The failed death penalty experiment teaches us how inept lawyering, overzealous prosecution, race discrimination, wrongful convictions, and excessive punishments undermine the pursuit of justice. Garrett makes a strong case for what a future criminal justice system might look like if these injustices were remedied.

Brandon L. Garrett teaches law at the Duke University School of Law, where he has been the L. Neil Williams, Jr. Professor of Law since 2018. Previously, he was the Justice Thurgood Marshall Distinguished Professor of Law and White Burkett Miller Professor of Law and Public Affairs at the University of Virginia School of Law, where he taught beginning in 2005. His research on our criminal justice system has ranged from the lessons to be learned from cases where innocent people were exonerated by DNA tests, to research on false confessions, forensics, and eyewitness memory, to the difficult compromises that prosecutors reach when targeting the largest corporations in the world. Garrett directs the Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law, which conducts empirical criminal justice research.

Garrett’s new book, Autopsy of a Crime Lab, will be published by University of California Press in Spring 2021. His last book, “End of its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice,” examining the implications of the decline of the death penalty, was published in Fall 2017 from Harvard University Press.In 2011, Harvard University Press published Garrett’s book, “Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal Prosecutions Go Wrong,” examining the cases of the first 250 people to be exonerated by DNA testing. That book was the subject of a symposium issue in New England Law Review, and received an A.B.A. Silver Gavel Award, Honorable Mention, and a Constitutional Commentary Award. It is has been translated in Japan and Taiwan, and in China. In 2013, Foundation Press published a casebook, “Federal Habeas Corpus: Executive Detention and Post-Conviction Litigation,” that co-authored with Lee Kovarsky. Garrett’s new book examining corporate prosecutions, titled “Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise with Corporations,” was published by Harvard University Press in Fall 2014.

Co-sponsored by ACLU of Pennsylvania, Amnesty International USA, Sisters of St. Joseph of Baden