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Keith Roots Named Director of U.Va.'s College Guide Program

Garrett's Study of First 200 Post-Conviction DNA Exonerations Shows Flawed Criminal System

When Less is More: Too Much Happiness May Be Too Much of a Good Thing

Keith Roots Named Director of U.Va.'s College Guide Program

Keith Roots Photo by Dan Addison

Keith D. Roots has been named director of the University of Virginia’s College Guide Program.

The program, created at U.Va. two years ago and now expanding nationwide, places recent college graduates in high school guidance offices to assist students who ordinarily would not choose to apply to college. Guides have also been placed in community colleges to encourage students to consider four-year colleges when they graduate.. Roots, a former admissions counselor and most recently director of corporate and foundation relations for U.Va.'s College of Arts & Sciences, worked closely with College Guide founder Nicole F. Hurd since the program’s inception.

"The College Guide Program has helped many students move onto paths they may not have taken otherwise," said Roots. "We’re proud to serve as an additional resource to our partner institutions across the Commonwealth.

The College Guides work with students on applications to colleges, applications for financial aid and explaining the steps necessary to enter college. Guides have taken students on trips to colleges. Guides also encourage students in lower grades to consider college and what courses to take while still in high school.

"This is a valuable effort that will help not only this generation, but also generations to come."

The College Guide Program has already opened doors for many high school students. After its first year in the program, Holston High School in Damascus, which had traditionally sent about 50 percent of its graduates on to some form of higher education, saw that number rise to nearly 85 percent.

In Virginia alone, College Guides worked with 15,000 students in the last academic year, Roots said.

The program is partially funded by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and directed through U.Va’s Office of the Vice President and Provost. U.Va.’s Guide Program has also received $337,000 from Americorps State, which provides grants for direct service to address unmet community needs and educational programming. Several Guide positions are funded by foundations in the communities where they work. College Guides receive a $10,000 service stipend, a $10,000 housing allowance and $5,000 toward either future education or to pay for existing educational debts.

"The success of the program will be in the students coming to college who would not have ordinarily," Hurd said. "We are trying to assist overworked guidance counselors in our partner high schools."

The Cooke Foundation was so impressed with the program’s performance in its first year that it awarded $1 million apiece to 10 colleges and universities to create programs based upon U.Va.’s model. The grant recipients are Brown University, Franklin & Marshall College, Loyola College in Maryland, Pennsylvania State University, Tufts University in collaboration with the Massachusetts Campus Compact, the University of Alabama, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Missouri-Columbia, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Utah.

"I am delighted that Keith will be representing U.Va. in our growing network of advising corps programs," said Hurd, who is now director for Higher Education Initiatives at the National College Access Network, which is overseeing the growing program. "As our national expansion continues, Keith's experience and enthusiasm will help sustain a strong model program in the Commonwealth."

"Keith brings strong experience and is committed to access to higher education," said J. Milton Adams, vice provost for academic programs.

Roots has a bachelor’s degree in government from U.Va., a master’s degree in educational psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and has nearly completed a Ph.D. in higher education at the University of Georgia. At. U.Va., he has been the associate director of corporate and foundation relations, as well as assistant to the provost. He has also been assistant to the president at Longwood College (now University) in Farmville, Va., and district executive of the Boy Scouts of America in Charlottesville. Roots also served as an admissions officer at Longwood, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Georgia.

This fall, 24 Guides have started their yearlong jobs in 25 Virginia school districts and two community colleges, including four who are returning from the previous year. The 20 new Guides have been put through a six-week training course in financial aid, admissions, diversity issues and various forms of post-secondary education. Aside from their classroom training, they visited 21 Virginia colleges, meeting admission directors and touring campus facilities to familiarize themselves with an array of institutions.

For information, contact Keith Roots, director of U.Va.’s College Guides Program, at (434) 924-7612 or kroots@virginia.edu.

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Garrett's Study of First 200 Post-Conviction DNA Exonerations Shows Flawed Criminal SystemSource: School of Law

Professor Brandon Garrett Photo by Dan Addison

University of Virginia law professor Brandon Garrett’s groundbreaking study examining the cases of the first 200 wrongly convicted people later found innocent through DNA testing reveals fundamental flaws in the criminal system. Courts not only failed to redress trial errors over years and sometimes decades, but they often found innocent appellants to be guilty, and sometimes denied relief even after DNA testing proved innocence, Garrett says.

The study, to be published by the Columbia Law Review in January 2008 as the first comprehensive inquiry to explore the cases, examined evidence introduced during the appellants’ initial trials, each claim they raised during their appeals, how courts ruled on them, and how DNA testing ultimately freed them. Garrett has personal experience with the issue; he formerly litigated wrongful conviction cases as an associate at the law firm Cochran, Neufeld & Scheck in New York City.

"Although our system of criminal appeals is intended to protect against wrongful convictions, this study shows how appellate courts misjudged innocence," Garrett says. "A third of those with written decisions received rulings in which judges claimed that errors were harmless due to outweighing evidence of guilt in their cases. Some courts judged innocence particularly poorly, in retrospect. Nine percent of innocent appellants had a court deny a new trial, ruling that there was ‘overwhelming’ evidence of their guilt."

"This study shows what an uphill battle many of the Innocence Project's clients faced in the courts," says Peter Neufeld, co-director and co-founder of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization formed to assist prisoners who could be proven innocent through DNA testing. "In our experience, many exonerees suffered terribly unfair trials, were convicted based on unreliable evidence, and this should have been apparent long before they had DNA testing. Just like others in the criminal system, judges can learn valuable lessons from these DNA exoneration cases about the importance of ensuring rigorous and fair dispositions."

Few innocent appellants in the study brought innocence claims—just 25 percent of those with written decisions. "Those that brought innocence claims failed," Garrett says. "One reason for this is that the Supreme Court has not yet recognized any constitutional right entitling a petitioner to relief on the grounds of actual innocence."  Yet even those who brought state law innocence claims failed.

The majority, 86 percent, never received any relief during their appeals before they obtained DNA testing. However, even after they obtained DNA testing, some innocent appellants still had trouble convincing a court to vacate their conviction. "Courts denied 12 innocent appellants relief despite at least preliminary DNA test results exonerating them," Garrett says. In 41 cases (20 percent), appellants received a pardon from their state executive, often because they lacked any available judicial forum.

"Many of these exonerees had trouble obtaining access to DNA testing due to traditional limits on post-conviction motions brought after a statute of limitations," Garrett says. "In response, most states have passed statutes making DNA testing more widely available post-conviction. However, those statutes often include severe restrictions that most of these exonerees could not have satisfied. Decades into the DNA era, we still do not make DNA testing available to all of those who could use it to conclusively prove their innocence."

Criminal appeals brought before DNA proved innocence resulted in a high 14 percent reversal rate, but Garrett found that rate consistent with the reversal rate in other rape and murder convictions not involving DNA evidence. 

"Approximately half of these reversals were innocence-related, indicating a high degree of factual error in the most serious criminal prosecutions," Garrett says.

The innocent group, all male save one, included 22 juveniles and 12 mentally handicapped people; 71 percent were minorities. The vast majority of exonerated rape convicts (73 percent) were black or Hispanic, while studies show only about 37 percent of rape convicts are minorities. Fourteen were sentenced to death, including seven who confessed, three of whom were mentally retarded. In the entire innocence group, only eight pled guilty.

The 200 exonerees were convicted based on eyewitness identifications (79 percent), forensic evidence (55 percent), informant testimony (18 percent), and false confessions (16 percent).

"Surprisingly few innocent appellants brought claims regarding those facts, such as challenging an eyewitness identification for being suggestive, even though in 56 cases, the victim’s identification was the sole noncircumstantial evidence supporting the conviction," Garrett says. 

Of those with written decisions, 45 appellants challenged none of the central facts supporting their conviction during their appeals. Garrett suggests this could be due to ineffective appellate lawyering, but also because "factual claims require expensive investigation, and the standards for such claims ensure that success is rare. 

"We need to embrace changes to our criminal system to facilitate the accurate development of factual evidence at all stages of the process — not just in DNA cases, but in the vast majority of cases in which DNA testing cannot be conducted," Garrett says.

Adopting more dependable eyewitness identification procedures across the nation, videotaping identifications and interrogations, evaluating the use of jailhouse informants, improving or establishing oversight of crime labs, and enabling access to independent forensic experts would all provide courts and juries with more reliable evidence, Garrett says, and would then empower appellate courts to better remedy wrongful convictions when they happen.

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When Less is More: Too Much Happiness May Be Too Much of a Good ThingSource: U.Va. Today

Shigehiro Oishi Photo by Dan Addison

Are you happy? Well don't try to be happier; you might become less happy. That is the gist of a multi-cultural study published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The study by University of Virginia psychology professor Shigehiro Oishi and colleagues at three other institutions found that, on average, European-Americans claim to be happy in general – more happy than Asian-Americans or Koreans or Japanese – but are more easily made less happy by negative events, and recover at a slower rate from negative events, than their counterparts in Asia or with an Asian ancestry. On the other hand, Koreans, Japanese, and to a lesser extent, Asian-Americans, are less happy in general, but recover their emotional equilibrium more readily after a setback than European-Americans.

"We found that the more positive events a person has, the more they feel the effects of a negative event," Oishi said. "People seem to dwell on the negative thing when they have a large number of good events in their life.

"It is like the person who is used to flying first class and becomes very annoyed if there is a half-hour delay. But the person who flies economy class accepts the delay in stride."

Oishi, a social psychologist who grew up in Japan and then moved to the United States at 23, is interested in comparing how people from East Asia and the United States respond to the daily events of life.

He and his colleagues surveyed more than 350 college students in Japan, Korea and the United States over a three-week period. The students recorded daily their general state of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with life, as well as the number of positive and negative events they had during the course of each day.

The researchers found that the European-Americans needed nearly two positive events (such as getting complimented or getting an A) to return to their normal level of happiness after each negative event, such as getting a parking ticket or a lower grade than expected. The Koreans, Japanese and Asian-Americans generally needed only one positive event to make up for each negative event.   

Oishi said that people who become accustomed to numerous positive or happy events in their life are more likely to take a harder fall than people who have learned to accept the bad with the good. And because negative events have such a strong effect when occurring in the midst of numerous positive events, people find it difficult to be extremely happy. They reach a point of diminishing returns.

This is why the extreme happiness people may feel after buying a new car or a house, or getting married, can be rapidly diminished when the payments come due or the daily spats begin. It becomes a problem of ratio, or perspective.

"In general, it's good to have a positive perspective," Oishi said, "But unless you can switch your mindset to accept the negative facts of everyday life — that these things happen and must be accepted — it becomes very hard to maintain a comfortable level of satisfaction."

His advice: "Don't try to be happier."

His co-authors are Ed Diener, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and The Gallup Organization, Dong-Won Choi of California State University, East Bay; Chu Kim-Prieto of the College of New Jersey, and Incheol Choi of Seoul National University.

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