Over 50 Incarcerated People Wrote to Us About Their Innocence Claims. Some Had Waited Years for a Conviction Review.

This story is a collaboration between New York Focus and Columbia Journalism Investigations, an investigative reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School.

Richards has yet to hear back.

And Luis Cherry, another incarcerated New Yorker, contacted a conviction integrity unit in Suffolk County in 2024, when he learned his accomplice’s attorney was disbarred for witness tampering after bribing Cherry to lie on the stand. Cherry claimed the incident had tainted his conviction. 

Cherry hasn’t heard back, either.

None of the men had legal representation when they applied to a conviction integrity unit, or CIU. Like many incarcerated people, they either couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer or couldn’t convince one to take on their wrongful conviction claims. They applied on their own — what the justice system calls “pro se.” Without legal aid, they saw their county CIUs as one of their best shots at a fair reinvestigation into their cases.

They’d soon learn that the CIU system can be just as opaque and complex as the system that convicted them in the first place. Navigating the CIU process alone, Eleby, Richards, and Cherry were left wondering basic questions: Had the unit received their application? Was it reinvestigating their case? What was the outcome?

In a year of reporting on the state’s 17 county CIUs, New York Focus, in partnership with Columbia Journalism Investigations (CJI), found that the units have failed to support innocence claims later upheld by the courts, and rarely acknowledged prosecutorial misconduct contributing to wrongful convictions. The attorney general’s statewide unit — the only option for many defendants — functions more like a mail-forwarding service than a vehicle for justice reform, the investigation found. And nearly half of New York’s conviction integrity units have yet to support a single exoneration.

New York Focus and CJI circulated an ad in prison newsletters seeking to understand incarcerated New Yorkers’ experiences applying to CIUs. It reached more than 50 facilities across the state. Fifty-five people wrote back saying they had contacted a CIU; they detailed experiences across 11 counties and the statewide bureau.

The letters paint a picture of a CIU process rife with roadblocks, especially for applicants who didn’t have lawyers.

More than two-thirds of the letters came from people who applied to a CIU pro se. Most reported not knowing the status of their applications. Fifteen said they never got an acknowledgement of receipt from the CIU they’d applied to. Those who did said they waited years for the units to inform them about subsequent reinvestigations.

New York attorney Scott Stevenson, who has successfully represented defendants before Queens County’s CIU, said there can be a “yawning gap” between a lawyer’s ability to file a CIU application and a pro se applicant’s.

CIU personnel may overlook pro se applicants with credible cases because they might include irrelevant facts or botch legal arguments that an innocence attorney knows how to strengthen, Stevenson and other legal experts noted.

Many units don’t have the resources to sift through case files and interview witnesses, said Marissa Bluestine, of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. That makes cases where an innocence attorney has already done this legwork more compelling.

“There are a lot of units in the country — maybe even the majority — that don’t look at pro se applications,” she said.

Sixteen of the state’s county CIUs either shared incomplete records or did not respond to requests for data on the number of pro se applications they have received. From 2018 to 2023, 90 percent of all applicants to the Nassau County CIU represented themselves, according to data that New York Focus and CJI obtained through a public records request. (The Nassau County District Attorney’s Office did not answer questions about how many of those pro se applications it reviewed or reinvestigated.)

Putnam County District Attorney Robert V. Tendy told New York Focus and CJI that a defendant represented by a lawyer has a clear advantage with his county’s CIU.

“It’s a lot easier to pick up the phone and call an attorney,’” he said. Otherwise, CIU personnel are “trying to reach somebody in a jail in northern New York state, where you can’t get through to anybody.”

Ten of New York’s CIUs have created online forms for pro se applicants, which legal experts say can help. The forms give structure and direction to applicants who do not have an attorney and who otherwise would be left to guess what information is relevant. 

Here are three stories from pro se applicants who sought relief from New York CIUs — and the hurdles they faced.

When Eleby first wrote to Brooklyn’s Kings County District Attorney’s Office more than a decade ago, he didn’t know what a conviction review process looked like. He’d long maintained his innocence, but didn’t have an attorney to help him navigate the system.

Eleby had written to defense attorneys across New York without much luck. He had no trial transcripts; when he tried to obtain his transcript from the court, the clerk couldn’t find it, according to an affidavit filed in a later appeal of his case.

He requested his case documents from the Brooklyn DA’s office, which told him that it couldn’t locate anything from his original arrest and prosecution, according to a 2011 letter the DA’s office sent Eleby, who shared it with New York Focus and CJI.

Eleby figured a lawyer could have helped him get these records and other evidence to support his claim.

Police officers arrested Eleby in 1985 after a fatal shooting at a drug dealer’s house in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood. The crime shook the borough: Perpetrators killed three men, and injured seven additional people, including two children. Some were held hostage. Ten months later, a jury found Eleby and three co-defendants guilty of murder and assault. A judge sentenced him to life in prison.

For decades, Eleby has insisted that he and his then-wife, Rosa Buie, were visiting friends when the crime occurred. Buie corroborated Eleby’s account in a statement she gave to a Brooklyn assistant district attorney in 1985, records show.

According to Buie, she and Eleby were at a card game at her sister’s house in Coney Island — about 10 miles from the crime scene — on the night of the shooting. Buie and Eleby, who lived in Crown Heights, three miles from where the murders took place, said they didn’t return home until the following day. Soon afterward, police officers knocked on the front door and arrested Eleby, who police said was known to them due to a history of auto theft and other larcenies.

In an interview for this article, Buie reiterated what she’d told the district attorney’s office four decades earlier. She said that police used threats and told her not to testify in court.

“They gonna take my children,” she recalled, of the threats. “All kinds of crazy stuff they were telling me.”

Eleby’s defense attorney did not call Buie to testify at trial, records and interviews show. In 2011, as a pro se defendant, Eleby filed a motion to throw out his conviction, accusing his attorney of ineffective counsel. Five months later, a judge dismissed that claim, and ruled Buie’s alibi statement inadmissible because it was not a sworn affidavit. (Eleby’s defense attorney, Mary Bednar, who retired from the New York family court bench in 2015, could not be reached for comment; a woman who answered the phone at Bednar’s home said “she is not going to talk” about Eleby’s case.)

More than half of the pro se applicants who wrote to New York Focus and CJI, including Eleby, claimed some form of official misconduct had contributed to their wrongful convictions.

Eleby wrote multiple letters to the Brooklyn CIU stating his belief that police forced witnesses to implicate him in the high-profile crime, he said. He finally heard back a decade later, in January 2023, when the unit’s special counsel asked him to complete a special pro se application form. 

He detailed his case in the 10-page form and listed witnesses, like Buie, who could corroborate his innocence.

The unit reviewed Eleby’s application and unit investigators tried to interview Buie at her home. Buie told New York Focus and CJI that she spoke with investigators for about a half hour. The Brooklyn DA’s office said she wasn’t home, and didn’t respond to messages.  

Eleby said no one from the unit called or visited him in prison. He believes that if he’d had legal representation, the unit would have communicated with his attorney. 

In September 2023, the unit sent Eleby a one-page letter informing him that it did not find “any new evidence to reopen the case” and had closed his application.

“Should you uncover new evidence in support of your claims, you are welcome to submit a new application,” the CIU said. 

The Brooklyn DA’s office declined to provide New York Focus and CJI with an internal memo detailing the reinvestigation, citing the fact that Eleby’s case involved an alleged sex crime. 

In a statement, Oren Yaniv, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn DA’s office, said the unit had “thoroughly reviewed this case,” but “found no shred of evidence that points towards this defendant’s innocence.” Yaniv said the first time the unit heard from Eleby was in 2022.

He discounted Eleby’s earlier letters to the unit. The unit “didn’t exist back in 2013,” Yaniv said. 

The Brooklyn DA’s office formed its first conviction integrity unit in 2011, according to a report it put out a few years ago, and took credit for its first CIU-backed exoneration two years later, records show — around when Eleby said he first contacted the unit.  

A couple of years ago, Eleby turned to the New York attorney general’s statewide conviction review bureau to plead his case, to no avail. Last year, he said, he found an attorney to help him submit a new application to the Brooklyn CIU. The attorney, De Nice Powell, director of innocence investigations at the New York-based Appellate Advocates, did not confirm that Eleby is filing a new application, but told New York Focus and CJI in an email that she’s representing Eleby “in connection with his Kings County murder conviction.”

Eleby, now 66, spends his days being escorted from one upstate prison to the next as he battles stage four cancer and other health complications, he said. He remains steadfast in fighting his convictions.  

“For 40 years and seven months to date I’ve been fighting alone,” said Eleby, who had just been released from a prison medical unit. “Justice is all I seek and ask for.”

Richards knows how frustrating a drawn-out CIU process can be. After reading about a newly minted unit in the local newspaper six years ago, he felt surprised.

“I didn’t even think it was real,” said Richards. Sentenced to a maximum of 20 years for his drug convictions, Richards soon saw the Ulster County CIU as his “way home,” he said.

He wrote to the Ulster County District Attorney’s Office seeking information, and in July 2019, an assistant district attorney wrote back, instructing Richards to mail in an application. The now-former ADA urged the pro se applicant to “include as much detail as possible” about his wrongful conviction claim in order to help the unit “fully investigate.”

Richards immediately put together copies of papers he had already typed out detailing his case. He was one of roughly 80 people arrested during a massive drug sweep in Kingston, New York, in 2012, later dubbed “Operation Clean Sweep,” Hudson Valley One reported. Richards was convicted for having cocaine and selling it on two occasions to a police informant.

Richards doesn’t dispute his drug possession conviction. But he maintains he never sold cocaine.

The application he mailed to the Ulster CIU made these points, he said. Two months later, the unit acknowledged receiving his application; the former ADA wrote that the unit would review Richards’s case and then contact him “in the near future.” 

But six years later, the unit has not followed up, and has not responded to New York Focus and CJI’s recent request for comment. During this time, Richards has sent four letters to the Ulster DA’s office seeking an update, he said.

“It is totally possible he hasn’t heard back,” said then-Ulster County Administrative Assistant DA Sajaa Ahmed, who handled the office’s CIU matters, when asked about the status of Richards’s application in April 2025. 

“It’s not because of any malfeasances,” Ahmed said. A new Ulster County district attorney started in January 2024 and made its conviction review process less structured.  

“If he hasn’t heard back from our office, he needs to. Even if it’s a no,” Ahmed said. 

Ahmed requested details about Richards’s CIU application from New York Focus and CJI, and said the Ulster DA’s office would “review his request.” After a CJI reporter sent these materials, the office did not respond to follow up calls, emails, and written questions asking about that review.

“It’s like I never existed nowhere,” Richards said.  

Richards is among the roughly 27 pro se applicants who wrote to New York Focus and CJI that reported having to wait at least a year for a CIU either to acknowledge their applications or inform them of its decision. Some have waited as long as 10, 12 or even 14 years.

New York’s CIUs aren’t mandated to notify an applicant when an application is dismissed. But Richards believes they’re more likely to do so if the applicant has legal representation. “They have more respect for a lawyer,” he said, referring to CIU personnel.

He said he’s spent almost $7,500 in recent years trying to get two lawyers to represent him in the CIU process. One lawyer visited him in prison once, he said. Neither helped advance his case. (New York Focus and CJI could not independently verify Richards’s version of events.)

Without legal help, Richards filed a court motion to vacate his conviction in 2015. A judge denied it in light of Richards’s “prior criminal history,” court records show.

Richards said he has no idea where to turn for help — at this point, he’s lost hope of ever hearing back from the Ulster CIU. Today, he runs a magazine from his cell in Shawangunk Correctional Facility, in Wallkill, New York.

As for writing the Ulster CIU, Richards hasn’t necessarily ruled it out. “I’ll do it if they gonna respect what I say,” he said.

Cherry contacted the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office about its conviction integrity unit in April 2024, not long after he’d heard that the man who was convicted for being his accomplice in a fatal shooting was doing the same.

Ten years earlier, Cherry had forfeited a trial when he pled guilty to murder on Long Island.

He’s long claimed that he was forced to sign a confession statement that he didn’t understand written by Suffolk County police.

“That paper I signed was all in the cops’ handwriting,” said Cherry, currently in prison at Five Points Correctional Facility, north of Ithaca, and serving a maximum life sentence for murder charges. “I got myself in a hole that no one would believe.”(The Suffolk County Police Department declined to comment.)

In 2019, the US Justice Department accused his co-defendant’s attorney of witness tampering for bribing Cherry, years after his guilty plea, to change his testimony and state that he had committed the murder alone. The attorney, John Scarpa Jr., was convicted and sentenced to two and a half years in prison. (Cherry’s co-defendant is now serving more than 70 years in prison for murder and other charges.)

In his 2024 letter to the Suffolk County CIU, Cherry wrote that he’d faced unfair proceedings because of Scarpa’s bribery plot, among other things. Cherry didn’t dispute his involvement in the crime.

Judges often overturn convictions based on evidence that police, prosecutors, or other officials violated legal and ethical rules meant to ensure a defendant’s constitutional right to a fair trial, experts say. A prosecutor might have failed to share evidence that was favorable to the defense before trial, for instance, or a police officer might have coerced a confession.

Most New York CIUs support exoneration cases based on such claims, too. Six CIUs, including Suffolk County’s, do not. Instead, they use a higher legal standard requiring “clear and convincing” evidence that the defendant didn’t commit the crime, such as DNA evidence or proof of an alibi.

That standard is a high bar for any CIU applicant, according to legal experts, but for pro se applicants, it’s “almost impossible” to meet, criminal defense attorney Ron Kuby said. Some lawyers who handle CIU cases will track down untested DNA samples and pay for new tests on behalf of their clients.

Tom Hoffman, a defense attorney whose team has presented wrongful conviction claims to CIUs seeking DNA tests, now covers testing expenses for several CIU applications — often at a cost of hundreds of dollars.

Hoffman said the units will “come up with all sorts of reasons” not to test DNA evidence, “even though it’s kind of obvious that they should be retesting.”

While CIUs have the power to reinvestigate any potential wrongful conviction, it falls to applicants to collect evidence themselves and make a compelling enough case to win their support. Often, units won’t consider applications without new evidence to back them up.

“If you just show up, and you’re like, ‘I got convicted, I think it was wrong,’ there’s a very low likelihood that you’ll even get a response,” said Stevenson, the attorney who helped secure the 2021 exonerations of three men with the Queens CIU’s support. To get the unit’s attention, he worked with six other lawyers to compile a 111-page motion arguing to overturn the men’s convictions.

After the Queens unit agreed to reinvestigate the cases, Stevenson kept working. He remembers going to the unit chief’s home during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown and combing through boxes of old files on the front lawn.

The Suffolk CIU’s application form tells applicants it will only review a case if “you did not commit or participate in the crime for which you were charged or convicted, supported by information or evidence not previously part of your original trial or appeals” — a legal standard called “actual innocence.”

In an interview, Cherry said he didn’t remember whether he’d known that the Suffolk CIU used the actual innocence standard when he applied.

At least half of the pro se applicants who wrote letters to New York Focus and CJI sought conviction reviews based partly on fairness arguments. Four people made fairness arguments to county CIUs with actual innocence standards; all four either had been rejected or were waiting for a decision when they wrote.

Tendy, the Putnam County DA, said his unit would not back a pro se applicant who discovers new evidence of misconduct, because that applicant could ask a judge to overturn their conviction. A CIU should not reinvestigate a wrongful conviction claim if a defendant still has options in court, he believes.

“I’m not going to ever insert myself into the actual legal process,” Tendy said.

The Suffolk DA’s office has taken a more flexible approach, according to that unit’s bureau chief, Craig McElwee. He described the absence of exonerating evidence as a “disqualifier” for CIU applications, but also said that “a claim of egregious misconduct and/or bad faith actors” can lead to “further investigation.”