News

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 […]

By Alexi DeLara  In recent decades, researchers, judges, and journalists have raised questions regarding the reliability of a range of widely utilized forensic techniques. This includes, but is not limited to, forensic comparison methods, such as latent fingerprint and firearm comparisons. The article, “Mock Jurors’ Evaluation of Firearm Examiner Testimony Notes,” written by Brandon L. […]

The Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law School is hiring an Associate Director. From the job description: The Wilson Center for Science and Justice aims to conduct interdisciplinary research to advance criminal justice and civil rights. The Center’s mission includes three important components: (1) research, (2) policy and law reform, and (3) […]

By Brandon Garrett Last night, Roger Hood, a champion of justice and international leader in criminology and in death penalty research, the founder of the Centre of Criminology at Oxford, and the greatest friend and mentor, to myself and countless other scholars, passed away in Oxford. His most recent work examined the death penalty in […]