A way to help the wrongfully imprisoned
New York needs more conviction review bureaus
We would justifiably be baffled if a defense attorney, while appealing a murder conviction, conceded that the trial was error-free, admitted her client’s guilt, and urged that the conviction and punishment should be upheld. That’s not what defense lawyers do.
Now imagine a prosecutor, having won a hard-earned murder conviction, doing an about-face and arguing that, after further review, it appears the defendant actually was innocent and should be released from prison. That’s precisely what prosecutors should do.
In our adversarial system of justice, defense lawyers and prosecutors are both charged with representing their clients’ best interests, but their obligations are asymmetrical. Not surprisingly, it is in the best interest of most defendants, whether guilty or innocent, to avoid conviction and a prison sentence. On the other hand, a prosecutor’s client is the People — you and me — and while it may be in our best interest to have guilty parties brought to justice, none of us much wants to see an innocent person convicted and punished.
That’s why canons of ethics stipulate that the prosecutor’s job is not simply to obtain convictions, but rather to do justice. That endures beyond trials: Prosecutors who learn following a conviction that evidence supports a defendant’s innocence are ethically obligated to investigate and, if the evidence is sufficiently strong, take corrective action.
The caveat is that these post-conviction duties exist only when prosecutors are aware of evidence of a defendant’s innocence. Most people serving prison sentences are severely compromised, to put it mildly, in their ability to bring forward new evidence of innocence. Many no longer have attorneys working for them, and unless they are fortunate enough to have friends or family to help, or an organization such as the Innocence Project willing to take on their case, they are all but certain to remain incarcerated even if wrongfully convicted.
No one any longer doubts that innocent people are confined in the nation’s prisons. The National Registry of Exonerations (NRE) has reported nearly 3,400 exonerations nationwide since 1989. This tally represents only known cases of innocent people convicted of crimes; the number of undiscovered wrongful convictions is certainly much greater. Even if 99 percent of the 1.2 million people currently imprisoned in the United States are guilty, and criminal justice systems have an error rate of only 1 percent, a staggering 12,000 factually innocent people are serving prison sentences today.
One promising development in response to miscarriages of justice has been the initiative taken by some prosecutors’ offices to create conviction integrity units (CIU), sometimes called conviction review bureaus. As the NRE explains, a conviction integrity unit is “a division of a prosecutorial office that works to prevent, identify, and remedy false convictions.” Some 93 CIUs, many of quite recent origin, were operating nationwide in 2021.
Fourteen of those CIUs were housed in county district attorney’s offices in
New York. According to the NRE, since the state’s first CIU opened its doors in 2011, nine of those units have helped to expose the wrongful convictions of 72 individuals, accounting for an impressive 42 percent of the state’s 172 exonerations during that time. Unfortunately, no district attorney’s office in the Capital Region — including those in Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga and Schenectady counties — has a CIU.
The conviction review bureau in the state attorney general’s office, created in 2012, announces on its website that it accepts complaints of wrongful conviction and assists county district attorneys with investigations of claimed innocence when requested. However, the website is largely barren of other information: It lacks a complaint form and offers no electronic contact information. And according to the NRE, this conviction review bureau has never participated in a case resulting in exoneration.
When prosecutors remain in the dark about information supporting claims of innocence, they can neither investigate nor correct miscarriages of justice, even in the most deserving cases. New York’s existing conviction integrity units have helped serve prosecutors’ mandate to do justice in cases of wrongful conviction. But counties without a dedicated CIU, and the state’s lack of a robust unit charged with reviewing post-conviction claims of innocence, may unwittingly bring unfortunate new meaning to the saying that “justice is blind.”