25 innocent people served that time; cops, prosecutors blamed

Dorr.

The report found poor prosecutorial conduct helped fuel the vast majority of the wrongful convictions.

In one case, it identified a “politically motivated

“Taken together, the wrongful convictions discussed here all point to failures of prosecution as an institution— whether through the acts of individual prosecutors, collective decisions, or failure to train or guide prosecutors adequately,” the report states.

Lawyer Nina Morrison of the Innocence Project and one of report writers, said the findings highlight the many prosecution.” factors that led to so many wrongful convictions in Brooklyn.

“The single biggest common factor among these cases — that the DA’s office itself identified — was that the actions of its own prosecutors, or former prosecutors in most cases, contributed to the wrongful convictions,” she said.

Beginning in 2014 and running through the first half of 2019, the examination analyzed the conviction review unit’s recommendations in 20 cases involving 25 people who’d been convicted over the past three decades.

Those people mentioned in the report include 24 men and one woman. All but one are black or a person of color, and three weren’t yet 18 years old when convicted. The majority of the cases were based on singlevictim homicides involving the use of a deadly weapon, which occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. The oldest crime happened in 1963; the most recent in 2011.

All the convictions were vacated, but three people convicted died in prison and were exonerated posthumously, the report notes.