#Brooklyn DA says police misconduct played role in most wrongful convictions

In a stunning new report, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office examined 25 wrongful convictions and determined that prosecutorial and police misconduct contributed to a majority of them.

“The magnitude of years lost to wrongful imprisonment in these cases is almost unbearable—together, they add up to 426 years spent in prison,” wrote DA Eric Gonzalez in an introduction to the 100-page analysis.

“Each case described in these pages is itself a complete tragedy, for the person who was wrongfully convicted and incarcerated, for his or her community, for the victims and survivors of these cases, and indeed for all of us.”

The DA’s Conviction Review Unit, which examines claims of innocence, investigated the 20 highlighted cases — leading to the exoneration of 25 defendants for crimes dating as far back as 1963.

In 85 percent of them, the CRU determined that prosecutorial misconduct contributed to the wrongful convictions, according to the report.

In 65 percent of the cases, the unit found that police misconduct led to the miscarriage of justice. All but one of the exonerees are people of color, the DA said.

In each case, at the CRU’s recommendation, the DA requested that the convictions be vacated and the indictments dismissed.

The reasons prosecutors move to overturn convictions are often not disclosed in detail — and once the indictments are dismissed, the court records are typically sealed.

In the spirit of transparency, Gonzalez said he decided to take a different approach — revealing in the report his office’s own assessment of what went wrong in the hope it will prevent future failures.

“I believe that to do better, we must reckon with and be transparent about the mistakes of the past—particularly in the institutions in which we now work,” Gonzalez wrote in the introduction.

The report “marks the first time an elected District Attorney has conducted a comprehensive study of his office’s own wrongful convictions,” said Nina Morrison, a lawyer with the Innocence Project, which helped write the analysis — along with law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale & Dorr LLP.

Only one of the exonerees is a woman and the crimes, spanning five decades, include murder, rape and burglary.

Three of the defendants died in prison and had their convictions vacated after their passing, the report says.

In one case, a young man served 30 years for a brutal rape and gun-point robbery he didn’t commit due to a misidentification.