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COURIER L 20 IFE, JULY 17-23, 2020
District attorney
releases wrongful
conviction review
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
District Attorney Eric
Gonzalez released a 100-
page study on July 9 investigating
the cases of
25 wrongfully-convicted
Brooklynites, who had
spent a combined 426
years in prison — which
the borough’s top prosecutor
hopes will serve as
a tool for improving the
criminal justice system.
“For us to build community
trust, especially
now, when so many people
in this country are
expressing anger and despair
with the system,
we must reckon with and
be transparent about the
mistakes of the past,” said
Gonzalez in a statement.
“We must also learn from
these errors so that we
can avoid them in the future.”
The report gives a
deep look into 20 cases
that had been re-investigated
by the DA’s Conviction
Review Unit — which
former District Attorney
Ken Thompson established
in 2014 to help investigate
and overturn
wrongful convictions.
Those 20 cases led to
the exoneration of 25 people
between 2014 and 2019,
according to Gonzalez,
who said the report gives
a fi rst-of-its-kind insight
into what factors lead to
a convicted person being
exonerated.
“Around the country,
the reasons why a prosecutor’s
offi ce chooses to
support a convicted person’s
exoneration are not
usually disclosed in detail,”
he said in the report.
“The District Attorney
made the decision to
do something different
here — to invite the public
to look inside these cases
and to reveal the Kings
County District Attorney’s
own assessment
as to what went wrong in
each of them. And insofar
as we are aware, this is
the fi rst time any prosecutor’s
offi ce in the nation
has done so.”
Most of the wrongful
convictions happened between
the 1980s and 1990s,
and all but one of the exonerees
in the study were
people of color. Three of
them died in prison and
were exonerated posthumously,
the report says.
Done in collaboration
with the advocacy
nonprofi t The Innocence
Project and the law fi rm
WilmerHale, the study
examines eight factors,
one of more of which was
present in each exoneration.
The most common factor
in each case was prosecutor
misconduct or error,
which played a role
in 17, or 85 percent, of the
cases. In those instances,
the attorneys either did
not properly scrutinize
the amount of evidence at
hand, or the reliability of
that evidence, according
to the report.
“Doing justice also
means doing everything
in the prosecutor’s power
to ensure that the trial is
fair,” the report states.
“Prosecutors in a number
of these cases failed
to meet this standard,
whether on direct examinations,
cross-examinations,
or openings/
summations, at times exaggerating
or mischaracterizing
testimony on
critical questions presented
to the jury.”
Police misconduct
or error was the second
most prevalent factor in
the exonerated cases, having
infl uenced 13 of the
exonerations. In those instances,
the report notes,
there were serious red
fl ags with the reliability
of confessions and witness
testimony — and in
three cases, cops even
coached witnesses, failed
to give crucial information,
or provided false testimony.
Other signifi cant factors
included nondisclosure
of evidence that
could help stop a conviction,
which was present
in 45 percent of the cases.
Witness credibility issues
and defense lawyers doing
a bad job were also
factors in 40 percent of the
studied cases.
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