As chief state’s attorney, Kane made state better
Kevin T. Kane recently retired as chief state’s attorney after more than 13 years as the state’s top-ranking prosecutor and head of the Division of Criminal Justice. All of us owe him a profound thank you for his service, not only as chief state’s attorney but for his 47 years as a prosecutor.
One of Kane’s highest priorities throughout his 13 years as chief state’s attorney and, indeed, throughout his career has been the large number of unsolved homicides in the state. There’s no statewide cold case clearinghouse that keeps track of the cases, and the exact number isn’t known, but Kane has estimated there may be as many as 1,500 to 2,000 unsolved homicides dating back to the 1970s.
In 1998, a cold-case unit was created in the chief state’s attorney’s office. Over the past 20 years, inspectors in that office, working with members of police departments in the Greater Hartford area, have solved a number of cases. But staffed as it was largely with personnel based in Rocky Hill and the Hartford area, it wasn’t ideally located for investigating unsolved homicides in other parts of the state. In 2009, Kane arranged with his successor as the New London state’s attorney to create a cold-case unit in that office, and in 2016 he arranged to create such a unit in the New Haven State’s Attorney’s office as well. I hope at some point the chronically underfunded Division of Criminal Justice will be able to create such units in all of the state’s attorney’s offices.
While Kane was, throughout his career, dedicated above all to bringing to justice those who had committed a crime, as chief state’s attorney he also supported procedural reforms to reduce the likelihood that innocent persons would be convicted of crimes they hadn’t committed. The Innocence Project reports that the single most frequent contributing cause of the 325 wrongful convictions reversed because of DNA was eyewitness misidentifications and, indeed, the first Connecticut conviction thrown out because of new-found DNA evidence was one — that of James
Tillman — based on an eyewitness misidentification.
In 2011, the legislature created an eyewitness identification task force to evaluate the reliability of the standard means by which such identifications were obtained — by showing the witness a photo array of six or eight faces — compared with an alternative technique in which the witness is shown the photos one at a time. Research demonstrated the latter technique resulted in substantially fewer misidentifications.
After studying the research and hearing from a number of experts, the task force recommended that the legislature mandate that all police departments use the sequential technique, and in 2012 it did so.
Kane served on the task force, chaired by former Supreme Court Justice David Borden. I served on it as a social scientist. Looking back on the experience, I’ve always thought the most important moment in the deliberations came when, after one of the country’s leading researchers had presented data that showed the sequential technique resulted in fewer misidentifications, Kane made it clear that he thought the analysis was persuasive and important. Prior to that moment, I wasn’t sure the task force would endorse the technique. But after he spoke, I thought it would — and, indeed, it did.
Another important cause of the wrongful convictions that have been thrown out because of DNA evidence is false confessions or admissions. In 2008, Kane arranged for pilot programs to record interrogations in two towns in the New London area and later obtained funds to support a pilot program in Bridgeport. The pilot programs produced an unanticipated finding — that the officers who conducted the recorded interrogations liked having them recorded because it meant they couldn’t be accused later of having pressured the person or even having fabricated the confession. Based on those findings, in 2013 Kane supported legislation that required video and audio recording of all interrogations of those suspected of having committed a major crime.
One of the most important criminal justice developments over the past dozen years has been the creation in prosecutors’ offices in cities and counties throughout the country of conviction integrity units, which scrutinize the evidence in cases in which there is some reason to believe an individual was wrongfully convicted. Several years ago, I called for the state to create such a unit in the chief state’s attorney’s office. At the time, no state had created such a unit. But Kane invited me to discuss the issue with him and Deputy Chief Leonard Boyle, and in the course of the discussion I learned they were creating a conviction integrity process involving the state’s attorneys.
Thanks to Kevin Kane, the state’s criminal justice system is a better one today, both in bringing those who’ve committed long-unsolved crimes to justice and in preventing the wrongful conviction of innocent persons, because of his service.