President Richard Brodhead announced Wednesday the creation of a new criminal justice center at the School of Law.
The law school will invest $1.25 million over the next five years to create a center devoted to expanding education against wrongful conviction and promoting justice in the criminal justice system.
The idea behind the new center-recommended to Brodhead and Provost Peter Lange by David Levi, dean of the law school-was formulated in the wake of the 2006 lacrosse case and other instances of injustice in the North Carolina legal system.
"What we hope to be able to do is certainly educate more of our students on the causes of wrongful convictions and other aspects of the criminal justice system," said Theresa Newman, associate dean for academic affairs. "We're also hoping to reach out beyond the walls of the law school to the Durham community, the Piedmont region, the state of North Carolina, the Southeast and even beyond that."
An important mission of the center will be a public-policy initiative allowing faculty and students to examine issues related to criminal justice and professional responsibility.
The center will offer summer and postgraduate fellowships for students and will host roundtables and short-term seminars on criminal justice. A new course taught by experts in the areas of eyewitness identifications, forensic science and false confession will be open to undergraduates.
"[Duke law professor] Jim Coleman, Theresa Newman and their students and colleagues are doing terrific work investigating the cases of individual prisoners and raising awareness of the larger issues surrounding wrongful convictions," Brodhead wrote in an e-mail.
Although the center has gained much of its momentum in the aftermath of the lacrosse case, the idea behind a criminal justice center has long been considered by professors at the law school, said Coleman, who led a University committee examining the behavior of the lacrosse team last year.
The center will incorporate existing programs at the law school such as the student-led Innocence Project and the Wrongful Convictions Clinic as well as the independent North Carolina Center on Actual Innocence, and will create an opportunity for these programs to expand, Newman said.
"As far as I know there is no center that is going to combine teaching of undergraduates, the kind of seminars and discussion we are planning to have and the opportunities for fellows to work during the summer and after gradation," she said. "We hope this is a somewhat unique center and we're planning to make it so."
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