Author Brandon Garrett

Earlier this month, Horace Roberts was exonerated after two decades of wrongful imprisonment. Roberts had been convicted of a 1998 murder. A watch had been found near the crime scene, and when police showed Roberts a picture of it, he stated… Continue Reading →

The Connecticut Supreme Court heard oral arguments last week in the cases of Shawn Henning and Ralph Birch. The two men, convicted of murder in 1989, seek vacatur of their convictions based on (1) recent DNA test results that exclude… Continue Reading →

Last month, Professor Greg Hampikan of Boise State University wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled “The Dangers of DNA Testing.” Hampikan described a recently-published NIST study of US and Canadian crime labs that gave them a fictionalized… Continue Reading →

Today, a group of amici scholars representing a variety of disciplines, including law, ethics, forensic science, medicine, and statistics, filed an amicus brief in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals case of Long v. Hooks.  The brief can be read… Continue Reading →

The Wisconsin State Department of Justice received a report from the National Forensic Science Technology Center at Florida International University examining the Wisconsin State Crime Lab. The issues identified include employee turnover that disrupts lab timeliness in testing and incidences… Continue Reading →

Marina Medvin published a new article Thursday titled “Framed By Your Own Cells: How DNA Evidence Imprisons The Innocent.” Medvin argues that new technologies that allow DNA to be analyzed from increasingly small samples present a risk of error due… Continue Reading →

Rachel Mendleson of the Toronto Star published an investigative article last week detailing how the Motherisk scandal is still affecting the life of a mother whose child was wrongfully removed from their home. In 2015, the Motherisk Drug Testing Laboratory… Continue Reading →

On Wednesday, John Brown was released from prison in Arkansas after his convictions were overturned by a Federal District Court in Arkansas last month. Brown had been convicted of aggravated robbery, rape, and murder in 1988. He had served twenty-eight… Continue Reading →

A Massachusetts judge has accepted an agreement, signed by all eleven of the state’s District Attorneys, to exclude breath test machine evidence obtained between 2011 and 2017 in tens of thousands of DUI cases. These convictions have been called into… Continue Reading →