Resources

This amicus brief filed on behalf of the Innocence Project and the Wilson Center argues that the bite mark evidence and testimony used in State v. Richardson lacked scientific foundation.

Wilson Center Faculty Director Brandon Garrett serves as independent monitor for the landmark federal bail reform settlement in Harris County, TX. This second report by the monitor team describes the first year of work evaluating the implementation of the misdemeanor bail reforms in Harris County, Texas. (2021)

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. By: Brandon L. Garrett, Travis M. Seale-Carlisle, Karima Modjadidi, and Kristen M. Renberg in North Carolina Law Review (2021)

Researchers have shown how eyewitness misidentification results in conviction of the innocent — and revealed the role that poorly designed and suggestive police procedures can play. This article examines the role that poorly designed court procedures can play.By: Brandon L. Garrett – Judicature (2020)

This study describes North Carolina’s population of suspended drivers and assesses how driver’s license suspension statutes operate relative to geography, race, and poverty level. By: William E. Crozier and Brandon L. Garrett – Duke Law Journal (2020)

This study examines the impact of providing jurors with testimony further qualified by error rates and likelihood ratios, for expert testimony concerning two forensic disciplines: commonly used fingerprint comparison evidence and a novel technique involving voice comparison. By: Brandon L. Garrett, William E. Crozer, and Rebecca Grady – Journal of Forensic Sciences (2020)

This article examines in detail the judging of risk assessment and why decisionmakers so often fail to consistently use such quantitative information. By: Brandon L. Garrett and John Monahan – California Law Review (2020)

Lack of transparency has become pressing in the area of risk assessment, as entire judicial systems have adopted some type of risk assessment scheme. While the types of information used in a risk tool may be made public, often the underlying methods, validation data, and studies are not – nor are the assumptions behind how a level of risk gets categorized as “high” or “low.” We discuss why those concerns are relevant and important to the new risk assessment tool now being used in federal prisons, as part of the First Step Act. By: Brandon L. Garrett and Megan Stevenson – Behavioral Science and Law (2020)

This article aims to empirically assess the rise and then the fall in Juvenile Life without Parole (JLWOP) sentencing in a leading sentencing state, North Carolina, to better understand these trends and their implications. By: Ben Finholt, Brandon L. Garrett, Karima Modjadidi, and Kristen Renberg – Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology (2020)

This article examines the impact of undeliverable mailings when attempting to survey people in North Carolina whose driver’s licenses had been suspended. These undeliverable mailings suggest that large numbers of people, numbering perhaps in the hundreds of thousands in North Carolina, never receive actual notice of either their court date or the drastic consequence of nonappearance.  Further, they may have no idea that the state has suspended their license, and as a result, may suffer severe consequences if later stopped for driving with a revoked license.  We conclude by discussing the due process and policy problems implied by these findings. By: Karima Modjadidi, Brandon L. Garrett, and William Crozier – UCLA Criminal Justice Law Review (2020)