NEW YORK — When the decades-old murder convictions of three half brothers were thrown out last month, they became a dramatic example of an idea spreading among prosecutors nationwide: “integrity units” dedicated to double-checking convictions to determine whether justice was served.
Over the last seven years, more than a dozen prosecutors’ offices across the country have created such staff teams or expert panels to review wrongful-conviction claims. The groups have agreed to revisit more than 4,900 cases, resulting in at least 61 convictions tossed so far, according to a tally compiled from interviews, prosecutors’ reports and news accounts.
The initiatives are underway from New York to Santa Clara County, Calif., and from Chicago to Dallas, fueled by growing concern about false convictions in a country that has averaged 68 exonerations a year since 1999.
“What we’ve seen take place over the last 15 years has, I think, shaken most career prosecutors to their core. We had to respond to it,” says Scott McNamara, district attorney in central New York’s Oneida County.
While advocates see the reviews as open-minded efforts to address possible injustice, some defense attorneys are cautious about embracing them. Some prosecutors have faced questions about whether they’re out to rethink convictions or just harden them.
“It’s a catchy name to say you’re a conviction integrity unit, but you have to be able to answer some of these questions,” said Barry Scheck, a co-founder of the Innocence Project, an exoneration advocacy group.
Police and prosecutors have long aided some exonerations without having special conviction-review units, and many still do. But since Dallas DA Craig Watkins started such a unit in 2007, it has freed 33 people, reviewed more than 400 cases and inspired other prosecutors. Philadelphia and Cleveland prosecutors followed suit this April.
Prosecutors acknowledge it’s an unusual role for them.
“Why are we doing this?” some Santa Clara County prosecutors asked at first, recalls Assistant District Attorney David Angel, who oversees the effort there. His reply: If the criminal justice system errs, “we have to be part of reversing that error.”
Appeals courts have been re-examining convictions for centuries, but prosecutors’ reviews can unearth evidence from authorities’ own files that never made it into the court record. DAs also have investigative tools that defense lawyers don’t, such as the ability to grant witnesses immunity from prosecution. And there can be “enormous advantage” in approaching prosecutors before going into the adversarial realm of court, says Claudia Trupp of the Center for Appellate Litigation in New York.
Whatever the debate, it hardly mattered to Robert Hill when he left a Brooklyn court last month, free for the first time in 27 years, after prosecutors disavowed the 1980s convictions that had put him and his two half brothers behind bars.
“I’m just happy to be out,” Hill said.
In colorado
The attorney general’s and Denver district attorney’s offices are setting out to determine whether new DNA testing might cast doubt on violent crime convictions. Prosecutors and investigators reviewed more than 1,700 cases from 2010 to 2014. They ultimately concluded that only one case presented enough of an identity question to merit new testing; that defendant was exonerated. The work is to continue. The Associated Press
