426 WRONG YRS.
The Brooklyn district attorney’s office Thursday released an historic analysis that profiles the wrongful convictions of 25 people who served a combined 426 years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit.
The report found an astonishing 84% of the wrongful convictions were due to actions by prosecutors — and that in 65% of them, police conduct played a significant role.
Mistaken eyewitnesses, nondisclosure of favorable evidence, poor procedures, unreliable confessions, and bad defenses are all cited as among the drivers of the bad convictions.
“This is the most comprehensive, detailed, and thorough analysis of wrongful convictions ever performed by a DA’s office — in the history of DAs offices,” civil rights attorney Ron Kuby told the Daily News.
The document details three decades of misconduct and error that contributed to over two dozen wrongful convictions.
In a statement, DA Eric Gonzalez said one case in particular kept him up at night.
“One of these cases has always weighed on me particularly heavily — a case of mistaken identification in a brutal sexual assault and robbery, committed at gunpoint, which resulted in Brian Davidson [a pseudonym] spending 30 years in prison for a crime he did not commit,” Gonzalez writes.
“Brian and I were born just one year apart and raised in Brooklyn by mothers who came here from somewhere else to make a life for themselves and their families. But our lives were set on very different courses—irreversibly so—in March of 1988 when Brian was arrested for a crime he had nothing to do with.”
The report writers aimed to show how wrongful convictions persist and how to eliminate them in the future.
The conviction review unit that produced the report was launched under the leadership of the late Brooklyn DA, Kenneth P. Thompson, and Gonzalez, then the counsel to the district attorney, in 2014. The Innocence Project was heavily involved in compiling the data, as was the law firm of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and