Bonnie, the Out-law
Bonnie and Clyde are a criminal phenomenon. Although barely known during their robbery spree, they gained extreme fame after their death. Why? Clyde Barrow was responsible for the death of 13 people, mostly police officers. And Bonnie was his getaway driver in the Barrow gang. Why do they matter, and why did they gain fame for being small-time criminals? Well, known as one of the first criminal couples, Bonnie and Clyde’s relationship was romanticized to sound like an unstoppable couple until their death and would do anything for each other. However, the reality was vastly different. Bonnie was a bored housewife at the age of nineteen when she met Clyde and was drawn into his criminal orbit. In some ways, Bonnie was a victim of Clyde. I explored the fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights in the context of Bonnie and her life that was ended because of the use of deadly force in an unnecessarily dangerous situation, the troublesome background of Bonnie Parker's life, and the poetry and literary analysis of Bonnie Parker's poems and the pressure of the law that cause their death.
Civics
The purpose of researching the fourth and Fourteenth Amendments and Bonnie Parker is to understand what would have happened had the establishment of standardized excessive and deadly force been created in the 1930s. Because these standards were only truly developed in the 1980s, it is a cause for concern when analyzing the legal cases debating the use of force any time before Tennessee v. Garner in 1985. I connected the fourth and Fourteenth Amendments with Bonnie Parker through a proxy trial in which I created a scenario in which Bonnie Parker lived and faced trial defending her actions and even suing the police for using excessive and deadly force in an unnecessarily dangerous situation. To synthesize, I used an opening and closing statement to convey the entirety of the trial and a reference list. I used the cases from the 1980s to present to argue her defense and provide context on standards of the law that have developed.
English
On the other side of the law, there was relief knowing that Bonnie & Clyde were dead. However, not many statements were made after their death because they did not gain fame until much later for being known as a criminal couple. I decided to re-contextualize the situation and create a speech from the perspective of a governor addressing their failed arrest. That being said, the speech synthesized the voice of the law, and the voice of Bonnie. So, I created a speech in which a poem is read, but it also included phrases Bonnie used in her poems within the speech portions of the product. The poem itself is an allegory for Bonnie as it describes a young cow wandering from her herd because she saw a bull. In the speech, it condemns Bonnie, and references how the cow (Bonnie) was caught.
Art
How did a nineteen-year-old housewife get caught in a criminal web and derail her life forever. Although Bonnie and Clyde are glorified as one of the most die-hard couples there have ever been, being honest, she would have lived had she not met Clyde. She was sucked into a man's world and his problems, and she paid for that mistake with her life eventually. Even after her leaving her husband, she still wore the wedding band of her former husband and had a tattoo of him. Meeting Clyde was not the end-all-be-all for Bonnie considering she still had plenty of mementos from her former life lovingly. Understanding why a woman would sacrifice her life and freedom at the ripe age of nineteen for a man she never truly knew can make any person question what the foundation of that relationship was and the power Clyde Barrow had over her. The goal of my art product was to explore Bonnie Parker's past and synthesize it with the person she was at the time of her death. Although this project explored other thinking skills, understanding who she was before she met Clyde Barrow and how that changed her throughout an acrylic portrait in which her past and present collide synthesizes two parts of the same woman.