News

The New Mexico Supreme Court recently cited Wilson Center research in a unanimous opinion that raises the standards for eyewitness identification under the state constitution. The opinion in State v. Martinez affirmed a man’s convictions for killing two Santa Fe teenagers and adopted a new standard for determining whether eyewitness identification of a criminal suspect […]

Wake County Superior Court Judge Vince Rozier released the order today appointing Wilson Center Director Thomas Maher as a special master in ongoing litigation in how the state is handling COVID-19 in prisons. You can read more about the case and the appointment here and read the full order below. 20 CVS 500110 Order Appointing […]

Wilson Center Director Brandon Garrett and Vanderbilt Law School Criminal Justice Director Christopher Slobogin released a new article today in the German Law Article, “The Law on Police Use of Force in the United States.” The Abstract: Recent events in the United States have highlighted the fact that American police resort to force, including deadly […]

Wilson Center Executive Director Thomas Maher has been appointed special master in the North Carolina litigation over the state prison system’s handling of COVID-19. NAACP v. Cooper was filed earlier this year on behalf of several civil rights organizations, including the North Carolina NAACP and ACLU, as well as several incarcerated individuals. The plaintiffs have […]

By: Sydney Gaviser Eyewitness testimony is one of the oldest and most basic forms of trial evidence. If a witness sees a person commit a crime, reports to the police, and is able to identify the culprit in a lineup procedure, the system must have worked. Unfortunately, research tells us that eyewitnesses can and do make […]

Dr. Marvin S. Swartz, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke and a faculty member at the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at the Duke School of Law recently wrote a piece for Care4Carolina about a key element of successful reentry programs for individuals with severe mental illness: ongoing […]

Researchers from the Wilson Center for Science and Justice have been scraping jail data in Durham in an effort to analyze pretrial policies and practices concerning the use of cash bail. Wilson Center Research Director William E. Crozier, Center Director Brandon L. Garrett, and PhD. candidate Arvind Krishnamurthy wrote “The Transparency of Jail Data,” an […]

By De’Ja Wood Over the summer, the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, sparked national protests and discourse about the need for radical police reform. Organizers across the nation called on their local and state governments to defund the police, invest in community resources that address the conditions that create violence within communities, and […]