Criminal justice attorneys are invited to attend a new speaker series, "Big Ideas and Best Practices," a collaboration between the U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts and the Criminal Justice Act Board of Massachusetts, with support from the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts. The series will feature leaders with diverse perspectives on the criminal justice field, designed to spark innovation by, and conversation between, prosecutors, defense attorneys, probation officers and law enforcement professionals.
The first event will take place on Wednesday, Nov. 6, from 4-5:30 p.m., in the Jury Assembly Room of the U.S. District Court in Boston, with light hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar to follow. Attorney and author James Doyle will present "Avoiding Errors and Improving Results in the Criminal Justice System: Can We Learn Anything From Brain Surgery and Space Shuttles?"
Doyle will speak about his ongoing research with the National Institute of Justice, where he focuses on reviewing errors from a systemic viewpoint — errors that can have devastating human costs. This approach, called “sentinel event analysis,” has been highly productive in more technical fields, such as aviation and medicine. Applying this approach to the criminal justice context can be used to analyze events, such as wrongful convictions, mistaken pretrial releases, police shootings or “near misses” that might have resulted in a negative outcome if not otherwise caught.
Doyle will discuss a new set of initiatives that focus on such events as organizational failures, rather than focusing on blaming individual actors. He will discuss research on techniques that focus on forward-looking accountability to help prevent such errors from reoccurring.
RSVP by Friday, Oct. 18, to rsvp@mad.uscourts.gov. More information on Doyle can be found here.