Dr. Greg Hampikian

Dr. Greg Hampikian was professor of Biology and Criminal Justice at Boise State University  for 20 years and directed the Idaho Innocence Project. He is now president of CompGenomics and works on forensic DNA cases across the U.S. and overseas.  He is an adjunct professor at the University of Idaho College of Law, and his lab pioneered the use of forensic genealogy for exonerations.  Hampikian’s casework has been featured in Science, on the BBC, CNN, and Dateline.  His book Exit to Freedom with exoneree Calvin Johnson, Jr., chronicles Mr. Johnson’s 17-year fight to prove his innocence using DNA.  Hampikian helped establish innocence organizations in France and Ireland, and has served as a DNA expert in more than 40 exonerations, including Amanda Knox (Italy), Kerry Robinson (with the Georgia Innocence Project), and Christopher Tapp (Idaho) and Charles Fain (Idaho).  In both Idaho cases, his lab worked with police to identify new DNA genealogy matches that led to arrests decades after the crimes.  His New York Times Op-eds include “The Dangers of DNA Testing,” “When May I Shoot a Student?,” and “Men Who Needs Them?” In addition to forensics, Hampikian’s research and patents cover COVID-19, HIV, cancer, and foundational work on DNA sequences absent in nature, called Nullomers.

Bruce Livingston

Bruce Livingston is a recently retired lawyer, who appreciates art and music, even if his ability to perform in the creative arts is sadly lacking.  He grew up in Oberlin, Ohio, and obtained an undergraduate degree from Duke University, and a law degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Illinois.  Between college and law school, he once audited an Italian Renaissance Art class at Oberlin College, but, truth be told, his objective was as much about meeting Oberlin students as it was about the art itself.  Upon passing the bar exam in 1984, Bruce practiced law at a large corporate firm in St. Louis, developed some appellate law expertise, and took two cases to the Supreme Court of the United States, where he argued one of them.  When his firm decided to take on the last appeal of a Missouri death row inmate, his appellate experience led his firm to assign the case to Livingston, which led to another case, and then another. Those three cases all had something so dramatically wrong with them that Livingston shifted positions – from being ambivalent about the death penalty to opposing it in all cases.  In 1997, he left a lucrative, corporate-litigation practice and took the opportunity to move to Idaho and work exclusively on the last appeals of Idaho’s death row inmates for the next 25 years in the local Capital Habeas Unit of the Federal Public Defender.  Many of his clients engaged in artistic endeavors over the course of their time in prison, and Livingston can speak to the importance of the arts to them.

Michael Richardson

Originally from Vermont, Michael Richardson is a writer, visual artist, and web developer.  As an undergraduate, back in the 1980s, he had the chance to teach drawing and sculpture classes to men at Cheshire CI, a prison in Connecticut.  A few years later, while studying for his MFA in creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College, he co-led a writing program for incarcerated women in upstate New York. In 2021, he founded Idaho Prison Arts Collective, a non-profit that has brought arts programming to incarcerated people in Idaho – classes like writing, dance, painting, music, coding, and mindfulness.  He teaches coding and creative writing at the Idaho State Correctional Center, a men’s prison in Kuna.