When Conviction Integrity Units Exonerate the Innocent, Prosecutors Escape Blame

CIUs are widely viewed as a vehicle for DAs’ offices to remedy wrongful convictions. Proponents of the model — including some former and current unit chiefs — say they serve another equally important purpose: They act on and prevent the prosecutorial misconduct that might have contributed to a wrongful conviction in the first place.
The District Attorneys Association of the State of New York has cited the units’ existence as a reason why the state doesn’t need a separate commission on prosecutorial misconduct.

But New York’s CIUs — and the elected DAs who control the conviction review process — have rarely acknowledged instances of prosecutorial misconduct even when exoneration bids involved credible claims, the investigation found. In some cases, units recognized mistakes by police, but ignored those made by prosecutors. When units admitted that prosecutors bore some responsibility in a case, they almost never named those whose actions helped put the wrong person in prison.

New York CIUs have supported more than 90 exonerations in the last decade and a half. In half of those cases, prosecutorial misconduct may have played a role in the original conviction, according to a New York Focus and CJI analysis of data from the National Registry of Exonerations. Each included credible allegations that prosecutors had violated legal and ethical standards meant to ensure a defendant’s constitutional right to a fair trial, such as withholding evidence that could have cleared their name or making statements during trial that biased the jury.

Officials acknowledged that prosecutors had engaged in improper behavior in less than 20 percent of these exonerations, according to a review of DA press statements. By contrast, officials conceded mistakes by police in nearly 60 percent of them.

Even when units recognized prosecutor mistakes, DAs’ offices overlooked them. In Brooklyn, for instance, the Kings County unit publishes reports on exonerations it supports, detailing what went wrong in the original criminal cases. Almost a dozen of these reports have documented prosecutor missteps. But in press releases touting the exonerations, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office sometimes omits such actions.

“The defendant gets exonerated … but there’s no identification of where the blame should lie,” said Bennett Gershman, a Pace University law professor and legal ethics expert who has studied prosecutorial misconduct. “It’s a strong indictment about the integrity of these conviction integrity units.”

In interviews, some CIU chiefs and district attorneys downplayed the investigative findings. They argued that a CIU’s primary purpose is to free innocent people, and that naming and shaming prosecutors can jeopardize this mission.

John J. Flynn, the former Erie County DA, said that convictions reviewed by his office’s CIU, such as Lynch’s, often date back 20-plus years — long enough that the original prosecutors had left, and the office could do little to prevent the mistakes from happening again. He would not have hesitated to hold a current employee accountable for misconduct uncovered by the CIU, Flynn said.

His successor echoed this sentiment. “If it was misconduct by someone that worked in our office, obviously we would address that with the person if they are still here,” said Michael Keane, the newly elected Erie DA.

Some legal experts argue that CIUs have a responsibility not only to acknowledge prosecutorial misconduct, but to do something about it. Marissa Bluestine, of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, has studied CIUs across the country, and helped compile best practices from units. Prosecutors rarely engage in intentional misconduct, she said. They are more likely to violate legal and ethical standards unintentionally — what DAs’ offices call “errors.” A CIU should aim to acknowledge and contextualize these mistakes in order to prevent future wrongful convictions.

“The CIU’s true function is not singularly focused on identifying past error, but learning from past error to prevent future error,” Bluestine said. Having this type of information is “pretty critical.”

In January 2015, years before the Erie DA’s deal would omit her misconduct claims, Lynch wrote a letter from her prison cell to Jane Fisher-Byrialsen’s law office. Lynch had not met the lawyer, but she had been in the news for representing an exoneree from one of the highest-profile exoneration cases in recent decades — the Central Park Five — in civil litigation filed against New York City.

“I’m asking for your mercy upon me,” Lynch wrote.

In 1995, after the fatal stabbing of Lynch’s landlord in her home near Buffalo, detectives questioned Lynch. She had struggled with addiction and was known to police for sex work and shoplifting. The detectives promised her leniency on charges unrelated to murder if she helped them develop incriminating evidence against a male acquaintance in the stabbing case.

Eighteen months later, Lynch was arrested for stealing a fur coat. According to court records, one of those detectives said that after the arrest, Lynch decided to tell “the truth” and ultimately confessed that she had planned to rob her landlord with the acquaintance. Instead, the man killed her landlord during the robbery.

Lynch soon recanted her confession, insisting that police had coerced her. Over an eight-day trial in 1998, the Erie County prosecutor pinned the murder on her and the man he called “her accomplice.” A jury found her guilty of first-degree robbery and second-degree murder, and the judge sentenced her to 25 years-to-life in prison. The DA’s office never charged the man.

In prison, Lynch passed the time filling legal pads with poetry. “My purpose here is to simply tell the truth, and the truth is I stand in my innocence,” she wrote in a poem titled “Who is Renay Lynch.”

By the time she sent her letter to Fisher-Byrialsen’s office, Lynch had spent 18 years behind bars and mailed dozens of letters to attorneys to no avail. This one proved different. Within weeks, Lynch shuffled into an austere meeting room at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, in Westchester County, to find Fisher-Byrialsen seated at a metal table.

Fisher-Byrialsen remembers Lynch sobbing, unable to stop.

Lynch remembers Fisher-Byrialsen hugging her and saying what for almost two decades no one else had: “I’m gonna take your case, and I’m gonna get you out of here.”

Over the ensuing years, Fisher-Byrialsen, along with attorneys from wrongful conviction nonprofit the Innocence Project, searched for holes in Lynch’s criminal case. Through a records request, they obtained a 1995 report showing police had found more fingerprints at the victim’s home than law enforcement had disclosed to the defense. This key information might have led jurors to question Lynch’s involvement in the crime, a judge later affirmed.

The attorneys requested DNA testing on original forensic evidence — a bloody fingerprint found on the victim’s dresser, 31 blood swabs collected at the crime scene, and more. The tests ruled out Lynch and
her alleged accomplice.

Lynch’s attorneys eventually brought the case to the Erie County CIU and began working with unit chief Natalie Lesh, a former defense attorney.

Lesh agreed to joint DNA testing beyond what Lynch’s attorneys already had done and allowed an outside fingerprint analyst to re-examine evidence, Fisher-Bryialsen recalled. The two-year reinvestigation identified a total of 14 fingerprints previously withheld from the defense.

They pointed to another suspect whom police had identified at the time.

To Fisher-Byrialsen, the CIU’s reinvestigation seemed promising. When Lynch was eligible for parole, DA Flynn, as if in a sign of good faith, wrote to the board backing her release.

In January 2022, Lynch walked out into the world, a free woman after a quarter century. Outside the prison gates, her family picked her up in a limousine and took her out to eat. She ordered a New York strip steak, well done.

CIUs are well positioned to re-examine past convictions. Typically housed in DAs’ offices, they may have access to the original criminal case files and can review trial transcripts. Often, units turn up evidence that was unknown to one or both sides at the time of trial — new eyewitness testimony or untested DNA samples — and that can become the basis for overturning a conviction.

But how the units characterize that additional evidence has big implications for prosecutorial misconduct. State law distinguishes between new evidence arising from a conviction review and evidence prosecutors or police withheld from the defense at trial. The latter could constitute a so-called Brady violation — a form of misconduct that deprives a defendant of their constitutional right to a fair trial.

Some defense attorneys believe that is intentional. They argue that CIU staff sometimes treat previously withheld evidence as though it were newly discovered so the units can ignore potential misconduct.

In 18 of the cases New York Focus and CJI identified, newly discovered evidence was cited as the sole reason for throwing out the conviction. In only one of them did a DA’s office acknowledge mistakes by the prosecutor that amount to Brady violations.

“If you don’t make a record on this stuff and bring it out — ‘Look, there are Brady violations by this office’ — then they can continue to lie to the next person,” said James Henning, who made this very argument in court on behalf of two recent exonerees, Eric Smokes and David Warren.

In October 2023, CIU officials at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office told a judge that new evidence cast doubt on the men’s 1987 convictions for the murder of a French tourist. By then, Smokes and Warren had already been released after spending nearly 50 years combined in prison. The CIU’s conclusion came after an exhaustive review, during which staff conducted more than 21 interviews and reviewed prosecution files from the original case.

In a letter to a judge supporting the men’s exonerations, Manhattan CIU Chief Terri Rosenblatt outlined what she called “newly discovered evidence” that could have resulted in “a more favorable outcome” for the defendants at trial.

Among the evidence was recent testimony from a person who told the CIU that a pivotal eyewitness had lied about observing the murder. But the details of this person’s testimony were not, in fact, new. According to Rosenblatt’s letter, he had spoken with the original prosecutor twice before trial and said the same thing.

Rosenblatt wrote that the prosecutor “does not remember the statements one way or another.”

But Henning argued in his response that the prosecutor had withheld that information at trial, thereby violating Smokes and Warren’s civil rights.

According to federal civil rights lawsuits filed by Smokes and Warren against New York City and dozens of employees, including Rosenblatt, the CIU chief told Henning that her boss — Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg — had directed her to only support their exoneration motions under the legal grounds of “newly discovered evidence.”

Rosenblatt urged Henning not to challenge the Manhattan CIU’s description of the evidence, according to the lawsuits, because it would raise “issues that the People cannot consent to … and could lead to the Court losing faith in this case.”

In a statement, the Manhattan DA’s office said its goal for any exoneration motion is simple: “Get relief for the impacted individual through the courts.”

“In some instances, we have filed jointly on the same grounds as the defense,” the office said, adding that in others, the office disagreed with the defense counsel’s legal analysis.

A spokesperson for the DA’s office declined to make Rosenblatt available for an on-record interview for this story, and said the office would not comment on pending litigation.

In January 2024, the judge tossed the men’s convictions, but did not rule on the disputed evidence. The judge declined to comment.

Henning said he refused to go along with the Manhattan CIU’s request because he believes it is important to get prosecutorial misconduct claims on the record.

When a CIU’s stance is, “‘Maybe the prosecutor didn’t know,’ the next guy doesn’t get out,” he said.

By 2022, the Erie CIU and Renay Lynch’s attorneys had built a strong innocence case centered on the previously withheld fingerprints. But there was another significant argument for Lynch’s claim: new questions about whether the original prosecutor had violated legal and ethical standards to win her conviction.

The trial prosecutor’s case hinged on Lynch’s recanted confession about watching as a male acquaintance stabbed her landlord in a robbery gone wrong. At trial, the prosecutor mentioned the man’s name in opening and closing statements to the jury more than a dozen times, the transcript shows. But Lynch’s attorneys came to believe that the prosecutor had withheld key information about the man from the jury.

Before the CIU’s reinvestigation, Fisher-Byrialsen, Lynch’s lead attorney, happened upon the information while viewing a documentary TV series that featured Lynch’s case. In an interview for the show, a detective from the original investigation said police had learned that Lynch’s supposed accomplice was in Florida when the crime occurred; they eliminated him as a suspect before her trial.

Then, when Lynch’s attorneys petitioned the court for DNA testing, an assistant DA said there would be no need for testing on the man. At a January 2018 hearing on the question of whether it was appropriate to order DNA tests, the assistant DA told the court that detectives had gone to Florida to interview him and “they rule him out as a suspect in 1997” — a year before Lynch’s trial.

The revelation, if true, would mean the case against Lynch was built on the falsehood that she had watched the man stab her landlord.

The allegations would challenge an influential public figure’s reputation. The trial prosecutor was Frank Sedita III. In the years since trying Lynch, Sedita served two terms as the Erie County DA and was elected to a state court judgeship. His family has deep political roots in Buffalo, where buildings bear his grandfather’s name. (Sedita’s office did not respond to requests for comment, and the former assistant DA at the DNA testing hearing declined to comment.)

Getting the DA office to grapple with claims of Sedita’s misconduct at trial proved difficult. After the CIU chief, Lesh, interviewed the detectives involved in Lynch’s case about the claims, she told Fisher-Byrialsen that the detectives’ memories were hazy, Fisher-Byrialsen recalled. Her co-counsel pressed Lesh to look into the alternate suspect, but to no avail, she said.

Lesh did not respond to multiple interview requests. The Erie DA’s office allowed her to sit in an interview with Keane, but she did not speak.

With no word from Flynn’s office, Lynch’s attorneys drafted an exoneration motion pointing to both the fingerprint evidence and Sedita’s courtroom remarks about Lynch’s alleged accomplice. Before filing, they looked to gain the DA’s support, seeking help from Terrence Connors, a Buffalo-based lawyer and Innocence Project friend who knew Flynn.

Connors, who described his role as “the Kissinger,” aimed to negotiate what he called a “politically expedient” contract. He remembers Lynch’s attorneys and the DA agreeing the undisclosed fingerprints presented a strong argument for a conviction reversal. They disagreed on the claims of the prosecutor’s misconduct.

The DA who prosecuted the case is now a state judge. Connors recalled Flynn saying, “This is a bridge too far.”

In an interview before stepping down from his post last March, then-DA Flynn confirmed the negotiations around Lynch’s motion and disputed the alleged misconduct.

“I tell Terry, ‘We’re not going to consent to that,” Flynn said, referring to the misconduct claims. “You want to blow the whole thing up? Or do you want to win?’”

Keane, the current Erie DA, declined to comment on Lynch’s case, citing a state statute that seals reversed convictions.

By the end of negotiations, Lynch’s 73-page original motion was 29 pages. It turned on the fingerprint evidence. Sedita’s name never appeared in the court record, and he continues to serve on the state’s judicial bench.

Fisher-Byrialsen knew she had a legal and ethical obligation to prioritize Lynch’s exoneration. Yet agreeing to the Erie DA’s ultimatum and omitting the prosecutor’s conduct from the motion made her feel “gross and dirty,” she told New York Focus. “As a lawyer, it’s so hard to tell innocent people to swallow these pills, and that the truth doesn’t matter.”

Lynch did what her lawyers advised, though she found it unjust. She remembers thinking that she had already experienced “cruel and unusual punishment … and then they have the audacity to say that we can’t mention [the prosecutor],” she said.

Experts say such dealmaking is common.

“The idea any DA would say, . . . ‘No, we can’t support this if you’re going after one of our own,’ that, to me, is exactly like the blue wall of silence,” said Steven Zeidman of the City University of New York School of Law. He said he considers deals like this “entirely inappropriate.”

Barry Scheck, who co-founded the Innocence Project and worked on Lynch’s exoneration, said he would not second-guess a defense attorney’s reasons for making such a deal. But, he argued, the onus should be on DAs’ offices to ensure prosecutorial misconduct claims are investigated and called to the attention of a disciplinary committee.

In the days following Lynch’s exoneration in January 2024, news articles told a story with one villain: A woman was exonerated because police detectives had failed to turn over favorable evidence.

No one mentioned that the original prosecutor had been accused of unfairly implicating Lynch in the murder based on false and misleading information.

In an interview, Flynn said his office investigated these claims, but could not substantiate them. “There was no evidence at all that the prosecutor purposely said anything that was contrary to the information that he had,” he said.

Told about Flynn’s remarks, the detective whose documentary interview gave rise to the allegations replied, “Well, I guess that’s where we differ.”

However rare it is for CIUs and DAs to name prosecutors whose actions contributed to a wrongful conviction, it’s rarer still for them to disclose any resulting discipline. Only one CIU-supported exoneration involving prosecutorial misconduct claims led to a public statement about punishment, this investigation found.

In 2016, after the Brooklyn CIU had uncovered prosecutorial misconduct in a case, a spokesperson for the DA’s office told The New York Times that the prosecutor in question would face “immediate reprimand, including termination.” By then, the prosecutor had already resigned on his own.

In response to an inquiry by New York Focus and CJI, none of the state’s CIUs reported having a policy on official misconduct. This makes it nearly impossible to determine how units handle mistakes identified by reinvestigations and work to prevent them from recurring.

Some CIU officials say they turn identified missteps into office-wide training in order to improve prosecutorial practices. But they offer little to no information about what such training entails.

A spokesperson for the Brooklyn DA’s office said that its former CIU chief, Charles Linehan, who resigned in January to launch a private firm focused on wrongful convictions, taught new recruits about problematic interrogation methods. The office refused to share its training materials.

CIU chiefs in Queens and the Bronx have publicly stated that their units conduct staff trainings, but declined to elaborate.

The lack of accountability prompted at least one judge to reprimand the Queens County Conviction Integrity Unit for failing to act on misconduct claims involving two prosecutors.

The prosecution “completely abdicated its truth-seeking role,” the judge wrote in a March 2021 decision exonerating three men who had each spent nearly 25 years behind bars for a double murder they did not commit.

In a filing backing the men’s exonerations, Queens CIU Chief Bryce Benjet cited evidence that would clear the defendants’ names yet had been withheld at trial. Benjet assured the court that prosecutors did not intentionally hide the evidence implicating someone else for the crime.

“Defendants were prosecuted in good faith and with legally sufficient evidence,” he wrote.

The judge was not convinced. His ruling named the prosecutors, Brad Leventhal and Charles Testagrossa, castigating them for what he called their “egregious” conduct. The judge also criticized the Queens CIU for failing to acknowledge it. Prosecutorial misconduct led to the three men’s wrongful convictions, the judge wrote, “irrespective of the [prosecutors’] good faith or bad faith.”

The Queens DA’s office declined to make Benjet available for an interview for this story, and did not respond to questions about New York Focus and CJI’s findings.

Within days, St. John’s University School of Law, in Queens, dismissed Leventhal, who taught an evidence class there. “The prosecutor’s role is not to win, but to do justice,” the school’s dean wrote in a March 2021 email to students, in which he announced that Leventhal had “agreed to resign from his teaching position.” Both prosecutors resigned from their DA jobs around this time.

In spring 2024, at a New York City Council public safety committee hearing on wrongful convictions, the chairman asked four of the city’s five CIU chiefs about the consequences for prosecutors whose actions resulted in a wrongful conviction.

Benjet was the only one who responded. “I would not comment on individual employee discipline or remedial actions that might take place within the office,” he said.

Following the Queens judicial misconduct ruling, attorneys for the three men sought accountability outside of the DA’s office. In August 2021, they filed complaints against Leventhal and Testagrossa with the state’s attorney grievance committee, which disciplines lawyers. It is unclear whether the committee opened an investigation; a spokesperson for the committee would only say the former prosecutors remain in “good standing.”

A lawyer representing Testagrossa told New York Focus and CJI that the grievance committee’s investigation is still pending. He said the Queens DA’s office effectively found “the prosecutors did nothing wrong,” and Testagrossa resigned because “he didn’t want to embarrass the bureau.” Leventhal did not respond to multiple emails and a letter seeking comment.

Accountability is hard to come by in CIUs, says Russell Neufeld of Accountability New York, an advocacy group focused on prosecutorial misconduct, because part of their mission is to make DAs’ offices look good.

One possible solution, he and other experts suggest, would be a statewide conviction integrity unit that operates independently from county CIUs and their DAs’ offices. At a minimum, Neufeld said, county CIUs across New York should have to report the misconduct uncovered by their reinvestigations to an outside body like the grievance committee.

“The more outside, independent scrutiny and investigation, the better,” said Peter Santina, the managing attorney for the Prosecutorial Accountability Project at Civil Rights Corps, in Washington, DC.

Even Linehan, the former Brooklyn CIU chief, recognizes that some New York counties do not operate “these units the way that they should,” he said. Linehan attributes that not so much to the people who lead these units but to the pushback within DAs’ offices. “The DAs are dealing usually with political situations internally,” he added.

Back in Erie County, Lynch is still pushing for transparency. When her exoneration became official, Flynn stood before a podium full of microphones at a press conference and fielded questions. He said he did not consider her case a true exoneration.

“I want the reports of this to be accurate,” he told reporters. He did not support Lynch’s motion because she was innocent, he said; rather he supported it because it would be a waste of taxpayer dollars for the Erie DA’s office to re-try the case after 30 years.