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Leor Stylar for New York Focus

By Willow Higgins and Ryan Kost, Columbia Journalism Investigations

When we first learned about conviction integrity units, special programs in district attorneys’ offices meant to investigate claims of wrongful conviction, we found their very premise paradoxical. Could the same office that may have wrongfully convicted a person lead an unbiased reinvestigation of their own work? While we knew, in our guts, there was something here, we often second guessed ourselves. After all, these units were staffed with well-meaning people working toward the laudable goal of freeing innocent people. 

But once we started down the rabbithole, our findings became irrefutable. No, the fox can’t guard the henhouse. We spent more than a year digging into these units, and our work ultimately resulted in a four-part series.

Our anchor story, a collaboration between Columbia Journalism Investigations and New York Focus, examined dozens of men who sought help, only to have their innocence ignored by prosecutors. While the court eventually exonerated them, going to the CIU added years to their wrongful incarceration. Our second story found that prosecutors responsible for wrongful convictions were rarely held to account.

Ahead of publication, we sent our findings to the offices we’d investigated, one of the country’s most acclaimed units. Their response only underscored why our project — and others like it — are so necessary. 

A Brooklyn District Attorney spokesman responded 20 minutes later. “I’m going to look at the misleading claims in the letter and see if it’s worth rebutting any,” he wrote, then offered a warning: “These types of stories and the unfair nits they play up are precisely the reason why prosecutorial offices are a lot less eager to open CIUs … After all, they have no legal or constitutional obligation to do this work. Your story will fuel that trend.”

There are more than 100 CIUs operating across 27 states, most with wide discretion, limited oversight and few, if any, legal obligations. When these units exonerate people, they generate positive headlines. How they actually function is rarely scrutinized.  

Any CIU investigation requires making judgment calls and setting consistent standards. That challenge grows more pressing as these units expand — and as the information needed to assess them remains difficult to obtain. To help other journalists overcome the challenges we faced, we’ve compiled a media toolkit that provides additional details on our reporting methodology, includes three of our original databases and links to many of the public records we’ve acquired. 

Soon after our first story came out, Dan Hinkel of Injustice Watch published his own investigation into the Cook County, Illinois unit, another nationally celebrated CIU. He, too, found a unit that wasn’t operating quite as advertised. And when we spoke to him, he mentioned many of the same reporting challenges. We’d like to share what we learned with other reporters interested in doing this work locally.

As Hinkel put it, “we’re now what 15, 20 years on in the whole CIU experiment … I think it’s really, really time for journalists to assess whether this is working.”

At the center is a practical problem: How should journalists assess these programs when there’s no uniform framework governing them, and they rarely publish clear information about their goals, methods or decision-making?

The absence of formal standards makes accountability difficult — but not impossible.

To develop benchmarks, we consulted legal scholars, reviewed research from the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice and spoke with Barry Scheck, a founder of the Innocence Project who helped develop the CIU-concept. 

For our main story, we concluded it was fair to flag cases where a unit rejected an applicant only for a court to overturn the conviction based on the same evidence. For our follow ups, we determined it was reasonable to scrutinize whether units should address prosecutorial misconduct when they uncover it, the difference between a state oversight body recommending an application review versus simply forwarding it to a local prosecutor and whether CIU applicants with no legal representation face a different standard of review.

You can also compare budgets, staffing, response times and outcomes across jurisdictions. When we did this we found glaring disparities: some units had never overturned a wrongful conviction; others of similar size had intervened in several. In essence, there are plenty of ways to scrutinize these units.

In an ideal world — for us reporters, at least — district attorneys would be amazing keepers of their own data, documenting the details and timeline of each application they receive, and, crucially, make that data readily available to the public. But CIUs rarely published this data, and getting this information through records requests proved difficult if not impossible. Not only was it difficult to get closed investigative files, which were withheld through an attorney-work product exemption in New York’s records laws, but offices often refused to confirm which cases they had investigated at all. They’d cite a sealing statute —  improperly, according to one lawyer we consulted — that closes off court records following a dismissal. That felt like an odd justification given that the DAs often released self-congratulatory statements following each exoneration. 

Nonetheless, filing records requests is a good place to start. For Hinkel, an information request led to a dataset of CIU applications, which became the foundation of his investigation. Eventually though, the DA’s office stopped turning over the remaining records, leaving Hinkel to fill in the blanks.

Our best bet was to compile our own, original databases. The biggest breakthrough came as we realized we could use information from the National Registry of Exonerations to create a list of every exoneree in every county with a unit. From there, we used shoeleather reporting to find their attorneys and who had applied for review. This led us to 27 individuals who petitioned and were rejected, but were ultimately exonerated through the courts. That was the lynchpin of our anchor story  — and it’s a process any reporter in any CIU jurisdiction could repeat. 

Staying organized with our archives of primary sources from the get-go was a great use of our time. Every time we spoke to a source, whether it be an attorney, an incarcerated person or a former prosecutor, we asked them to share documents with us. The result was thousands of pages of collected court records, application materials, denials, emails and more. Doing so allowed us to prove offices wrong when they denied working with certain exonerees.

This came down to cultivating a robust network of sources who trusted us. We found that innocence attorneys were some of the best sources, many have been wishing for years that the media would pay closer attention to the problems they were seeing with these units. 

Exonerees themselves were often willing to provide first-hand accounts of their experience, and so were currently incarcerated people, who were able to speak, in-real time, to the frustrations and heartbreak of navigating a conviction review. 

We went about sourcing up in New York’s prisons in two ways. First, we individually contacted folks that we knew, through records requests, had applied to a CIU and asked about their experience. We also published a call-for-engagement in a prison-newsletter called Pro Se, asking to hear from people who had interacted with these units. We received more than 100 letters.

Some folks were wary of going on record, but on background conversations can be just as valuable. We had sources who never appeared in our reporting point us to certain court transcripts and misconduct allegations to look into. 

This reporting experience has been an incredible reminder to take incarcerated people seriously — it’s part of our job as journalists. 

“Those guys spent decades telling people exactly the stuff that the courts would eventually be forced to recognize,” Hinkel said. “It’s pretty easy to dismiss them, because we don’t have many resources and we don’t have all the time in the world, but sometimes it’s true.”

Despite the Brooklyn spokesperson’s best effort to warn us off this topic, we walked away with full confidence that these are units worth investigating — and there are an infinite number of stories that could be written about them. If you are a criminal justice reporter with a unit in your coverage area, it’s worth it to ask local defense attorneys, incarcerated people, and the DAs’ offices themselves a few questions and see where the answers lead.

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