Who Do Prosecutors Blame for Wrongful Convictions? Apparently Not Themselves.

In the first installment of our investigative series “Innocence Ignored,” done in collaboration with Columbia Journalism Investigations, we found that the CIU model has failed to deliver on its promises: Nearly half of the state’s 17 units have yet to produce a single exoneration, and investigators have sometimes bowed to pressure to protect their colleagues.

Last month, we published the second installment, which examines the units’ track record on holding prosecutors responsible for their misconduct. Misconduct by police, forensics experts, and other trial participants was a factor in nearly 80 percent of the exonerations CIUs have supported. Prosecutorial misconduct in particular played a role in over half.

Here’s what we found.

DAs rarely acknowledge when prosecutors’ actions led to wrongful convictions.

There have been 46 CIU-backed exonerations in New York that have involved credible allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, out of 93 such exonerations total. When a CIU backs an exoneration, it’s up to the DA to pursue it and hold prosecutors who tried the case accountable. We reviewed every public statement by a DA we could find about each of them — and found that district attorney’s offices publicly acknowledged the potential misconduct in just seven of them.

Often, the offices used vague and passive language to avoid naming prosecutors. In one case, a judge overturned a conviction based on missing photo evidence, but the DA’s office took no responsibility in its public statement, saying only that it was “unclear” whether the evidence had been turned over. In another, an office referred to “miscarriages of justice” but did not identify whose mistakes resulted in them — or even specify what those mistakes entailed.

A DA’s office released a public statement about punishment for prosecutorial misconduct in only one instance we reviewed.

Brooklyn’s CIU is the only unit in New York that regularly prepares reports on their findings. However, even those reports do not name the original prosecutors in a case when criticizing their conduct.

Even when CIUs acknowledge their colleagues’ misconduct, they rarely hold them accountable.

When a panelist at a town hall asked Charles Linehan, the Brooklyn CIU’s former chief, about naming names, he said doing so would make it harder to exonerate innocent people. “If I … start blowing up prosecutors’ careers, even if they deserve it, you know how much success I’m gonna have after that?” he asked.

In at least one case, involving the exonerations of three men who’d each spent nearly 25 years behind bars for a double murder, a judge reprimanded a CIU for failing to act on prosecutorial misconduct claims.

The Queens CIU had acknowledged in a filing that the defense had not received exculpatory evidence during the original trial, but tried to assure the court that prosecutors had acted “in good faith and with legally sufficient evidence.”

The judge was not convinced. The Queens DA’s office “completely abdicated its truth-seeking role,” the judge wrote in a March 2021 decision.

His ruling named the prosecutors, whose misconduct led to the wrongful convictions “irrespective of the [prosecutors’] good faith or bad faith.” The judge called the trial prosecutors’ conduct “egregious,” and criticized the Queens CIU for failing to acknowledge it.

DAs are much more likely to blame the police than other prosecutors.

DAs’ offices publicly blamed police misconduct in 60 percent of the prosecutorial misconduct cases we reviewed.

In 2022, a Brooklyn assistant district attorney told a judge that the DA’s office no longer had confidence in the convictions of three men who’d spent years in prison for the murder of a subway token booth clerk.

The ADA blamed the wrongful convictions entirely on the misconduct of two New York City Police Department detectives.

The subsequent CIU report identifies the police officers by name more than 500 times but does not name any prosecutors. An expert hired by the CIU later heavily criticized one prosecutor’s tactics while taking the mens’ statements after a police interrogation.

When asked about the reports, a spokesperson said the Brooklyn DA’s office was not hiding the prosecutors’ names, which he said was “publicly available information that’s accessible to any interested party.” He said our questions were “picking nits” and “a silly attempt to find something to criticize.”

Reform advocates see things differently. Russell Neufeld of Accountability New York, an advocacy group focused on prosecutorial misconduct, argues for naming prosecutors who violate legal and ethical standards.

“The public should know that there are people whose salaries we are paying that are engaging in misconduct,” Neufeld said.

CIUs can misclassify evidence withheld at trial.

When investigating claims of wrongful conviction, CIUs often turn up evidence — eyewitness testimony or DNA samples — that was unknown to one or both sides during the original trial. That evidence can become the basis for overturning a conviction.

How conviction integrity units characterize that evidence can impact an applicant’s claim. That’s because state law distinguishes between evidence discovered after trial and evidence that was known to and withheld by prosecutors or police during trial. The former classification may elide misconduct that has occurred, while the latter can qualify as a Brady violation — misconduct that deprives a defendant of their constitutional right to a fair trial.

Some defense attorneys argue that CIU staff sometimes treat previously withheld evidence as though it were new so that the units can ignore potential misconduct.

Two years ago, the Manhattan CIU backed two men’s exoneration for their 1987 murder convictions. The CIU chief sent a support letter to a judge in which she outlined what she called “newly discovered evidence” that could have resulted in “a more favorable outcome” for the defendants at trial.

The unit had received recent testimony from a person who said a pivotal eyewitness had lied about observing the murder. But the details of this testimony were not new. According to the letter, the witness had spoken with the original prosecutor twice before trial and said the same thing.

The CIU chief wrote that the prosecutor “does not remember the statements one way or another.” The mens’ lawyer, James Henning, argued in his response that the prosecutor had withheld that information at trial, a clear violation of his clients’ right to a fair trial.

The DA’s office urged Henning not to challenge how it had classified the evidence, according to lawsuits filed by Henning’s clients against New York City, but he declined.

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

DAs can obstruct a defendant’s claims of constitutional rights violations.

It isn’t always easy for defendants to resist the kind of pressure Hennings faced. A DA’s recommendation goes a long way with judges in New York.

We reported on the case of Renay Lynch, who was sentenced to 25-years-to-life for the stabbing death of her landlord in 1998. Decades later, a reinvestigation conducted by the Erie County CIU and Lynch’s attorneys had produced strong evidence of her innocence.

First, the review turned up 14 fingerprints previously withheld from the defense, none of which matched Lynch’s. Second, Lynch’s attorneys believed that the trial prosecutor withheld key information from the jury. Essentially, her attorneys had reason to believe that her alleged accomplice had actually been eliminated as a suspect prior to her trial. (The man had never been arrested or convicted of the crime.)

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