When the New York Attorney General’s conviction review bureau gets involved in someone’s wrongful conviction case, it often succumbs to pressure from the county prosecutors who originally landed them in prison. But in the vast majority of cases, the bureau doesn’t get that far. Instead, it acts as a mail forwarding service, passing cases on to the prosecutors who originally tried them.

That’s what happened to Alexander Reed.

Anthony DiPippo was in his prison cell one day in 2014 when he spotted a letter on the floor, lying beyond his reach on the other side of the bars. He noticed a logo: the New York Attorney General’s Office.

That’s the one, DiPippo thought.

He’d been waiting to hear from a department within the attorney general’s office that investigates wrongful conviction claims.

This article was published in partnership with The New York Times.

An Orchard Park police officer found the man in the shoulder of a six-lane road, standing near his crumpled black BMW, arguing with his girlfriend.

It was 11 p.m. on a Saturday in 2021, in the suburbs of Buffalo. The BMW had slammed into a Jeep, smashing its left taillight. White high heels were toppled on their sides on the pavement, outside the BMW’s passenger door.

The man’s speech was slurred and his gait was unsteady, the officer, Andrew J. Kowalski, would later note in a report. His eyes were glassy, and he smelled strongly of alcohol.

The officer asked who had been driving. The couple looked at each other.

“We’re State Police,” the woman said. Her boyfriend, Ronald W. Wilson, was an off-duty investigator and had the identification to prove it.

In the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of Minneapolis police officers in 2020, New York State repealed a law that for decades kept the disciplinary records of its police officers secret.

New York Focus and The New York Times have since gathered over 10,000 such files from around half of New York State’s nearly 500 law enforcement agencies. The documents, most of which are from the past 10 years, provide a window into how some officers at the state, county and local levels have avoided accountability in court despite relatively clear evidence that they broke the law.

When Republicans dragged Democratic governors before Congress in June to testify about sanctuary policies, Governor Kathy Hochul was pressed on one case in particular: a central New York sheriff who had refused Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s request to hold a man in county jail past his release date.

The case had drawn national attention in January, when the Trump administration announced it was investigating Tompkins County Sheriff Derek Osborne for allegedly obstructing ICE in its efforts to arrest the man.