Events

The Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, Innocence Project, and Wrongful Convictions Clinic regularly sponsor events throughout the year to educate members of the Duke Law and greater legal communities about wrongful convictions. Below is a listing of selected upcoming and past events:

Upcoming Events

Click here for a list of upcoming events at Duke Law.

Past Events

April 6, 2011
Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong
Brandon Garrett, from the University of Virginia School of Law, will present a lively discussion on his new book entitled "Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong." Garrett took a microscopic and unprecedented look at the first 250 DNA exonerations in the U.S., reviewing trial transcripts and numerous other source documents to identify what went wrong in those cases. His investigation revealed larger patterns of lawyer incompetence, prosecutorial abuse, and plain error. He will talk about those and other weaknesses in our criminal justice system, including unsound forensic evidence, poor police work, psychological biases, and more.

February 18, 2010
Getting it Right: An Interdisciplinary Assessment of Decisionmaking in the Criminal Justice System
Duke Law School’s Center for Criminal Justice and Professional Responsibility, the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, and the Social Science Research Institute at Duke University, co-hosted an interdisciplinary seminar held at the Law School. The seminar was intended as a fact-gathering session for a larger interdisciplinary project – “Science and the Search for Truth: Use of Scientific Knowledge to Detect and Prevent Miscarriages of Justice in the Investigation and Trial of Criminal Cases.”

February 4, 2010
Junk Science in Criminal Trials: A Practitioner's Tale
A presentation by George Castelle, Chief Public Defender in Charleston, West Virginia, who is widely known for his expertise in forensic science and his role in unraveling an enormous forensic scandal in his state.

September 25-26, 2009
Innocence Project Training Weekend

June 16-27, 2008
TIP Summer Studies Program 2008
During a two-week summer program, approximately thirty high school students in the Duke University Talent Identification Program were introduced to the workings of the U.S. criminal justice system, viewed through the lens of wrongful convictions.