Jessica Gabel Cino is an associate professor of law and incoming Associate Dean
of Academics at Georgia State University College of Law in Atlanta. Prior to joining
Georgia State, she clerked for Hon. Peter T. Fay, Circuit Judge for the U.S. Court
of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. While practicing in San Francisco at Covington
& Burling LLP, she focused on white-collar crime and death penalty cases. Professor
Cino gives international and national presentations on various issues in forensic
evidence, trial strategy, and criminal law. She also is widely published in these
fields. In 2015, the Fulton Daily Report and ALM Media named her one of the “40
Under 40 Rising Stars.” Professor Cino consults on various criminal and business
matters, and has engaged in numerous pro bono criminal defense representations.
She also serves as an expert witness on forensic evidence and is a frequent blogger
and op-ed contributor. Professor Cino received her J.D. magna cum laude from the
University of Miami School of Law and graduated summa cum laude from the University
of Central Florida. While in law school, she co-founded and served as the executive
director for the Wrongful Convictions Project, which is now an Innocence Clinic
that assists defendants with claims of actual innocence.
Judge Anthony A. Mozingo is a native Mississippian and independent decision-maker
on a Southern trial court. He was educated in Mississippi and Louisiana and served
as a judge on all court Mississippi court levels except the Supreme Court and Court
of Appeals. Judge Mozingo hears all major civil and criminal cases in a five-county
district. He is the first judge from his home state to earn a master's degree in
judicial studies from UNR/NJC's distinguished program for sitting judges. Judge
Mozingo's graduate thesis focuses on the responsibility of trial court judges'
gatekeeping role. This is his first visit to West Virginia, except for a short
attendance at the Bear Creek Association of Primitive Baptist churches in 1988.
Keith A. Findley, a 1985 graduate of the Yale Law School, is an assistant professor
at the University of Wisconsin Law School. He teaches evidence, wrongful convictions,
and criminal procedure. His primary areas of research focus on wrongful convictions,
and in particular the role that forensic sciences play in both causing and correcting
wrongful convictions, and the ways that cognitive biases can impede the criminal
justice system’s reliability. Along Professor Carrie Sperling, he also serves as
co-director of the Wisconsin Innocence Project (which he co-founded with Professor
John Pray). He has previously worked as an Assistant State Public Defender in Wisconsin,
both in the Appellate and Trial Divisions. He has litigated hundreds of post-conviction
and appellate cases, at all levels of state and federal courts, including the U.S.
Supreme Court.
Professor Meghan Ryan teaches and writes at the intersection of criminal law and
procedure, torts, and law & science. Her current research focuses on the impact
of evolving science, technology, and cultural values on criminal convictions and
punishment, as well as on civil remedies. Professor Ryan earned her A.B., magna
cum laude, in Chemistry from Harvard University and her J.D., magna cum laude,
from the University of Minnesota Law School. Afterk clerking for the Honorable
Roger L. Wollman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, she worked
at Dorsey & Whitney LLP, focusing on commerial and intellectual property litigation.
Professor Ryan has also conducted research in the areas of bioinorganic chemistry,
molecular biology, and experimental therapeutics at the Mayo Clinic and the University
of Minnesota.
Dr. Simon A. Cole is Professor of Criminology, Law and Society and Director of the
Newkirk Center for Science & Society at the University of California, Irvine.
He received his Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University.
Dr. Cole is the author of Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal
Identification (Harvard University Press, 2001), which was awarded the 2003 Rachel
Carson Prize by the Society for Social Studies of Science, Truth Machine: The Contentious
History of DNA Fingerprinting (University of Chicago Press, 2008, with Michael
Lynch, Ruth McNally & Kathleen Jordan), ), and more than 20 scholarly articles
and book chapters about the scientific validity of fingerprint evidence and its
use in the courts. He is a member of the Human Factors Subcommittee of the National
Commission on Forensic Science and the Forensic Culture Task Force for the National
Institute of Standards and Technology, and he is Co-Editor of the journal Theoretical
Criminology.
Brandon L. Garrett focuses his research and teaching in areas of criminal procedure,
wrongful convictions, habeas corpus, corporate crime, scientific evidence, civil
rights, civil procedure, and constitutional law. Garrett’s recent research includes
studies of DNA exonerations and organizational prosecutions. Garrett’s recent book
examining corporate prosecutions, titled “Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise
with Corporations,” was published by Harvard University Press in Fall 2014. A new
book examining the implications of the decline of the death penalty is in contract
with 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. In 2013, Foundation
Press published Garrett’s casebook, “Federal Habeas Corpus: Executive Detention
and Post-Conviction Litigation,” co-authored with Lee Kovarsky. Garrett’s work
has been widely cited by courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, lower federal
courts, state supreme courts, and courts in other countries, such as the Supreme
Courts of Canada and Israel. Garrett also frequently speaks about criminal justice
matters before legislative and policymaking bodies, groups of practicing lawyers,
law enforcement, and to local and national media. Garrett attended Columbia Law
School, where he was an articles editor of the Columbia Law Review and a Kent Scholar.
After graduating, he clerked for the Hon. Pierre N. Leval of the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Second Circuit. He then worked as an associate at Neufeld, Scheck
& Brustin LLP in New York City.
Imran Syed is an assistant clinical professor of law at the University of Michigan
Law School, teaching in the Michigan Innocence Clinic. A 2011 graduate of the University
of Michigan Law School, Imran has successfully litigated several arson cases in
the Michigan Innocence Clinic, including the cases of David Gavitt (2012), Victor
Caminata (2013) and Andrew Babick (2014). His research and writing have focused
on shifts in various sciences, including fire science, comparative bullet lead
analysis and the medical diagnosis formerly known as Shaken Baby Syndrome. Imran
also teaches a law school seminar on forensic science and the law.
David Moran cofounded the Michigan Innocence Clinic in 2009 to litigate claims of
actual innocence by prisoners in cases where DNA evidence is not available. In
its first six years, the clinic's work resulted in the exoneration of eight men
and two women who have served a total of more than 100 years of wrongful incarceration.
In addition to his work in the clinic, Professor Moran teaches courses in criminal
law and criminal procedure. He has published many articles about various aspects
of criminal procedure, especially search and seizure. He has argued six times before
the U.S. Supreme Court, most recently in November 2012. Among his most notable
cases is Halbert v. Michigan, in which the Supreme Court struck down a Michigan
law that denied appellate counsel to assist indigent criminal defendants who wished
to challenge their sentences after pleading guilty. Professor Moran earned his
BS in physics from the University of Michigan; a BA, MA, and CAS in mathematics
from Cambridge University; an MS in theoretical physics from Cornell University;
and a JD, magna cum laude, from Michigan Law. He clerked for the Hon. Ralph B.
Guy Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, then served for eight
years as an assistant defender at the State Appellate Defender Office in Detroit.
In 2010, he was named the Michigan Lawyer of the Year by Michigan Lawyer's Weekly
and received the Justice For All Award (with Michigan Law Lecturer Bridget McCormack),
the highest award bestowed by the Criminal Defense Attorneys of Michigan.
Katherine H. Judson is the SBS/AHT Litigation Coordinator and Clinical Instructor
at the Wisconsin Innocence Project, where she engages in training, consulting,
and direct representation of clients in cases involving wrongful convictions of
child homicide and child abuse. She previously served as the Innocence Network
Shaken Baby Syndrome Litigation Fellow. Kate began her legal career as an attorney
with the New Mexico Public Defender Department, where she specialized in felony
cases, especially those with complicated scientific evidence. Prior to beginning
law school, she worked as a laboratory assistant in the Department of Pathology
at the University of Wisconsin on studies involving electron microscopy. She has
spoken before the American Academy of Forensic Science, the Innocence Network,
the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and numerous other organizations
on topics related to forensic science and the law.
Vanessa Meterko is the Research Analyst at the Innocence Project. She earned her
M.A. in forensic psychology from John Jay College of Criminal Justice, part of
the City University of New York. Vanessa has conducted research and published on
a variety of topics including health care, discrimination, and wrongful convictions.
Dr. Glen Jackson joined the faculty of WVU in the fall of 2012 as a Ming Hsieh Distinguished
Professor of Forensic and Investigative Science. Recently, Dr. Jackson was appointed
to the new NIST OSAC subcommittee on Controlled Substance, which is responsible
for defining national standards for forensic chemical analyses.
Dr. Suzanne Bell joined the faculty of WVU in 2003. Prior to joining WVU, Dr. Bell
spent three years with the New Mexico State Police Crime Laboratory as a forensic
chemist where she conducted drug analysis, arson, and crime scene work. Dr. Bell
also spent nine years as an environmental analytical chemist at Los Alamos National
Laboratory.
Prof. Kelly Ayers primarily focuses to provide training and education for local law
enforcement professionals, with a special interest in the rural agencies of West
Virginia. Most recently, Prof. Ayers has served as an instructional coordinator
with the Forensic Science Initiative at WVU. Prior to coming to WVU in 2010, Prof. Ayers was employed as a forensic services technician with the Asheville, NC Police
Department. In addition, Prof. Ayers is a Certified Senior Crime Scene Analyst
through the International Association for Identification and has been qualified
in North Carolina Superior Court as an expert in forensic identification.
Paul Bieber is the Founder and Director of the Arson Research Project, an independent
criminal justice research project that seeks to examine the reliability of evidence
used in the investigation and prosecution of arson, and identify arson convictions
that have relied on unreliable evidence. He has nine years of investigative experience
including criminal defense, death scene, fire cause and origin, insurance fraud
investigations and criminal justice research.
Maria Cuellar is a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University. She focuses her research
on developing statistical methodology for social and behavioral science research,
particularly as it relates to making inferences from partially-observed social
network structures, correcting for systematic measurement errors such as underreporting
of stigmatized behaviors, using multiple systems estimation to estimate population
sizes, and estimating coverage error.
Professor Sandra Guerra Thompson is the Alumnae College Professor in Law and Director
of the Criminal Justice Institute at the University of Houston Law Center. Since
joining the faculty in 1990, she has taught and written in the areas of criminal
law, criminal procedure, wrongful convictions and evidence. She has authored numerous
articles on criminal law topics such as eyewitness identification and wrongful
conviction, immigration crimes, jury discrimination, police interrogations, federal
sentencing, and asset forfeiture.
Russell Dean Covey is a Professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law.
Professor Covey teaches criminal law and procedure and is the author of numerous
articles and book chapters in the field. In particular, his work focuses on the
intersection of wrongful convictions, innocence and the guilty plea process, exploring
and applying insights from a variety of disciplines, including economics, cognitive
psychology, and behavioral economics to shed light on the dynamics of criminal
justice. His recent work includes studies on police misconduct as a cause of wrongful
convictions, use by police and prosecutors of the threat of perjury sanctions to
deter witnesses from recanting false incriminating testimony, and the especially
pernicious effects of jailhouse informants in convicting the innocent.
Mark Godsey is the Carmichael Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati where
he teaches Criminal Law, Evidence and Wrongful Convictions. A former federal prosecutor
in New York City, Mark is the co-founder and director of the Ohio Innocence Project,
which has free 23 Ohioans since its founding in 2003. He serves on the board of
the Innocence Network, and is co-chair of the International Committee. In that
capacity, he has worked with scholars and lawyers in Europe, Asia and Africa to
establish innocence organizations in various countries around the world. Mark is
the editor of the Wrongful Convictions Blog, and has a forthcoming book tentatively
entitled Deconstructing Wrongful Convictions: How Cracks in the Human Psyche Cause
Tragic Injustices.
M. Chris Fabricant is the Joseph Flom Special Counsel and Director of Strategic Ligation
at the Innocence Project. He leads the Strategic Litigation Unit, whose attorneys
use the courts strategically to address the leading causes of wrongful conviction,
including eyewitness misidentification and the misapplication of forensic sciences.
Before joining the Innocence Project, he was a clinical law professor and the director
of the Criminal Justice Clinic at the Pace University School of Law, where he developed
one of the nation’s first “combined advocacy” criminal defense clinics, incorporating
individual direct representation with impact litigation, legislative advocacy,
and empirical research to address the harms associated with “broken windows” policing.
Mr. Fabricant has over a decade of criminal defense experience at the state and
federal, trial and appellate levels with The Bronx Defenders and Appellate Advocates.
He began his career as a pro se law clerk in the Southern District of New York,
where he focused on prisoners’ rights and post-conviction litigation. Mr. Fabricant
received his J.D. with Honors and a Corpus Juris Secundum distinction in criminal
law from the George Washington University Law School.
Jennifer Laurin received her undergraduate degree in Politics from Earlham College.
In 2003 she earned her J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was an Executive
Articles Editor of the Columbia Law Review. She served as a law clerk to Judge
Thomas Griesa of the Southern District of New York and Judge Guido Calabresi of
the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and spent several years
as a litigation associate with the New York City civil rights firm of Neufeld Scheck
& Brustin, LLP. Professor Laurin's principal research interests lie in the
intersections of criminal and constitutional litigation, and regulation of criminal
justice institutions. Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the Columbia
Law Review, Texas Law Review, and Notre Dame Law Review, among others. Professor
Laurin is also a co-author of “Police Misconduct: Law and Litigation,” the leading
treatise in that area of civil rights litigation. Among other professional activities,
Professor Laurin is currently serving as Reporter to the American Bar Association's
Criminal Justice Standards Task Force charged with updating the 1996 3rd Edition
Discovery Standards.
Liliana Segura is a journalist and editor with a longtime focus on prisons, prisoners,
and the failings and excesses of the U.S. criminal justice system—from wrongful
convictions to the death penalty. She covered these and other issues most recently
as an editor at The Nation, where she edited a number of award-winning stories.
Previously she was a senior editor at AlterNet, where she was in charge of civil
liberties coverage during the early days of Obama’s presidency. She has appeared
on CNN International, MSNBC, DemocracyNow! and several other news outlets. Her
writing has been reprinted in numerous places, from prison publications to The
Best American Legal Writing to, most recently, the collection Against Equality:
Prisons Will Not Protect You. Liliana is on the board of the Campaign to End the
Death Penalty and the Applied Research Center, a U.S. racial justice think tank.
She lives in Brooklyn.
Radley Balko is a opinion blogger at the Washington Post, where he writes the popular
blog on civil liberties and the criminal justice system, The Watch. Balko’s work
on paramilitary raids and the overuse of SWAT teams was featured in the New York
Times, has been praised by outlets ranging from Human Events to the Daily Kos,
and was cited by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer in his dissent in the case
Hudson v. Michigan.
Balko is also credited with bringing national attention to the case of Cory Maye,
a black man who prior to Balko’s work was on death row in Mississippi for shooting
and killing a white police officer during a raid on Maye’s home. Balko’s Reason
feature on Maye was also cited in an opinion by the Mississippi State Supreme Court.
National Journal also profiled Balko’s coverage of the case. Balko’s November 2007
investigative report on Mississippi medical examiner Steven Hayne won second place
in the investigative reporting category for the 2007 Los Angeles Press Club awards.
Balko was formerly a policy analyst with the Cato Institute. He has been a columnist
for FoxNews.com, a senior editor at Reason, and has been published in the Wall
Street Journal, Playboy, Time, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Slate,
Forbes, ESPN, the National Post, Worth and numerous other publications. Balko has
also appeared on the BBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News Channel, MSNBC and NPR. Balko is
also the author of Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police
Forces, published in 2013. He graduated from Indiana University with a degree in
journalism and political science.
Valena Elizabeth Beety is an Associate Professor of Law at West Virginia University
College of Law. She is also Deputy Director of the WVU Law Clinical Law Program,
chairing the West Virginia Innocence Project. Beety’s scholarship and teaching
interests include criminal procedure, causes of wrongful conviction, prisons and
policing. Her experience as a federal prosecutor and litigating innocence cases
in Mississippi and West Virginia shape her interest in criminal justice, from investigation
through incarceration. A 2006 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School,
Beety clerked for Chief Judge James G. Carr of the Northern District of Ohio, and
the Honorable Martha Craig Daughtrey of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. She
served as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia
before joining the Mississippi Innocence Project as a senior staff attorney. At
WVU, Beety directs the ground-breaking LL.M. in Forensic Justice. She created the
Franklin D. Cleckley Fellowship, a joint collaboration between the University of
Chicago Law School and the WVU College of Law to sponsor a recent law school graduate
to work at the West Virginia Innocence Project. Beety serves nationally as a board
member of the Innocence Network, and in West Virginia on the Governor’s Indigent
Defense Commission. She represented WVU as a Big XII Faculty Fellow at the University
of Texas School of Law in Fall 2013.
