Ryan Kost is an investigative reporter based in New York City focusing on courts and the criminal justice system. He has been a staff writer for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian and The Associated Press. His work has also appeared in The Marshall Project and The Boston Globe.
Our investigation into conviction integrity units reveals that they reinforce a broken system. Help us expand on this reporting.
Here are the key findings from the second installment of our investigation into New York’s conviction integrity units.
Hochul’s proposed rollbacks are one of the major sticking points in this year’s budget negotiations. One prosecutor’s support rested on a faulty anecdote.
In New York, half of CIU exonerations involve prosecutorial misconduct, but DAs rarely acknowledge who got it wrong.
The secretive units have fallen short on their promise to help wrongfully convicted New Yorkers.
Our investigation identified dozens of cases in which a wrongful conviction unit denied someone’s application, only for a judge to later exonerate them.