A Meeting of The Minds Between Those on the Front Lines
- Medicine Meets Criminal Justice -
Effective Interventions for Gun Violence Prevention and
Community Safety
A Medical Perspective

Gun violence kills nearly 40,000 Americans every year; more than 100,000 people suffer non-fatal gunshot wounds, and the associated trauma affects hundreds of thousands more, making it a public health problem of epidemic proportions. Those of us working in the criminal justice system see the impacts of gun violence close up day-in and day out. What can be done about it?

Massachusetts General Hospital recently launched a hospital-based interdisciplinary and collaborative center dedicated to advancing the safety and health of children and adults through injury and gun violence prevention research, clinical care, education and community engagement. This is a bold and unusual step for an academic medical center. Come hear from the two pioneering doctors who founded the Center, who will discuss their work, and how it may be useful to defense attorneys, prosecutors, judges, probation officers, law enforcement, and others working in the criminal justice system.

Dr. Chana Sacks and Dr. Peter Masiakos

Speaker Biographies:
Peter T. Masiakos, MS, MD, FACS, FAAP Is a Pediatric Surgeon and the Director of Pediatric Trauma Service at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the Co-Director of the MGH Center for Gun Violence Prevention. He is an Associate Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and a Pediatric Surgeon at MGH, where he has a clinical interest in pediatric trauma care and injury prevention. He has been involved in successfully educating the Massachusetts legislature and the US Congress on the inherent risks that certain products pose on children. Dr. Masiakos has worked alongside Massachusetts State Legislators on several comprehensive injury prevention laws including junior operator laws, safe driving laws, child restraint laws and firearm injury prevention laws.

Chana A. Sacks, MD, MPH is a general internist in the Department of Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, an Instructor in Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the Co-Director of the MGH Center for Gun Violence Prevention. Dr. Sacks attended the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine and completed her residency and Chief Residency at MGH. She then completed a research fellowship focused on health policy and health economics at Brigham and Women's Hospital while completing her MPH at the Harvard School of Public Health. The MGH Center for Gun Violence Prevention she leads is an interdisciplinary clinical, education, and research program focused on developing and implementing a public health approach to address gun violence in Boston and across the US. Dr. Sacks' research focuses on the physical and mental health outcomes associated with firearm-related injuries and suicide prevention. She is also the images editor at the New England Journal of Medicine.

Reception to follow with light hors d'oeuvres and cash bar to follow.

This event will be live-streamed to the Worcester and Springfield Federal Courthouses.

"AVOIDING ERRORS AND IMPROVING RESULTS
IN THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM:
CAN WE LEARN ANYTHING FROM BRAIN SURGERY
AND SPACE SHUTTLES?"

Attorney and author James Doyle will speak about his ongoing research on avoiding and correcting errors in the criminal justice system. His current work with the National Institute of Justice 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. Mr. 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.

Speaker Biography:
James Doyle is a veteran litigator and writer. His experience includes constitutional litigation, homicide trials and appeals, representing crime victims, death row litigation, and civil rights cases. He is the author of True Witness (2005) the history of the collision between the science of memory and the legal system, and the co-author (with Elizabeth Loftus) of Eyewitness Testimony: Civil and Criminal, the principal treatise for lawyers in eyewitness cases. He was the founding Director of The Center For Modern Forensic Practice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and its Arson Screening Project. During 2012-2014 he was a Visiting Fellow at the National Institute of Justice, where he devised and launched NIJ's Sentinel Events Initiative, and authored the principal essay in the NIJ's Special Report, Mending Justice: Sentinel Event Reviews. He is an Advisor to the American Law Institute's Project on Policing and recently completed a term as a Senior Program Advisor to the National Institute of Justice.

Attorney and Author James Doyle

Reception to follow with light hors d'oeuvres and cash bar to follow.

Event will be held at the Boston Moakley Courthouse and streamed to Worcester and Springfield federal courthouses. Please indicate if you plan to attend the livestream in your RSVP.