Sean O’Brien is the 2022 recipient of UMKC’s prestigious N.T. Veatch Award for Distinguished Research and Creativity. The award, named after Nathan Thomas Veatch, co-founder of Black and Veatch Corporation, honors one faculty member each year who has distinguished themselves through scholarship and creativity and who serves as a role model and mentor for faculty and students in pursuit of academic excellence.
For Professor O’Brien, that work has been teaching criminal law, criminal procedure and wrongful convictions while supervising clinics that provide pro bono legal assistance to prisoners wrongfully convicted or sentenced to death. He is recognized as one of a small handful of the very best capital defense lawyers nationally and internationally.
His academic scholarship focuses on specific facets of death penalty defense and wrongful convictions doctrine and advocacy, combining numerous disciplines where law and forensic science intersect, particularly with respect to human development, social work, and mental health.
O’Brien is directly responsible for litigation that resulted in the correction of 20 unconstitutional death sentences and removed those men, women and children from death row in Missouri and across the country. He has also directly been responsible for litigation that won the freedom of 15 additional wrongly convicted persons.
We at UMKC School of Law congratulate Professor O’Brien on this recognition of his outstanding work.