Samuel R. Gross, the Thomas and Mabel Long Professor of Law, graduated from Columbia College in 1968 and earned a JD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1973. He was a criminal defense attorney in San Francisco for several years, and worked as an attorney with the United Farm Workers Union in California and the Wounded Knee Legal Defense Committee in Nebraska and South Dakota. As a cooperating attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc. in New York and the National Jury Project in Oakland, California, he litigated a series of test cases on jury selection in capital trials and worked on the issue of racial discrimination in the use of the death penalty. He was a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and came to the University of Michigan from the Stanford Law School faculty.

Prof. Gross teaches evidence, criminal procedure, and courses on wrongful criminal convictions. His published work includes articles and books on evidence law, the death penalty, false convictions, racial profiling, eyewitness identification, and the relationship between pretrial bargaining and trial verdicts.

Prof. Gross is the editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, exonerationregistry.org, a joint project of the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, which maintains a detailed online database of all known exonerations in the United States since 1989.

The National Registry of Exonerations was launched in May 2012, together with a detailed report by Prof. Gross: "Exonerations in the United States, 1989–2012, Report by the National Registry of Exonerations."

For some of the media coverage of the National Registry of Exonerations, see:

NPR

Huffington Post

The Atlantic

AP