TALKS
Anne Driscoll | We Are All Witnesses
For more than a decade, Anne Driscoll has been investigating wrongful convictions in two countries on two continents on both sides of the Atlantic. She knows firsthand how a wrongful conviction can happen to anyone, anytime, anywhere in any jurisdiction, most often due to bad eyewitness identification, police misconduct or prosecutorial misconduct. She has helped free an innocent man serving a life sentence without parole for murder who was misidentified by an eyewitness, and she also has been the victim of a crime where she nearly misidentified her own attacker. As both a social worker and a journalist, she learned that the power of bearing witness is both profound and impactful in the pursuit of justice. But we must also recognize that we are not the witnesses we believe ourselves to be.
Anne Driscoll is an award-winning journalist who has investigated wrongful convictions as senior reporter at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University and as a 2013-2014 US Fulbright scholar, and project manager of the Irish Innocence Project at Griffith College Dublin. Awarded a second Fulbright scholarship in 2018, she is currently teaching law and journalism students at the National University of Ireland, Galway about wrongful convictions and investigative techniques, while also conducting research to establish a National Registry of Exonerations in Ireland. Originally trained as a social worker, she remains a licensed certified social worker and is the author of a self-help series of guidebooks for girls called Girl to Girl. As a journalist, she has devoted her career to covering issues of human rights, social justice, and human development and has sought to make a difference in the world, one story at a time. She was the 2016 recipient of the Salem Award for Human Rights and Social Justice, is a Moth storyteller and the author of the mini-momoir about life in Ireland called Irish You Were Here.
