Kate Corrigan is a former prosecutor, and is currently a member of Corrigan, Welbourn, Stokke, APLC, a criminal defense practice.  Her practice is dedicated to the representation of individuals and entities under criminal investigation and facing prosecution in federal courts around the USA and the California state courts.  Her firm prides itself in client centered representation and has successfully defended its clients hundreds of misdemeanor and felony cases. Ms. Corrigan is listed on the Martindale-Hubbell Bar Register of Preeminent Lawyers, and was included as one of the top 50 lawyers on the 2015 Orange County Super Lawyers List. She was also a founding member of the Orange County Criminal Defense Bar Association, and served three terms as President.  She is currently the Chair of the OCBA Criminal Law Section.  She has also served as President of the FBA/OC Chapter.

Simon Cole, Ph.D. 

Simon A. Cole specializes in the historical and sociological study of the interaction between science, technology, law, and criminal justice. He 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. Most recently, he is a co-author (with Michael Lynch, Ruth McNally & Kathleen Jordan) of Truth Machine: The Contentious History of DNA Fingerprinting (University of Chicago Press, 2008). Dr. Cole has spoken widely on the subjects of fingerprinting, scientific evidence, and science and the law, and he has consulted and testified as an expert witness on the validity of fingerprint evidence. He has also written for many general interest publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, New Scientist, and Lingua Franca. His current interests are the sociology of forensic science and the development of criminal identification databases and biometric technologies. He teaches courses on Forensic Science and Society, Surveillance and Society, Miscarriages of Justice, The Death Penalty, Historical Criminology, and Science, Technology, and Law, and he is Co-Editor of the journal Theoretical Criminology. He is Director of The Newkirk Center for Science & Society, and he is affiliated with the Department of History.

Maurice Possley, Senior Researcher, National Registry of Exonerations, Newkirk Center for Science & Society, University of California, Irvine

Maurice Possley won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for Investigative Reporting at the Chicago Tribune, where he was a criminal justice reporter for 25 years. His reporting helped exonerate more than a dozen innocent defendants. A four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for his reporting, Possley is senior researcher for the National Registry of Exonerations, a database of more than 2,100 wrongful convictions in the U.S. since 1989. The Registry is a research project of Michigan and Michigan State law schools and University of California Irvine Newkirk Center for Science and Society. He previously worked as a research fellow at Santa Clara University Law School’s Northern California Innocence Project, where he co-authored NCIP’s report: “Preventable Error: Prosecutorial Misconduct in California 1997-2009.” He has taught as an adjunct professor at the University of California Irvine, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, and the University of Montana School of Journalism. He also co-taught a course on wrongful convictions at the University of Michigan Law School. He is a New York Times best-selling author and has written three non-fiction books, “Everybody Pays: Two Men, One Murder and the Price of Truth,” “The Brown’s Chicken Massacre,” and “Hitler in the Crosshairs: A GI’s Story of Courage and Faith.”