John Sirica and The Ammidown Murder Essay - 2416 Words

When I discovered that my English class had to do a Research Paper, I became horrified. I thought students only did this when they were finishing graduate school not when they were starting their first year in college. All I knew about research papers was that there is an overwhelming amount of research to do. In my efforts to complete this obstacle and not bore myself to sleep with researching, I wanted to do an interesting topic, but I had no idea where to begin. I spent hours going through a great number of subjects and people, but once I found topic remotely interesting, I could not find much information on the Library of Congress website. Therefore, I decided to choose one word that would hopefully lead me to an interesting topic. I†¦show more content†¦Ammidown. This is typically because John Sirica was more important to the United States history due to his involvement in the Watergate Trails. I continued searching further into the United States v. Ammidown, when John was Chief Judge for the United States District Court, by finding sources on the Library of Congress website. At the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress there is a collection summary on The Papers of John J. Sirica that has 123 containers holding 38,000 items. I visited the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress on April 4th , 2012. I was able to get hold of his Bench Book and files on the Ammidown case. I took a few pictures of some of the documents, but the information was overwhelming. A few weeks later I decided to come back to fully immerse myself into his Bench Book because I felt like that was the best way to comprehend John Sirica’s thoughts and opinions on the case. Nevertheless, the information within the book was hand written and is difficult to read. I used a camera to take pictures of the page that related to the case I’m researching in the bench book where I have started on deciphering the handwriting. Yet, the amount of time I have spent on trying to do so has made me realize that decoding the rest will take more than a while. There were other files