The Center for Science and Justice produces reports, amicus briefs, and academic articles in a range of disciplines. These are selected publications.
Driving Injustice: Consequences and Disparities in North Carolina Criminal Legal and Traffic Debt
North Carolina is our Exhibit A in what can go wrong when an entire state relies on fines and fees from low-level cases to generate revenue. A team of researchers from the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law released this report describing three studies examining fines, fees, and driver’s license suspensions in North Carolina.
Monitoring Pretrial Reform in Harris County: Second Report of the Court-Appointed Monitor
Duke Law professor and Wilson Center Director Brandon Garrett was appointed last year as independent monitor for a landmark federal bail reform settlement that could become a national model for cash bail reform. This report by the monitor team describes the first year of work evaluating the implementation of the misdemeanor bail reforms in Harris County, Texas.
Life Without Parole Sentencing in North Carolina
What explains the puzzle of life without parole (LWOP) sentencing in the United States? In the past two decades, LWOP sentences have reached record highs, with over 50,000 prisoners serving LWOP. Yet during this same period, homicide rates have steadily declined. To shed light on what might explain the sudden rise of LWOP, this report examines characteristics of the more than 1,627 cases in which LWOP was imposed from 1995 to 2017, in North Carolina, one of the states that imposes the largest numbers of these sentences.
The Explosion of Unpaid Criminal Fines and Fees in North Carolina
In over 1.72 million cases total – and 120,000 cases each year criminal courts in North Carolina have imposed fees that a person cannot or does not pay. A failure to comply with the court order to pay, or an “FTC,” is then entered in the case. This report sheds light on the scope of the FTC phenomenon in North Carolina.
Changing the Law to Change Policing: First Steps
Recent events have brought to the fore longstanding concerns about the nature of policing in the United States and how it undermines racial equity. As an institution, policing needs significant reconsideration. This report outlines a list of urgently-needed reforms, compiled by a small group of law school faculty, each of whom runs or is associated with an academic center devoted to policing and the criminal justice system.
Juvenile Life Without Parole (LWOP) in North Carolina
This report describes the rise and then the fall in juvenile LWOP sentencing in a leading sentencing state, North Carolina, to better understand these trends and their implications. We examine the cases of 94 people in North Carolina who were sentenced to LWOP as juveniles. View draft legislation on juvenile LWOP in NC.
Self-Policing: Eyewitness Identification Policies in Virginia
This report assesses the adoption of police eyewitness identification policies in Virginia. Policymakers were focused on this problem, in part, due to a series of DNA exonerations in cases involving misidentifications. To remedy this problem, in 2011, the state law enforcement policy agency drafted a detailed model policy on eyewitness procedure. An earlier 2013 study found those practices were only haltingly being adopted. This 2018 study, however, found near universal adoption of these best practices.
Driver’s License Suspensions in North Carolina
This report analyzes data concerning the 1,225,000 active driver’s licenses suspensions in North Carolina for non-driving related reasons. These constitute about 15% of all adult drivers in the state. The Center conducted a series of mixed-model linear regressions on suspensions from 2010 to 2017, analyzing the effects of race, poverty, population size, traffic court cases and traffic stops on suspensions per county.
This report, first published in the Academy for Justice, A Report on Scholarship and Criminal Justice Reform and then updated and published in the Annual Review of Criminology, describes a revolution in criminal procedure and in law and science research, in response to wrongful convictions.
This amicus brief by was filed by Sterne Kessler Goldstein & Fox on behalf of Brandon Garrett and Yvette Garcia Missri at the Wilson Center and Andrea Roth of the University of California at Berkeley Law School. It regards the Orange County DNA Database, a s0-called “spit and acquit” database, where prosecutors offered to drop or reduce misdemeanor charges, if defendants agreed to provide a DNA sample. This brief argues that the practice encouraged coercive prosecutorial power and violated rights to privacy.
This amicus brief was filed on behalf of several scholars and organizations, including Brandon Garrett and Yvette Garcia Missri at the Wilson Center and Gabe Berumen, J.D. Candidate, Class of 2023, Duke University School of Law, and the Idaho Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. It argues that the Board of Immigration Appeals erred in concluding that an individual drug substance is an element of the state’s criminal code.
This amicus brief, filed on behalf of Brandon Garrett at the Wilson Center and the Innocence Project, argues the trial court improperly admitted inherently unreliable and unscientific testimony that bite marks on the victim were made by the defendant.
This amicus brief, filed on behalf of scholars of criminal, constitutional law, poverty law and access to justice, describes the importance of conducting a robust due process and equal protection analysis when examining the imposition of sanctions on persons without regard to their ability to pay.
This amicus brief, filed on behalf of scholars representing a variety of disciplines, including law, psychology, neuroscience, and statistics, describes the importance of not relying solely on in-court identifications by eyewitnesses.
This amicus brief, filed by the Amicus Lab team on behalf of researchers, argued that the blood pattern evidence introduced in two Texas murder trials was unreliable, based on more recent scientific research.
This amicus brief, described in this story, was filed on behalf of 26 leading forensic analysts, statisticians, and researchers, who advocated for careful analysis of the reliable application of fingerprint methods to the facts in a case.
Brandon Garrett and Lee Kovarsky – forthcoming California Law Review
The Law and Science of Eyewitnesss Identifications
Thomas Albright and Brandon Garrett – forthcoming Boston University Law Review
Convicting with confidence? Why we should not over-rely on eyewitness confidence
By: Shari R. Berkowitz, Brandon L. Garrett, Kimberly M. Fenn & Elizabeth F. Loftus – Memory (2020)
By: William Crozier, Brandon L. Garrett and Arvind Krishnamurthy – Wake Forest Law Review (2020)
Juror Appraisals of Forensic Evidence: Effects of Blind Proficiency and Cross-Examination
By: William Crozier, Jeff Kukucka and Brandon L. Garrett – Forensic Science International (2020)
By: Gregory P. Mitchell and Brandon L. Garrett – Behavioral Science and Law (2019)
Undeliverable: Suspended Driver’s Licenses and the Problem of Notice
By: Karima Modjadidi, Brandon L. Garrett, and William Crozier – UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review (2020)
Juvenile Life Without Parole in North Carolina
By: Ben Finholt, Brandon L. Garrett, Karima Modjadidi, and Kristen Renberg – Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology (2020)
By: Brandon L. Garrett and Megan Stevenson – Behavioral Science and Law (2020)
By: Brandon L. Garrett and John Monahan – California Law Review (2020)
Error Rates, Likelihood Ratios, and Jury Evaluation of Forensic Evidence
By: Brandon L. Garrett, William E. Crozer, and Rebecca Grady – Journal of Forensic Sciences (2020)
Driven to Failure: An Empirical Analysis of Driver’s License Suspension in North Carolina
By: William E. Crozier and Brandon L. Garrett – Duke Law Journal (2020)
Life Without Parole Sentencing
By: Brandon L. Garrett, Karima Modjadidi, Kristen Renberg and Travis Seale-Carlisle – Duke Law School Public Law & Legal Theory Series No. 2020-21 (2020)
By: Brandon L. Garrett – Judicature (2020)
Wealth, Equality, and Due Process
By: Brandon L. Garrett – William & Mary Law Review (2019-2020)
Factoring the Role of Eyewitness Evidence in the Courtroom
By: Brandon L. Garrett, Alice Liu, Karen Kafadar, Joanne Yaffe, and Chad S. Dodson – Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (2020)
By: Michele M. Easter, Jeffrey W. Swanson, Allison G. Robertson, Lorna L. Moser, and Marvin S. Swartz – Journal of Mental Health (2020)
By: Allison G. Robertson, Michele M. Easter, Hsiu-Ju Lin, Dalia Khoury, Joshua Pierce, Jeffrey W. Swanson, and Marvin S. Swartz – Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment (2020)