AS A PROSECUTOR, I ALSO WANT TO PROTECT THE INNOCENT
It’s critical that everyone in law enforcement, including every prosecutor, accepts that injustices can occur.
My participation in the California Innocence Project’s yearlong clinic from 2004 to 2005 unquestionably helped to mold and shape me into the attorney I am today. The clinic was an internship opportunity to work with California Innocence Project during my third year of law school. In the clinic, law students are assigned caseloads and gain real world experience by working with staff attorneys to investigate, and potentially litigate, actual cases with claims of innocence. As I look back on it, and as I’ve often preached to leaders at the California Innocence Project since my departure from the clinic, I’m not sure there is a better training ground for a future prosecutor.
I distinctly remember exonerees coming to our class to share their stories and the impact it had on me to hear about how they ended up being prosecuted in the system and why the system failed them. Those stories of innocence impressed upon me the tremendous responsibility that falls on prosecutors, as the decisions we make daily in our professional lives affect people’s most valuable interests — their liberty and their freedom.
People sometimes ask me about my experiences with the California Innocence Project, how it has translated to my current job as a prosecutor, and how I could do both jobs. My response has always been that the mission of the attorneys at the California Innocence Project, and our prosecutors at the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, is aligned — protection of the innocent. Further proof of that symmetry is that the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office launched its own in-house Conviction Review Unit in 2016. Subsequent changes in the law afforded our office new discretion to recommend that a court recall and resentence a criminal defendant, and that unit expanded to become the Conviction and Sentence Review Unit.
Prosecutors assigned to the unit serve as another check on our convictions and the sentences imposed in San Diego County. These prosecutors examine post-conviction claims of innocence and work directly with our justice partners and innocence advocates, like the California Innocence Project, to efficiently cure any injustice that might have occurred. Our missions are aligned because no ethical prosecutor wants any innocent person in custody, or serving an unjust sentence, and the valuable work of this unit speaks to our office’s commitment to those goals.
Many of the cases I worked on at the California Innocence Project involved cases of misidentification. Thankfully, due to advancements in technology and the saturation of high-quality video surveillance all over the county, law enforcement is often able to correct some of those potential injustices in a matter of hours, whereas in
the past, it might have taken years, and included post-conviction litigation.
I know firsthand the value of surveillance footage capturing the truth to exonerate an individual falsely accused of a crime. A few years ago, I had the chance to use surveillance footage collected as part of an investigation to quickly exonerate a shooting suspect.
A shooting had taken place outside a crowded nightclub in Downtown San Diego, and initial police reports detailed an identification of a suspect by two separate witnesses. Both of the witnesses knew the alleged shooter from multiple prior interactions with him and even knew him by name. The suspect had been kicked out of the club earlier in the night for causing a disruption, which also gave him an apparent motive for the shooting.
As part of the investigation, law enforcement collected a plethora of surveillance footage from every nearby business and from the Metropolitan Transit System in hopes that the video may have caught some part of the shooting. In the days that followed the arraignment of that suspect, we scoured through hours and hours of video surveillance, and in doing that review, we were able to conclusively exclude the charged defendant as the shooter.
The actual shooter was the same height, the same size, the same race and approximately the same age, and he wore the same color jeans, the same color shirt and even very similar shoes as the charged defendant wore that night. Despite those similarities, following a complete review of all the video evidence, there was no doubt the charged defendant was not the actual shooter, and that the witnesses had been mistaken in their identification. My office took immediate steps to get that charged defendant out of custody and clear any record of his arrest, and I also filed a motion in support of his factual innocence, which the court granted immediately.
While cases of a person being wrongfully arrested and then charged with a crime are rare in my professional experience, there’s no denying it happens. Thankfully, technology and video surveillance can serve to quickly remedy the injustice, but there is no diminishing the impact injustice has on the person at the center of the situation. It’s critical that everyone in law enforcement, including every prosecutor, accepts that these injustices can still occur, and strives to be a safeguard against those cases from ever being brought into our courts.