Leader chosen for DA’S unit on fairness
A team of prosecutors tasked with checking the fairness of thousands of convictions obtained by the Bexar County District Attorney’s Office has a new director.
Matthew Howard now is in charge of the Conviction Integrity Unit, District Attorney Joe D. Gonzales announced Thursday. Howard, 33, previously an assistant district attorney, joined the DA’S office in 2013 and has worked with the CIU since 2015.
He replaces his former boss, Alison Dahlberg, who left to work for the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin to “pursue her first love of appellate work,” Gonzales said during a Zoom news conference.
Howard will lead a unit of three attorneys, including himself, and a paralegal.
“This division grades our paper to make sure these convictions have integrity, not just convictions obtained during our administration, but those that occurred before,” Gonzales said. “No division is as important as the Conviction Integrity Unit.”
The division reviews convictions to make sure they were sound and based on solid evidence and testimony, not junk science or the questionable veracity of witnesses who might have been coerced.
Howard said it is “a great feeling” to be able to inspire confidence in the criminal justice system by righting wrongs.
“Our oath as prosecutors requires us to strive to root out manifest injustice at all stages of a criminal proceeding, and we have a duty to ensure that no innocent individual sits in prison for a crime they didn’t commit,” he said.
Gonzales pointed to several victories Howard has been a part of in his years with the CIU.
The highest-profile cases the CIU continues to investigate are the ones involving Mark Benavides, a former San Antonio lawyer convicted in 2018 of human trafficking for forcing clients into having sex with him, threatening them with prison time if they did not.
In a three-week trial held in Floresville on a change of venue, testimony from six women established that Benavides, when he was representing them against prostitution and other charges, would force them to have sex with him in a downtown motel while being videotaped.
Investigators seized hundreds of videos from his home, which were shown only to the jury at trial. Benavides was sentenced to 80 years in prison.
The CIU, working with the Bexar County Public Defender’s Office, has assisted Benavides’ victims in obtaining dismissals and expunctions of cases for which they were found guilty.
Both are still seeking potential victims of Benavides, who was known to not only harass his clients, but their female relatives as well, officials said.
Potential victims of Benavides are urged to call 210-335-0701.
SAN ANTONIO