We Investigated the DA Units That Review Innocence Claims. Here’s What We Learned.

Nearly half of New York’s conviction integrity units have yet to support a single exoneration.

There are 17 county conviction integrity units across New York, and their records of overturning convictions vary widely. The most productive by far is the Brooklyn unit, which, as of the latest tally, has supported the exonerations of 42 people. Manhattan has 17 exonerations to its name, while Queens and the Bronx count 12 and 10, respectively.

But there’s a pretty steep decline after that. In fact, nearly half of the state’s CIUs have failed to back the exoneration of even a single person.

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 12 exonerations between them.

The Monroe County unit, for example, has been around for more than five years, but has so far failed to back an exoneration. Part of our investigation examines the case of Anthony Miller, arrested in 2013 for a robbery he didn’t commit. He’d always maintained his innocence. When the county launched its CIU, he saw it as “a sign from God.”

We obtained his case file, which suggests possible gaps in the original investigation – including in the one-man lineup where he was identified. The CIU rejected Miller’s application, though there wasn’t consensus within the unit, according to a former member. A year later, the court overturned his conviction and dismissed his indictment, citing “considerable, objective evidence” of his innocence.

“The pain and suffering is legit when it comes to being imprisoned for a crime you did not do,” Miller wrote while fighting his case. In October, a judge awarded Miller $3 million for his wrongful conviction.

We found at least 27 defendants who did not win support from a CIU, only to have their convictions overturned by a court later.

That figure accounts for one in every six exonerations since 2010 in the New York counties that have such units. In most instances, we found that CIU staff had access to the same information that prompted the judge to act.

Among those 27 cases, 14 convictions were overturned because newly discovered evidence had emerged. In another 11 cases, the court found that the defendants’ constitutional rights had been violated. The vast majority involved Black and Latino defendants.

This gap between CIU and judicial decisions could signify that these units lack resources or that their review processes have broken down, one expert said. It could also indicate that New York’s DAs don’t evaluate wrongful conviction claims objectively.

Those defendants spent more time fighting their wrongful convictions than if they had gone to a judge in the first place.

In a few cases, the process took months. On average, however, it took more than three years. Defendants spent an average of 19 years in prison before clearing their names.

Applicants told us they felt like they were left in the dark, not knowing if their application had been accepted for review or denied on its face. Many said they waited years for a response.

Calvin Buari had served 21 years of a 50-year sentence for a double homicide he didn’t commit when he agreed to work with the Bronx conviction integrity unit. Five new witnesses had come forward to name a different suspect and provide Buari an alibi.

Over the course of a year, his attorneys helped connect the witnesses with unit staff. Buari spoke with them as well. Ultimately, however, the Bronx CIU rejected Buari’s exoneration bid, stating that the new evidence didn’t prove that “the conviction was wrongfully obtained,” according to a letter the unit sent him.

So, Buari turned back to the courts. Three months later, based on the same evidence that led the CIU to reinvestigate it, a judge vacated Buari’s conviction.

“They felt like I was a drug dealer, so I didn’t matter,” Buari told us. Until the CIU process is truly independent, he said, “(t)he right thing is never going to be done.”

There are no legal standards governing CIUs.

This has a lot of downstream effects.

Defense attorneys and witnesses we spoke with raised concerns about CIU staff conduct, including allegations of intimidation and coercion. In one case, investigators showed up at witnesses’ homes and workplaces unannounced. One worried that if she said the wrong thing, she would be prosecuted herself. Their aggressive inquiries led to her eviction from the domestic violence shelter where she lived.

Unit personnel are also vulnerable to conflicts of interest. In more than 40 percent of the cases we analyzed, the prosecutor who handled the original criminal case was still working at the DA’s office during the CIU reinvestigation, requiring CIU personnel to reexamine their colleague’s past conduct.

Finally, each unit has no obligations other than to the elected official who created it.

DAs can create and dissolve these units on whim — and they can accept or reject the unit’s findings with little explanation.

That’s what happened in Erie County. In 2021, James Pugh and Brian Lorenz moved to overturn their 1994 murder convictions. They argued that DNA tests on evidence collected from the crime scene eliminated them as culprits. They also accused a detective of coercing and bribing witnesses during the investigation.

In response, the Erie County DA ordered a full reinvestigation, led by two senior prosecutors. The pair spent four months conducting dozens of interviews, including with Pugh and Lorenz. “I’d been waiting so long for somebody to just sit there and say, ‘Tell me what happened. Let me hear your side,’” Pugh said.

The prosecutors concluded that Pugh and Lorenz were innocent. But the Erie DA disagreed with their findings and said the office would oppose the exoneration motions.

In August 2023, a judge overturned Pugh’s and Lorenz’s convictions, citing the very evidence the prosecutors had found.

“Their own people believed in me,” Pugh said, but the DA “refused to believe them.”