Award-winning investigative reporter Dick Lehr joined Justice Brandeis Innocence Project last June. His hiring follows the departure of the Project's founding director Pamela Cytrynbaum, who accepted a teaching position in Oregon at the end of last semester. Lehr will be working through December as a "visiting journalism-in-residence" with the Innocence Project, according to a University press release.

The Project, one of only three journalism-based groups in the United States that investigate cases of possible wrongful conviction, opened at the Elaine and Gerald Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism in Fall 2005.

Lehr, a professor of journalism at Boston University, reported for the Boston Globe for nearly 20 years. His investigative reporting on the 1989 conviction of Shawn Drumgold for the murder of a young girl from Roxbury, Mass. in 2003 caused Drumgold to be released from a life sentence.

Institute staff didn't return several phone calls from the Justice.

Currently Lehr is working on The Fence, a book about police brutality in Boston. He has co-authored three other books, including Black Mass, Judgment Ridge, and The Underboss.

The Institute was founded in 2004 by Director Florence Graves and is the only university-run independent investigative reporting center in the U.S.