There is no greater injustice than an innocent person being convicted of a crime they didn’t commit. And even when a defendant may not be factually innocent, confidence in our criminal a justice system, and fundamental fairness, is undermined when a defendant doesn’t receive a fair trial.
In 2012 and 2013, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office came under intense criticism for the number of wrongful convictions that had occurred under the then-District Attorney and his predecessors. Ken Thompson, now sadly deceased, was elected in 2013 on a promise to investigate and overturn wrongful convictions and restore fairness and integrity to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. Soon after Thompson’s election, the current Acting District Attorney Eric Gonzalez, Thompson’s Special Counsel, reached out to me and asked that I design and implement what became Brooklyn’s Conviction Review Unit.
Thompson and Gonzalez did not want to look at this critical problem solely through the eyes of a prosecutor, and as a former Public Defender and a professor of criminal law at Harvard Law School, I was pleased to join them in laying the foundation for this important work.
The CRU in Brooklyn is now rightfully considered a national model. In each case under review, a team of prosecutors and investigators sifts through massive amounts of trial transcripts, boxes of evidence, retraces steps and conducts interviews, including many with witnesses who now live in other states. The findings of this team are reviewed by an Independent Review Panel made up of three attorneys who are unaffiliated with the office. Each time a case is vacated, a prosecutor stands up in court and details the problems with the conviction, whether it was bad work by a police detective, a defense lawyer, a prosecutor or a judge. Nothing is hidden.
To date, the CRU has vacated 23 wrongful convictions. The national criminal justice reform community has learned so much from the work in Brooklyn. Indeed, the DA’s Office hosted a Conviction Review Summit in late 2015, the first ever of its kind, which was attended by district attorneys from across the country eager to learn what we had found to be the root causes of these convictions and, more importantly, the best practices to prevent them.
The Brooklyn model has been so successful that several jurisdictions have moved to replicate it. In fact, I have advised the State’s Attorney in Cook County in implementing a more robust Conviction Review Unit in Chicago.
There have been calls in some quarters for outside commissions to look into wrongful convictions in Brooklyn, instead of locating the conviction review process in the offices of district attorneys. I believe this would be a grave mistake. The Brooklyn model works. It is working and righting decades old wrongs.
The more important priority of a CRU, aside from its main job of investigating and vacating wrongful convictions, is taking the lessons learned in these cases and putting procedures and training in place to make sure that the mistakes that led to the wrongful convictions will not be repeated in the future. The Brooklyn DA’s Office has taken these steps. Brooklyn is now dedicated to identifying bad actors, changing policies to root out the causes of wrongful convictions, identifying false confessions, handling one-witness identification cases judiciously and emphasizing prosecutors’ ethical obligations.
Jurisdictions around the country are looking to the Brooklyn DA’s Conviction Review Unit as a model for their own efforts to deal with the problem of wrongful convictions. I am proud of the part I played in creating that model, and the people of Brooklyn can be proud as well. They can have confidence that their DA’s Office and Acting DA Gonzalez are committed to the pursuit of justice for the wrongly accused, and to the integrity of the criminal justice system in Brooklyn.
Ronald Sullivan Jr. is a professor at the Harvard Law School and the Director of the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School.
