A CONVICTION INTEGRITY INITIATIVE. Cyrus R. Vance, Jr.*

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1 A CONVICTION INTEGRITY INITIATIVE Cyrus R. Vance, Jr.* Thank you, Chief Judge Lippman. It s always a great pleasure to be with you and I want to tell you how pleased I am to be able to look forward to working with you on the Task Force. There are a number of people I would like to thank and recognize. I want to thank Albany Law School for inviting me to participate in a very important symposium. I think the issue of wrongful convictions is the issue that vexes prosecutors more than any other. And I want to thank the school, the Dean, and I want to give recognition to Kate Hogan, the President of the District Attorneys Association; I m privileged to serve under your leadership, Kate. To Professor Bonventre, whose brother I worked with in the D.A. s office. We have assistant D.A. s from Special Narcotics, Kris Hamann, in attendance. And I want to give a special shout out to an alumna of this great law school, Liz Loewy, who I think was here last week talking about a large case she tried in Manhattan recently involving the Astor will. The issue of fairness in our justice system, and the issue of the possibility of wrongful convictions is something that is important to every prosecutor. That s the first message I d like to deliver. When I came back to the Manhattan D.A. s office, I had been in private practice for twenty years. It was remarkable for me to be reminded having had been a defense lawyer for twenty years that the lawyers in that office really do go to work every day, for little pay, focusing very much on trying to make sure that they serve the justice system both in a legal and a moral capacity to the best of their abilities. It is a reality, it s a tragic reality that we live in a system where from time-to-time people are falsely accused and wrongfully * Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., became District Attorney of New York County on January 1, Mr. Vance is a recognized leader in criminal justice reform and has proposed a compelling vision for moving the District Attorney's Office forward, with a focus on crime prevention. 1213

2 1214 Albany Law Review [Vol convicted. I must say though, I am absolutely committed in my belief that prosecutors want and are active and aggressive partners in making sure those types of injustice don t happen. and where they are revealed, to reverse them. We know the issues that create wrongful convictions: unreliable informants, confessions that are sometimes coerced, unreliable identifications, the stakes in the handling of evidence, and errors in science. So the question is, for me, as a prosecutor, honored and privileged to succeed three extraordinary D.A. s in the last seventy-five years Tom Dewey, Frank Hogan and Bob Morgenthau what is it that I can do as a prosecutor to make sure that the public understands that wrongful convictions are my highest priority as D.A., and that it reflects the highest priorities of what I believe is the common prosecution focus on this issue. I ran for this office as a former defense lawyer recognizing that injustices do occur. I ran for the office because I believe the Manhattan D.A. s office has the reputation as one of the finest prosecutor s offices in the country, and in order to hold that reputation and to continue it, we have to be a national leader in fair and effective prosecution practices. But we do it under tough circumstances. In our office, a hundred-thousand cases come in a year. Ten thousand indictments. That is a lot of volume in which to make good judgment calls when criminal court dockets are in the several hundred a day, when young district attorneys particularly the misdemeanors assistants are themselves handling caseloads of several hundred cases. To do a careful job and to pay attention to issues of wrongful convictions is our highest priority, but it is often a priority that we exercise under tough circumstances. Before I turn to the next point I just want to say, it is one of my highest priorities as D.A. also to deal with the enormous backlog we have in our criminal courts in Manhattan. And I know Justice Lippman is a partner with me on this. It is unacceptable to me that we have caseloads and dockets for courts and defense lawyers and judges that is so crushing that, despite our best efforts, it is a great challenge to provide individualized justice and fairness in each one of those cases. So I am committed as District Attorney to throw all hands on deck, and it s something that I ll be talking about in the upcoming weeks, to deal with the criminal court backlog to make sure that in the lower court we are doing the best job possible to deal with

3 2010] A Conviction Integrity Initiative 1215 potential for wrongful convictions, because typically those are not the ones you hear about. The ones you hear about are the much more publicized cases. So let me tell you what I intend to do about the issue of wrongful convictions as the prosecutor for Manhattan. In Manhattan today I am announcing what we are calling a Conviction Integrity Program. It reflects our office s tradition of concern in this area, and it reflects my commitment to not just stand on tradition, but to provide a structure and a framework to address some of the scientific and human issues that other panelists will be talking about. The program has three components. First and foremost, there will be a group of senior assistant D.A. s within the office that will number ten to begin with, called the Conviction Integrity Committee. It will include my Chief Assistant, the head of the Trial Division, the head of Appeals Division, and a number of other seasoned trial lawyers. Their job will be to identify the best practices in science, the best practices in dealing with incoming cases in terms of police protocols and interviewing witnesses and examining cases, and also to provide a orderly process when motions come in that bring to our attention cases where there are meaningful allegations of a wrongful conviction that we orderly, quickly, and promptly and methodically deal with it. So there will be a Conviction Integrity Committee where we devote enormous talent in our office to make sure that on the front end, and on the back end we are applying all our efforts to make sure that we avoid injustices in the first place using best practices, and that we review cases promptly that come to our attention. We will have within the office a Conviction Integrity Chief, who will be Bonnie Sard. Serving as chief will be her full-time job. She will manage the work of the Conviction Integrity Committee. She will report to me and my general counsel. And she will make sure that in the first few months, we work with the experts in both our law enforcement system and in the defense system around the country to make sure that we have best practices in terms of interviewing witnesses, identifications, and taking statements, ranging from domestic violence cases to cases of immigration fraud, the whole range of cases, making sure that the work we do establishing protocols are in place and recommendations are made to me by early summer. The third component is that we will have an outside panel of

4 1216 Albany Law Review [Vol advisory experts. The point of this is that prosecutors are indeed very experienced, but we don t have all the answers. I think it s important for us as experts in this profession to be unafraid to look outside, and to formalize help and guidance on a policy basis, not necessarily on case review. I think that s a critical distinction. But to have people to whom we can turn unafraid, unabashedly to tell us what are the best practices, to make sure that we are aware of things that they are learning so that we can decide whether to implement them in our procedures in evaluating cases to avoid wrongful charging and convictions. And I m very pleased to tell you that the policy members who have agreed to serve with us, some of them are known to you. Judge Howard Levine, formerly of New York Court of Appeals; Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project; Denise O Donnell, who many of you knew in Albany as a distinguished career veteran in law enforcement and a public servant; Bob McGuire, the former police commissioner for the City of New York; Zack Carter, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District; Richard Girgenti, former criminal justice coordinator for the City of New York; Mechi Prinz who works with the Office of the Medical Examiner and Forensics; Rachael Barkow, New York University Law Professor with extraordinary experience in these areas; and Bruce Green, a Professor of ethics at Fordham Law School. I hope that by taking this large office and formalizing a structure to deal with establishing best practices, reviewing cases, having management responsibility by having a senior assistant district attorney accountable to me and being able to be guided by outside experts where appropriate, I m going to be able to articulate to the public that which I knew all along, that the Manhattan D.A. s and its A.D.A. s care about the job they do. I know that no one feels a greater sense of tragedy than I did when I came to the job and in the first month had to deal with a case of an individual who it was revealed was put in jail for four years because a witness in the case perjured herself for reasons that were simply incomprehensible. But I need to be able to communicate to the public, to the outside world, not just what we aspire to do in our office, but what we are practically doing to address the issue that concerns everyone in this room. What are the practices? What are the protocols? What are the procedures? What are the guide markers? How are we going to measure our success? That I think is the challenge for a modern prosecutor s office. These are good lawyers, but we need to institutionalize the best

5 2010] A Conviction Integrity Initiative 1217 conviction protocols and measure our success against them. I hope we live up to our reputation as one of the finest prosecutor s offices in the country on one of the most critical areas confronting the criminal justice system in the country. Thank you.