Samuel Gross, professor of law at the University of Michigan and editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, will discuss wrongful convictions and exonerations in the United States Tuesday, Sept. 16.

The free, public lecture, “Wrongful Convictions in the U.S.: Lessons From the National Registry of Exonerations,” will start at noon in The University of Toledo Law Center McQuade Law Auditorium. It is part of the College of Law’s Distinguished Speaker Series.

In the lecture, Gross will speak to surprising findings that have been discovered through examining wrongful convictions, including the effect of eyewitness misidentification on false convictions, and the roles of DNA, prosecutors and police in exonerations.

Gross is the editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, exonerationregistry.org, a joint project of the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law.

Launched in 2012, the registry is the most comprehensive collection of exonerations in the United States ever assembled and maintains a detailed online database of all known exonerations in the country since 1989.

“Samuel Gross is one of the nation’s leading experts on wrongful convictions and exonerations. We are delighted to have him speak on how to address these most fundamental failures of our justice system,” said Daniel J. Steinbock, dean of the UT College of Law.

Gross teaches courses on evidence, criminal procedure and wrongful criminal convictions at the University of Michigan Law School. His published work includes articles and books on evidence law, the death penalty, false convictions, racial profiling, eyewitness identification and the relationship between pretrial bargaining and trial verdicts.

As a cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. in New York and the National Jury Project in California, Gross litigated a series of test cases on jury selection in capital trials and worked on the issue of racial discrimination and the death penalty.

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