5 Takeaways From Our Investigation Into the Attorney General’s Conviction Review Bureau

An alternative model is the statewide CIU, a centralized unit that reviews innocence claims from across the state, independent of local prosecutors. New York embraced this idea in 2012, when then-Attorney General Eric Schneiderman launched a conviction review bureau. His office pledged to assemble prosecutors, defense attorneys, and investigators to “discover the truth about wrongful convictions, and let the chips fall where they may.”

More than 10 years later, the AG bureau has fallen far short of its promise. During our reporting, Attorney General Letitia James’s office scrubbed any mention of the conviction review bureau from its website. Today, it operates entirely in the shadows.

We asked James’s office basic questions, like how many cases the bureau has taken on. The office declined to answer any of them, or to allow us to speak to bureau chief Gail Heatherly. When reached directly, Heatherly called our requests “an intrusion.”

Records requests from across the state yielded over a thousand pages of documents and pointed us to sources and leads. Those files laid the groundwork for months of reporting. Here’s what we found.

The AG bureau was put to the test when Thomas Schellhammer, its first chief and a former homicide prosecutor, took on Ronald Bower’s case. Bower, a security guard and father of two, was arrested days before his 30th birthday in 1991. He maintained his innocence, but he was convicted of sex-related charges in Queens and Nassau counties.

In 2012, Schellhammer made Bower his number one priority, digging deep into the case for more than a year. When Bower was up for parole, he wrote to the parole board his conclusion: “It appears highly unlikely that Bower committed the crimes.” 

When the Nassau DA’s office caught wind of the letter, it complained that it didn’t know about the AG bureau’s reinvestigation and disagreed with its findings. 

About a month later, Schellhammer left the AG’s office. After his departure, a former colleague walked back his findings, saying they weren’t supported by the evidence.

Bower was paroled, but never exonerated. Today, he remains a registered sex offender and lives a quiet life with his cat. 

“I trust animals,” he said. “And that’s basically it.”

After receiving an innocence claim, the bureau writes to the district attorney who prosecuted the case, alerting them of the application. The bureau also writes to the defendant, in most cases to let them know that they cannot review their case. The letters rarely explain why: The bureau doesn’t have jurisdiction over county-level criminal cases, so when a defendant writes in with a credible wrongful conviction claim, its staff must seek permission from the DA’s office that originally prosecuted the case. In practice, the AG bureau functions more like a mail-forwarding service than a vehicle for justice reform, records show.

Of more than 800 applications, the AG bureau flagged to DAs roughly 16 — less than 2 percent — as meriting a closer look. That puts the application back in the hands of the district attorney’s office that prosecuted the defendant in the first place. It’s up to the local DA whether to review the conviction, and our reporting foundthat county units often fail to back credible claims.

Anthony DiPippo, an exoneree from Carmel, New York, experienced this firsthand.

In 2014, DiPippo began communicating with the AG bureau while serving year 17 of his 25-to-life prison sentence for a rape and murder he didn’t commit.

Because DiPippo was prosecuted by Putnam County, he had to convince the DA to invite the AG’s collaboration on his case. He managed to do so, and for more than a year, the reinvestigation seemed productive. The DA, who once told a local newspaper that DiPippo would “take his last breath in that cell,” began to believe in his innocence, records and interviews show. 

But when the DA lost his November 2015 bid for re-election, the collaboration collapsed. The new DA did not agree with the AG bureau’s findings, court records and interviews show, and disinvited the bureau from the reinvestigation. Heatherly’s team retreated, despite the evidence she helped accumulate that built a case for his exoneration.

“If the DA chooses to ignore our conclusions, effectively, we can do nothing further,” her affidavit explained. DiPippo had to wait 10 more months until he was ultimately acquitted by a jury. His co-defendant remained wrongfully convicted for more than six years before he, too, was acquitted.

Even when elected DAs invite the AG bureau to reinvestigate a case, critics say the bureau might give in to pressure behind the scenes.

Oswego County DA Gregory Oakes invited the AG bureau to reinvestigate the case of Gary Thibodeau after Thibodeau launched a wrongful conviction motion in 2014 challenging his 1994 kidnapping conviction.

People who believed Thibodeau was innocent took to social media to accuse Oakes of corruption. The DA wrote to Thibodeau’s attorney that he invited the AG “to dispel the notion that we are engaged in some sort of ‘cover up.’”

The conviction relied heavily on a jailhouse informant, who later told a reporter from a local news outlet (who shared his reporting material with New York Focus and CJI) that he never said Thibodeau confessed.

The AG bureau reviewed documents and interviewed the informant, but did not appear to contact Thibodeau or new witnesses accusing three other men of confessing to or implicating themselves in the crime, according to Thibodeau’s attorney. She said she felt the review was “in name only.”

In August 2018, while his attorney was preparing a motion for a rehearing, Thibodeau died in prison at the age of 64. He served 23 years behind bars.

New York is one of more than 10 statewide CIUs across the country. But experts said that programs in other states point to a more effective approach to fighting wrongful convictions.

At least three other statewide CIUs can recommend exoneration without the DA’s consent, giving the programs more authority to operate independently. The state legislature could expand the New York AG bureau’s authority to do the same, but doing so could be politically challenging.