues to set UCM’s Criminal Justice and Criminology (CJC) program apart is students’ exposure to different branches of the criminal justice system.
The Missouri Court of Appeals has been holding oral arguments on campus for 25 years, thanks to Professor Emeritus Dane Miller, ’77, who taught at the university from 1977 to 2015. The annual event has since been carried on by Associate Professor Benecia Carmack. Classes regularly welcome guest speakers and visit courts, jails, police offices and juvenile facilities in the region.
It was during a trip to the Kansas City Police Academy as a student that Davenport Police Corporal Erin (Whitney) Pape, ’01, ’09, says her career path “just clicked.” Her education and experience gave her an edge when she got a job in her home state of Iowa and was sent to the police academy.
“For me, going to the academy was like a review because I’d already learned all of this,” says Pape, an LAE member at the start of the team’s winning streak. “I was in class at the academy with people who had no college experience, and learning the basics of criminal justice really gave me an advantage. … [At CMSU] it wasn’t just sitting in the classroom; they gave us a lot of opportunity to see real-life stuff, and that really helped.”
CJC has taken more students abroad than any other academic program at UCM, sponsoring international trips since 1999.
Miller and Professor Emeritus Don Wallace, who also joined the faculty in the late 1970s, were instrumental in getting the study tours started.
In 2002, Wallace launched the Journal of the Institute of Justice and International Studies, which was published annually at the university through 2014. The department also sponsored the International Corrections Symposium, bringing 19 scholars, judges and practitioners to Warrensburg, 11 of whom traveled from Wales, the Netherlands, Hungary, Ireland, Taiwan or Sweden. The symposium happened to start on Sept. 11, 2001, a day etched in the memory of every speaker and attendee.
“This three-day symposium was open to the entire campus community, and there could not have been a more uplifting place during those tragic days in September of 2001,” Wallace recalls. “As one of the scholars from the Netherlands voiced in her remarks to the audience, the symposium was about ‘finding common denominators for humane treatment that will sustain, instead of destroy, the ethical standards of us as a society.’”
In May 2002, Pape, Chenault and Peery visited prisons, courts, police departments and universities in Hungary on a study tour. Chenault flew to Hungary straight from the wedding of his friend and former roommate, Darrell Schmidli, ’01. (A few years later, Peery would be the best man at Chenault’s wedding, and Chenault would officiate Peery’s.)
Schmidli was LAE-GED president and Chenault was vice president in 1999 when the team won its first regional competition in Liberal, Kansas. Both Schmidli and Chenault were first-generation college students, and Chenault was also the first in his family to graduate high school. Schmidli’s father and brother were police officers, and he says getting a degree and participating in LAE made him much better prepared for the academy and his career.
“The thing that helped me the most was the people skills — just getting comfortable talking in front of people, meeting new people,” says Schmidli, who is now patrol captain for the City of Independence, Missouri. “We’re not all from the same walk of life, but we all walk in the same line of work.”
Chenault went on to earn his Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska at Omaha and has been a CJC professor at UCM for 13 years. He is now a mentor to first-generation students and one of the faculty members leading experiential learning opportunities like the ones he benefited from as a student.
In 2014, Chenault, Miller and Betsy Kreisel, ’92, ’94, traveled to Shanghai and Beijing as guests of the East China University of Politics and Law, visiting the People’s Court and meeting with Chinese judges and prosecutors. Before becoming associate dean of UCM’s Harmon College of Business and Professional Studies, Kreisel served as a CJC professor and department chair. She was one of the faculty members who accompanied Chenault and his fellow LAE members to Hungary in 2002 and has since traveled with him as a colleague on trips to Belize, Spain, Italy and France.
“To see how students who have never been out of the country blossom and experience other countries is amazing,” Kreisel says.
Chenault now serves as executive director of the Consortium for Transatlantic Studies and Scholarship, which offers a semesterlong study abroad opportunity for students from any major at the Universidad de Alcala near Madrid, Spain. He credits LAE with helping him expand his horizons and build a professional network.
“Those relationships, that networking, is incredibly valuable, even if our students don’t realize that now,” he says.
Along with professional skills and connections, Chenault and his teammates from the early years of LAE-GED’s winning streak built lifelong friendships. Although their careers have taken them to different locations, they come back together for recruiting events, reunions and Homecoming at the place where it all began.
“I just feel like that time in my life was so important and really made me into who I am,” Pape reflects on her university experience. “I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
