The Careers feature 'Courage of conviction' (Nature 526, 463–465; 2015) gave the wrong date for the conviction of Bradley Waldroup: the verdict was passed in 2009. The article also mischaracterized the part in the defence proceedings played by William Bernet. Bernet — together with James Walker — performed a complete psychiatric and neuropsychological profile of Waldroup and as a result identified that the defendant had a high-risk gene variant that, when coupled with his abusive childhood, could arguably increase his risk of violent behaviour. Bernet did not undertake any of the research linking this genetic variant to antisocial behaviour, as suggested by our article, but only presented a summary of extant scientific knowledge to the jury. Comments in the article also inadvertently could have been read as directly criticizing Bernet's testimony; this was not the intention and the text has now been corrected online to resolve this issue (see go.nature.com/xdi44d).