A New Era of DA’s Revisit Cases To Free Wrongfully Convicted Fellons

More than 30 district attorneys nationwide, who all consider themselves part of a new wave of prosecutors more interested in fair play than a stack of guilty verdicts, have established conviction integrity units . The standalone teams of lawyers and investigators delve into the office’s past cases, hunting for people wrongfully convicted of a crime.

But the practice — which affects the handful of cases in which someone truly innocent went to prison — offers limited redress, functioning more as an emblem of a cultural shift than a broad righting of wrongs. The conviction review unit in Brooklyn, N.Y., considered one of the most effective in the U.S., has identified just 23 over the past several decades.

None of these district attorneys have undertaken the far more ambitious task of revisiting cases of the guilty. That would mean poking into the sentences sought by a previous generation of prosecutors whose reflexive stance, for decades, was to ask for the maximum possible prison stint for each defendant.

Source: The DAs Who Want to Set the Guilty Free