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New Duke Law center delves into science of criminal justice
Yusef Salaam, left, and Raymond Santana, two of the “Exonerated Five,” spoke to Duke Law students Sept. 3, during an event marking the launch of the Duke Center for Science and Justice moderated by Professor Brandon Garrett, right.
A new center based at Duke Law School is applying legal and scientific research to reforming the criminal justice system.
The Duke Center for Science and Justice brings together faculty and students in law, medicine, public policy, and arts and sciences to pursue research, policy and law reform, and education in three areas: accuracy of evidence in criminal cases; the role of risk in criminal outcomes; and addressing a person’s treatment needs as an alternative to arrest and incarceration. It also is examining the needs of formerly incarcerated persons who are re-entering society.
The center is led by Brandon Garrett, the L. Neil Williams Jr. Professor of Law and a leading scholar of criminal procedure, scientific evidence, and wrongful convictions.
— Raymond Santana urged Duke Law students to remember the story of the Exonerated Five as they enter practice.
A central goal of the center is to convey the results of research to stakeholders in the criminal justice system.
“Duke University is a leader in fostering collaborative interdisciplinary research, and Duke Law School is known for its leading criminal law and justice faculty and pioneering Wrongful Convictions Clinic,” said Garrett. “This history of applying deep scholarly inquiry to society’s most pressing challenges makes Duke the perfect place for a center that employs science to help achieve a better criminal justice system.”
The center is supported by a $4.7 million grant from the Charles Koch Foundation, which supports research and educational programs in areas such as criminal justice and policing reform, free expression, foreign policy, economic opportunity, and innovation. Additional support for Garrett’s research has been provided by Arnold Ventures and the Center for Statistics and Applications in Forensic Evidence.
“Driven by innovative, research-based programs like this one, the nation is undergoing a major rethinking about how we approach criminal justice,” said Ryan Stowers, executive director of the Charles Koch Foundation. “We are excited to support Professor Garrett and the Duke Center for Science and Justice as they bring together scholars and practitioners from different disciplines seeking to allow more Americans the opportunity of a second chance and to determine practices that will prevent individuals from getting stuck in the system in the first place.”
Exonerees urge law students to remember their story Duke launched the center on Sept. 3 with a lunchtime conversation between Garrett and two members of the “Exonerated Five,” Yusef Salaam and Raymond Santana, who, as teenagers, were wrongfully charged and convicted, along with three others, of the brutal rape of a jogger in New York City’s Central Park. Early in his career, Garrett helped represent Salaam in his quest for exoneration.
Salaam and Santana urged the law students in the overflow audience to remember their story as they begin their careers, and said that speaking to future members of the legal profession has helped them heal the emotional trauma from their case.
“There’s not a day that goes by that we don’t think about this situation,” Santana said. “It’s constantly on our minds. But we know we have a service to fulfill. We have an obligation to tell you what happened to us. … We just want you to do your job to the best of your ability. Don’t cheat. Don’t cut corners.”
Salaam, Santana, Korey Wise, Antron McCray, and Kevin Richardson were between ages 14 and 16 in 1989 when they were arrested for allegedly raping and beating the 28-year-old jogger. Subsequently, the convictions of the so-called “Central Park Five” were vacated in 2002 after another man whose DNA matched DNA from the scene confessed to the assault and rape. In June 2014 the men settled a civil suit with the City of New York. Since then, they have become advocates
for criminal justice reform and were the subjects of the Netflix series “When They See Us,” released earlier this year.
“When you go into the system at a very young age it turns you into a fighter,” Santana said. “We’ve been fighting for so long, and we don’t know when it’s time to hang up the gloves.”
Said Salaam: “We’ve been given the opportunity to turn up our lights. We are trying to break generational curses by what we are doing with our lives.”
Recounting the circumstances of their convictions, Santana and Salaam said the young teenagers confessed to the crimes under pressure by seasoned police officers using the Reid technique, a nine-step process of interrogation that includes direct confrontation and offering alternative theories of the crime to elicit an emotional response from which guilt may be inferred. The Reid technique has since been discredited for eliciting a high number of false confessions, especially among juveniles. Santana called the situation an “unlevel playing field” and said the teens naively believed they would be released once the facts of the case emerged, including the fact that no blood from the victim was found on any of them.
But the teens were vilified by prosecutors and the media in the ensuing weeks, especially after Donald Trump took out a full-page ad in four New York City newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty shortly after their arrests. “The effect of false confessions is what allowed a lynch mob to form,” Salaam said, holding up a copy of the ad.
Salaam and Santana, ages 15 and 14 respectively at the time of their arrest, were sentenced as juveniles to five to 10 years in detention and served more than six years each before their sentences were vacated in 2002. After their exonerations the men faced struggles, Salaam said, including emotional trauma and financial hardship. Few employers would consider hiring them because of the case’s notoriety and 11 years passed before New York City settled their civil lawsuit, with each man receiving about $1 million per year incarcerated.
Since then, Salaam said, their financial independence has allowed them to travel the country, speaking in public and fighting against what he called “the criminal system of injustice.”
“‘When you are free from your immediate task, still labor hard,’” he said, translating a verse from the Quran. “I often describe being in the belly of the beast as an awakening process for me. I was being made courageous. I was being made brave. I was being shaped and formed, unbeknownst to me, to provide a service 30 years later.”
— Professor Brandon Garrett
Center builds on Duke Law’s deep strengths in criminal law In her welcoming remarks, Kerry Abrams, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law and professor of law, highlighted the engagement of Duke Law faculty scholars and students in pursuing justice for wrongfully convicted individuals and in criminal law reform.
“Wrongful convictions are an all too well-known phenomenon and Duke Law School has been on the forefront for years in doing the difficult and often painstaking work it takes to right these wrongs,” she said.
In 1991, she noted, James Coleman, Jr., the John S. Bradway Professor of the Practice of Law, developed the first law school-based death penalty clinic in the nation. In 2007 he turned its focus to investigating claims of innocence made by incarcerated felons, establishing the Wrongful Convictions Clinic, which Coleman co-directs with Charles S. Rhyne Clinical Professor of Law Theresa Newman ’88. This summer, the clinic won its seventh and eighth exonerations with the releases of Charles Ray Finch and Dontae Sharpe, who were incarcerated for 43 and 25 years respectively.
The Duke Center for Science and Justice promises to build on and enhance this record, as well as the work of the Law School’s other criminal law scholars, she said.
“At Duke Law School, we are building on our deep strengths in criminal law to create new opportunities for students and faculty to take the lead in studying and shaping approaches to criminal justice reform,” Abrams said. “The Center for Science and Justice will be an integral part of educating students who aspire to make the criminal justice system of the future better and fairer for everyone.”
