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New book explores how political ideology affects public opinion on wrongful convictions
LAWRENCE — A new book from a University of Kansas associate professor of political science argues that the adoption of policy reforms designed to reduce the likelihood of wrongful convictions is contingent on the ideological leaning of a state, the governor’s partisanship and the presence of innocence advocacy groups. “The Politics of Innocence: How Wrongful Convictions Shape Public Opinion” was published earlier this week by NYU Press.
Spotlight on mud snakes: Study unveils evolutionary secrets of enigmatic snake family from Southeastern Asia
LAWRENCE — A new University of Kansas genomic investigation of a group of unheralded but unique “mud snakes” from Southeast Asia is rewriting the evolutionary history of this family, named the Homalopsidae. The results were published in the Bulletin of the Society of Systematic Biologists. Species of mud snake can inhabit fresh, brackish or saltwater coastal and inland areas, mostly sleeping by day and munching on fish and crustaceans by night. Now, they’ve also fascinated two generations of KU researchers.
Four professors awarded Big XII Faculty Fellowships
LAWRENCE — Four University of Kansas professors have been selected for the Big XII Faculty Fellowship Program, which provides tenured and tenure-track faculty up to $2,500 in travel funding to collaborate with peers at other Big 12 institutions. Fellows can use the funding to visit campuses, bring colleagues from peer institutions to KU or access unique resources.
Full stories below.
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Contact: Jon Niccum, KU News Service, 785-864-7633, [email protected]
New book explores how political ideology affects public opinion on wrongful convictions
LAWRENCE — The Central Park Five. Amanda Knox. Henry and Leon McCollum. Kevin Strickland.
More stories emerge seemingly every week about convicted “criminals” being exonerated.
“Wrongful convictions are not a new phenomenon. What is new is the volume of media attention to the topic. As such, more people hear about them and discuss them,” said Kevin Mullinix, associate professor of political science at the University of Kansas.
Mullinix’s new book, “The Politics of Innocence: How Wrongful Convictions Shape Public Opinion,” argues that the adoption of policy reforms designed to reduce the likelihood of wrongful convictions is contingent on the ideological leaning of a state, the governor’s partisanship and the presence of innocence advocacy groups. It’s published by NYU Press.
“In addition to showing what leads to state-level policy reform, we demonstrate how media coverage of wrongful convictions changes people’s attitudes about criminal justice issues and the death penalty,” said Mullinix, who co-wrote the book with Robert Norris of George Mason University and William Hicks of Appalachian State University.
Whether it’s TV series such as “When They See Us” and “Making a Murderer,” podcasts such as “Serial” or even local news organizations covering regional cases, the media attention devoted to exonerations has undeniable impact.
“Our research suggests that when people see those stories, it makes them less confident that the justice system always gets it right. And it makes them willing to support policy changes that reduce the likelihood of these errors,” he said.
But this happens more in some environments than others.
“Addressing wrongful convictions seems like it should be apolitical and non-ideological,” Mullinix said. “It isn’t. The ways in which people think about wrongful convictions are shaped by politics and ideology. But a lot of these divisions are rooted in differences based on people’s awareness of the problem.”
The authors’ research shows that conservatives are less likely to report hearing about wrongful convictions and they believe these occur less frequently. Conservatives are also less supportive of policy reforms aimed at reducing wrongful convictions.
“We don’t see ideological differences in the rates at which people hear about wrongful convictions in entertainment-based fictional media like television shows, movies and books. However, we observe a big gap between liberals and conservatives in whether they hear true stories about wrongful convictions from their preferred news outlets,” he said.
Mullinix finds that when individuals are provided information regarding wrongful convictions, they become more concerned about the issue and more supportive of reforms. So, yes, ideology shapes people’s initial awareness of it. But once someone learns the facts, they support policy changes, regardless of whether they are liberal, moderate or conservative.
His team began working on this project in 2016. Even in just seven years, public attention to the issue has magnified dramatically.
“In 2016, the National Registry of Exonerations reported just over 1,800 verified exonerations in the U.S. since 1989. That obviously doesn’t account for every wrongful conviction — those are just the verified exonerations documented by the registry. I looked it up the other day, and it is now over 3,300,” he said.
Is there a single unifying aspect to these convictions that Mullinix sees repeatedly?
“One of the biggest threads through a lot of these cases is an overreliance on eyewitness testimony. But one of the things I find reassuring is that the justice system, law enforcement and the mass public are increasingly aware of the flaws associated with eyewitness testimony,” he said.
Mullinix, an expert in public opinion and public policy who has been at KU since 2018, has written extensively on topics involving justice policy reform. These include “The Feedback Effects of Controversial Police Use of Force,” (Political Behavior, 2020), “Framing Innocence: An Experimental Test of the Effects of Wrongful Convictions on Public Opinion” (Journal of Experimental Criminology, 2019) and “Partisanship and Support for Restricting the Civil Liberties of Suspected Terrorists” (Political Behavior, 2022).
He said one of the biggest challenges of writing the new book was the weight of the subject matter.
“It’s emotionally trying to hear these stories and see another one pop up time and again,” Mullinix said.
“There is a ripple effect for each wrongful conviction. First, there is the person who has been wrongfully convicted. Then there are the families of the victims who believed the actual perpetrator was caught and convicted – and then it is revealed they’re not. Then there are the prosecutors and law enforcement who sincerely believed they helped convict the true criminal. They must come to terms with the role they might have played in an innocent person losing years of their life. The scale and magnitude of pain and heartbreak is difficult to grasp. It takes an emotional toll to think about, but that is exactly what we should do.”
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Contact: Brendan Lynch, KU News Service, 785-864-8855, [email protected], @BrendanMLynch
Spotlight on mud snakes: Study unveils evolutionary secrets of enigmatic snake family from Southeastern Asia
LAWRENCE — A new University of Kansas genomic investigation of a group of unheralded but unique “mud snakes” from Southeast Asia is rewriting the evolutionary history of this family, named the Homalopsidae. The results just were published in the Bulletin of the Society of Systematic Biologists.
Species of mud snake can inhabit fresh, brackish or saltwater coastal and inland areas, mostly sleeping by day and munching on fish and crustaceans by night. Now, they’ve also fascinated two generations of KU researchers.
The new DNA-driven investigation by lead author Justin Bernstein, a KU Center for Genomics postdoctoral researcher, is an example of systematics: the study of how species evolve and their relationships through time. It builds on a “monumental” study of mud snakes conducted without benefit of DNA analysis in 1970 by Ko Ko Gyi. Gyi was a promising evolutionary biologist from Myanmar who conducted research in the Division of Herpetology of the KU Natural History Museum during a three-year fellowship from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
“Our new paper looks at the evolutionary relationships and history of mud snakes, which are found in primarily South Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Guinea — and they’re very poorly studied,” Bernstein said. “We don’t know too much about them, despite decades of effort, including the efforts of Gyi, because they’re kind of hard to find. They’re aquatic snakes who prefer muddy environments. They’re nocturnal. Very few people have studied their evolution.”
Bernstein and his co-authors shed light on mud snake evolutionary history using genomics by combining genetic analyses of older museum specimens’ mitochondrial DNA with fresher genetic samples from recent field collections (which allow for much higher-resolution molecular analysis — they used data from 4,800 nuclear loci in each genome).
“If you have an animal that’s been dead for days and extract DNA from that tissue, it’s going to be degraded — it’s not going to be high quality, which interferes with our results,” Bernstein said. “That means we either can’t analyze it, or the results might be kind of weird and we can’t trust them. But this idea of getting DNA from old specimens in natural history museums has really been on the rise in the last decade. While the DNA is degraded, there’ve been protocols in the last 10 years to get high-quality DNA out of old specimens that are over 100 years old from natural history collections.”
The researchers used the mitochondrial data from those museum-specimen samples to fill in knowledge gaps for a more accurate biogeographic history of Homalopsidae. Combining that with DNA samples from recent specimens, they reconstructed the most comprehensive family tree of Homalopsidae relationships, showing which species branched from common ancestors and roughly when.
Bernstein’s co-authors were Hugo de Souza and Kartik Shanker of the Indian Institute of Science; John Murphy, Harold Voris and Sara Ruane of the Field Museum in Chicago; Edward Myers of Clemson University and the California Academy of Sciences; Sean Harrington of the University of Wyoming and American Museum of Natural History; and Rafe Brown, curator-in-charge at the KU Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum and professor of ecology & evolutionary biology.
“Following up on Gyi’s pioneering and foundational work, Justin has been able to avail of a technological breakthrough, which we refer to now as ‘museumomics’ — the extraction and sequencing of degraded DNA, even from very old formalin-preserved specimens that were preserved dozens to hundreds of years ago,” said Brown, who served as an “outside” member of Bernstein’s doctoral committee at Rutgers. “Obviously, the quality of that highly degraded DNA is variable, but new genomic sequencing technologies, bioinformatic tools, and diligent studies on the part of museum biologists have developed best practices for reconstructing highly fragmented genomes of specimens that were preserved upwards of a century ago. Justin successfully harnessed these new state-of-the-art tools, but also brought his own research ‘full circle,’ historically following up on Gyi’s work.”
The new paper shows one long-held concept regarding mud snakes was incorrect. For years, scientists (including Bernstein) thought ice age fluctuations in sea level might have acted as a “species pump” that drove diversification of the mud snakes. Indeed, much regional biodiversity can be traced to sea level rise and fall. But the new paper shows, “Pleistocene sea level changes and habitat specificity did not primarily lead to the extant species richness of Homalopsidae.”
Instead, Bernstein and his colleagues believe a more likely driver of mud snake species richness happened around 20 million years earlier, during the Oligocene, when sliding tectonic plates and shifting rivers in Southeast Asia might have severed and reestablished gene flow repeatedly between mud snake groups, driving diversification.
“Although we can never prove what did happen, exactly, to trigger diversification in mud snakes, we can rule out, or reject, some previously articulated hypotheses,” Bernstein said. “Because we found strong statistical support for diversification pre-dating Pleistocene sea level fluctuations by 15-20 million years, we need to look to alternative explanations, or novel ways of interpreting the production of biodiversity.”
Bernstein and Brown are quick to point to the pioneering work on mud snakes performed 50 years ago by Gyi, whose work not only figured into the new paper but had several ideas confirmed by later DNA testing.
“Gyi completed a monumental work on this group of snakes, more than 50 years ago, and without the benefit of molecular analysis,” Brown said. “That, in and of itself, is quite an accomplishment — his work was thoroughly comprehensive for the time, he really made the most of the available technologies, such as detailed X-rays of the skulls of all the species in this mysterious group of snakes, and he totally took the study of the evolutionary relationships of mud snakes ‘from zero to 60’ in his 1970 monograph. I know his adviser, the late Bill Duellman, was heartbroken to find out that Gyi passed away unexpectedly back in Myanmar, shortly after he left KU. But, here at KU, we still honor revisit and celebrate Ko Ko Gyi’s unique contributions, even to this day, and his work is continued on by Field Museum of Natural History researchers John Murphy and Harold K. Voris — and now by Justin Bernstein.”
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Contact: Genevieve Prescher, Office of the Provost, [email protected]
Four professors awarded Big XII Faculty Fellowships
LAWRENCE — Four University of Kansas professors have been selected for the Big XII Faculty Fellowship Program, which provides tenured and tenure-track faculty up to $2,500 in travel funding to collaborate with peers at other Big 12 institutions. Fellows can use the funding to visit campuses, bring colleagues from peer institutions to KU or access unique resources.
The 2023-24 Big XII Fellowship recipients:
1. Eileen Nutting, Department of Philosophy
2. Lin Liu, Department of Mechanical Engineering
3. Sheyda Jahanbani, Department of History
4. E. Bruce Hayes, Department of French, Francophone & Italian Studies
“The Big XII Faculty Fellowship is an important opportunity for our KU faculty to collaborate and connect with scholars from across the Big XII conference,” said Amy Mendenhall, vice provost for faculty affairs. “This fellowship provides a platform for showcasing and supporting the important work of our KU faculty as they advance research and discovery with scholars at other Big XII institutions, strengthen research partnerships and promote their scholarship through public presentations to students, faculty and the greater campus communities across the Big 12.”
About the recipients
Eileen Nutting
Eileen Nutting, associate professor of philosophy, is preparing for her fall 2023 visit to the University of Texas at Austin. Collaborating with philosopher Jon Litland, they will explore paradoxes in metaphysics, logic and the philosophy of mathematics. In addition to holding in-depth discussions with Litland, Nutting plans to participate in graduate seminars and present her latest research. Their continued exchange of ideas will fuel ongoing research, inspire prospective collaborations and strengthen connections between the philosophy departments at KU and Texas.
Nutting joined the KU faculty in 2013.
Nutting said, “UT Austin has a world-class philosophy department, and I’m delighted to have the chance to get to know their faculty and graduate students. I’m especially grateful that the Big XII Faculty Fellowship will allow me to spend two full weeks working through research ideas with Jon Litland. The length of the visit will allow for a more sustained conversation, and consequently more substantive research progress, than would be possible in a shorter visit.”
Lin Liu
Lin Liu, associate professor of mechanical engineering, is collaborating with Kansas State University researchers to advance hydrogen production technology. Their work is focused on improving protonic ceramic electrolysis cells (PCECs) to increase efficiency and reduce cost involved with hydrogen generation. Liu plans to develop physics-based models and conduct experiments in an effort to optimize PCEC-positive electrodes. This project builds on recent breakthroughs in electrocatalysts and proton-conducting oxides. It is notable that Liu’s project also involves testing partnerships with Idaho National Lab and Pacific Northwest National Lab. By improving hydrogen production technology, this research can benefit sustainable energy efforts.
Liu joined the KU faculty in 2013.
Liu said, “The success of this project will not only produce results to strengthen our previous proposals but also create new knowledge to predict, design, synthesize and characterize the positive electrode for efficient and durable PCECs. Furthermore, obtained fundamental understanding, novel materials, novel experimental methods and devices may benefit other research fields, such as lithium metal batteries.”
Sheyda Jahanbani
Sheyda Jahanbani, associate professor of history, will visit the University of Texas at Austin to collaborate with Professor Mark Atwood Lawrence. During the fellowship, Jahanbani will present her latest book, “The Poverty of the World: Rediscovering the Poor at Home and Abroad.” She also plans to study connections between historical and modern poverty reduction efforts, as well as conduct interviews with leaders of influential organizations tied to President Lyndon Johnson’s administration. A couple of these significant organizations include Bread for the World and the Eleanor Crook Foundation. The fellowship will enable Jahanbani to learn about UT Austin’s applied social science program and help establish similar undergraduate opportunities at KU.
Jahanbani joined the KU faculty in 2007.
Jahanbani said, “Nurturing existing relationships with the director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum, faculty in the department of history at UT, and scholars at LBJ School of Public Administration, I am going to be exploring ways we can use innovative applied research strategies in our teaching in the history department at KU.”
Bruce Hayes
Bruce Hayes, professor of French, Francophone & Italian studies, will spend a week at the University of Texas at Austin collaborating with peers. At UT’s esteemed Harry Ransom Center, Hayes will look at rare Renaissance texts, including a 1598 edition of Montaigne’s “Essais.” Beyond research, Hayes plans to share insights on student recruitment and retention with UT’s French & Italian department faculty. This will include giving a talk about strategies to attract and engage students in the field. This opportunity allows Hayes to advance his work through strengthening scholarly networks while returning with new knowledge and insights to improve KU’s respective programs.
Hayes joined the KU faculty in 2001.
Hayes said, “I am both excited and honored to be invited by the Department of French & Italian at the University of Texas-Austin, including support from Professor Marc Bizer, a leading scholar in my field of French Renaissance studies. I look forward to giving a talk to the department and engaging in dialogue about student recruitment and retention while I am there.”
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