News

The Washington Post editorial board weighed in recently about the unfair practice of suspending driver’s licenses over nonpayment of court fines and fees, calling the policy “self-defeating” to public safety. Last week, the Senate introduced the bipartisan Driving for Opportunity Act to create incentives to stop debt-based driver’s license suspensions. Read more about the pros of […]

Duke Center for Science and Justice Postdoctoral Research Fellow Travis Seale-Carlisle has authored, along with other academics, a pre-print under review about how police should test a witness’s memory of a criminal perpetrator. Seale-Carlisle has been a postdoc with the Center for 10 months. He said the technology identified in the paper has strong potential […]

Roy Cooper may become the first North Carolina governor in more than 40 years to complete a term without granting clemency to a single person, which includes sentence commutations and pardons of forgiveness or innocence. Three faculty at the Duke Law Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility wrote a strong editorial this week calling […]

While people across the nation took to the streets to protest the brutal police killing of George Floyd, lawmakers responded by introducing a series of police reform policies. To date, there have been at least 78 pieces of police reform-related legislation, including bills, resolutions and executive orders, introduced in 15 states and Washington, DC. The […]

Several Duke Law faculty spoke last week about the current state of policing throughout the United States, with an emphasis on how policies and biases impact communities of color. Dean Kerry Abrams hosted the conversation with Brandon L. Garrett, the L. Neil Williams, Jr. Professor of Law and the Director of the Duke Center for Science […]

The federal government was set this week to carry out its first execution in nearly 17 years, but a U.S. District Court judge in Washington has intervened. Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered the U.S. Department of Justice to delay the executions of Daniel Lewis Lee, Wesley Ira Purkey, Dustin Lee Honken, and Keith Dwayne Nelson until […]

Gov. Roy Cooper has officially appointed the full 25-person Racial Equity in Criminal Justice Task Force, and the group will meet for the first time at 10 a.m. today. The Task Force will develop and help implement policy solutions to address systemic racial bias in criminal justice and submit legislative and municipal recommendations on or before […]

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a historic ruling protecting employees from being fired on the basis of their sexual orientation under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The 6-3 opinion was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch and is considered a major victory for the LGBTQ community. Duke Law faculty shared […]