There are 17 conviction integrity programs across New York, which has more than any other state except California. The units, typically housed within District Attorneys’ offices, were created over the past decade, during a national wave of criminal justice reform, to re-examine criminal convictions that those DAs may have gotten wrong. New York’s DAs have ushered in CIUs, as they’re known, with high hopes and bold promises.
New York’s conviction integrity programs have fallen short of their promise, an investigation by New York Focus and Columbia Journalism Investigations found. Nearly half of them have yet to support a single exoneration. The 12 CIUs outside of New York City — which have been around for an average of six years each and collectively boast three dozen staff members — have only supported only 12 exonerations.
Interviews with dozens of people and a review of hundreds of pages of government records reveal a CIU system operating almost entirely in secret, with no outside oversight. Most units answer solely to the DAs who created them. Controlled by elected officials, units can become vulnerable to internal pressure to cover up past mistakes. And because there are no legal standards governing CIUs, personnel can commit the same abuses as their colleagues in DAs’ offices — to the detriment of the wrongfully convicted. Applicants have found the CIU process slow and haphazard, leaving them in limbo, sometimes for years, awaiting a response. More often than not, units denied the applicants identified in this investigation without a review, or rejected them after a reinvestigation without explanation. Reporters analyzed data from the National Registry of Exonerations, reviewed every known exoneration case in a New York county with a CIU, and interviewed more than 100 exonerees, defense attorneys, legal scholars, current and former CIU staff members, and elected district attorneys to evaluate the units’ efficacy. The investigation identified at least 27 defendants in the state who did not win support from a county CIU, only to have their convictions overturned by the courts later.
That’s one in every six exonerations since 2010 in the New York counties that have such units.