Publications

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)

Beginning in early 2019, the judges and prosecutors in Durham, North Carolina, adopted new bail policies, reflecting a shift in the pretrial detention framework. This essay provides a firsthand look into the pretrial detention data following these substantive policy changes, and the observations serve as a reflection on how the changes in Durham reflect broader pretrial detention reform efforts. By: William Crozier, Brandon L. Garrett and Arvind Krishnamurthy – Wake Forest Law Review (2020)

This article, 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. By Brandon Garrett (2020)

The killing of George Floyd and other Black men and women in 2020 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. (2020)

Shari R. Berkowitz, Brandon L. Garrett, Kimberly M. Fenn & Elizabeth F. Loftus in Memory 30:1

The authors review what we actually know and do not know about the “initial confidence” of eyewitnesses in the DNA exoneration cases and new research that reveals numerous conditions wherein eyewitnesses with high initial confidence end up being wrong.

By: William Crozier, Jeff Kukucka and Brandon L. Garrett – Forensic Science International (2020)

Wilson Center Faculty Director Brandon Garrett serves as independent monitor for the landmark federal bail reform settlement in Harris County, TX. This first report by the monitor team describes the first six months of work evaluating the implementation of the misdemeanor bail reforms in Harris County, Texas. (2020)