My Wrongful Conviction.

AuthorWirskye, Bill

Reprinted from The Texas Prosecutor journal with permission from the Texas District and County Attorneys Association.

I RECENTLY DISCOVERED that I had a wrongful conviction in my past. But this wrongful conviction was not that of an innocent person sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. The conviction I'm talking about was a belief--a very strongly held belief I had about prosecution. I now believe I was wrong in this conviction, and I was wrong about wrongful convictions.

As a newly minted prosecutor in the Dallas County Criminal District Attorney's Office in the mid-1990s, it never occurred to me that I could wrongfully convict someone. After all, I had been taught that I was one of the good guys. I worked in the best criminal justice system in the world. We had checks and balances built in to the system to prevent just such a miscarriage of justice. I genuinely believed that if I was an honest and hardworking prosecutor, I would always get the right guy. Everyone I worked with shared these same fundamental beliefs. We all knew our duty under Brady, and we tried our best to comply. That was our office culture. We were proud to be prosecutors and considered ourselves "crime fighters" in the courtroom. Although I'd heard vague stories about wrongful convictions in other states, frankly they didn't seem very real to me, and I certainly didn't consider these stories to be any sort of a cautionary tale for me in my daily work.

But beginning in the early 2000s, Dallas became the epicenter of the DNA exoneration movement. As the number of DNA exonerations began to climb, I was forced to confront both the fallibility of the criminal justice system and the fallibility of my personal beliefs and convictions. From what I could tell, we didn't prosecute any differently in Dallas than prosecutors did in the rest of the state, but the media's narrative of that era was that a "win-at-all-costs, convict-them-all" culture in the Dallas DA's Office was to blame for the wrongful convictions. Dallas County prosecutors so valued convictions, this reasoning went, that we would routinely cut ethical corners without regard for whether we actually had the right guy.

This, of course, was utter nonsense. That was not the office culture I knew. The prosecutors involved in the exonerations were good, honest people, genuinely trying to get the right guy the right way. While I can never be sure that some Dallas prosecutor didn't intentionally cut corners in one of those cases, even one or two of these "bad apples" wouldn't explain the sheer number of wrongful convictions. The Innocence Project lists a total of 24 DNA exonerations in Dallas County. (1) So, exoneration by exoneration, I became increasingly aware of the limitations of our system and my own limitations as a prosecutor. It certainly seemed that our shared belief in honesty and hard work, while good, was not enough to prevent all the wrongful convictions occurring in Dallas. And even as I redoubled my efforts to avoid convicting an innocent person, I really had no new strategies or tactics to employ. In truth, I guess I just worried about it more because I was scared it could happen to me.

Probably because of these experiences in Dallas early in my career, I became intrigued with how we as prosecutors could do better. How can we convict the right guy, the right way, the first time? When I returned to prosecution in 2015 after eight years as a defense lawyer, I made a very conscious decision to study wrongful convictions and immersed myself in the world of conviction integrity and actual innocence. Fortunately, my elected DA, Greg Willis, shared my curiosity on the subject, and he encouraged me to follow my interest. 1 began to attend every seminar and training I could...

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