WHY PROSECUTORS SHOULD REVISIT THEIR WINS.

AuthorCiaramella, C.J.

WHEN THREE TAMPA, Florida, police officers were fired for misconduct earlier this year, Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren put his newly created "conviction review unit" to work. The members pored over 225 closed cases that the officers were involved in, and Warren's office ultimately vacated 17 convictions.

It was a relatively rare move by a prosecutor's office. In less scrupulous jurisdictions, the officers' misconduct might have been concealed under police secrecy laws or the defendants might have been left to challenge their convictions in court, but Hillsborough County is one of the few dozen places in the United States that has a unit dedicated to rooting out bad cases. "In short, we felt that convictions cannot stand based exclusively on the testimony of discredited officers," Warren says.

CONVICTION REVIEW UNITS, also known as conviction integrity units, operate within prosecutors' offices to investigate old cases for errors or misconduct that may have led to a wrongful conviction. The first one started in Dallas in 2007. There are now around 45 across the country, mostly in major cities.

Many district attorney's offices have traditionally operated under a "just win" mentality, measuring their performance by the number of convictions they obtain. Conviction review units are an acknowledgment that public officials can suffer from tunnel vision, confirmation bias, professional ambition, and bureaucratic self-preservation. Left unexamined, these failings can lead police and prosecutors, especially in an adversarial justice system, to dismiss the possibility that they put the wrong person behind bars.

We know that wrongful convictions happen. According to the Innocence Project, there have been 365 DNA exonerations in this country since 1989. Some of the exonerees were awaiting execution. But conviction review units require support and funding--otherwise they're little more than Potemkin projects.

They also need some measure of independence from the larger prosecutorial system. The Hillsborough County state attorney's conviction review unit, for instance, includes a review panel made up of a former Florida Supreme Court justice, a former state appellate judge, and a current appellate judge. Warren says that about half of the conviction review units he's looked at around the country have similar panels.

Another crucial element is buy-in from local law enforcement. "The reality is that we're all doing our jobs because we want...

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