Brooklyn D.A. Seeks to Correct Injustice with Conviction Review Unit

The

New Yorker

published a long piece Tuesday on Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson’s Conviction Review Unit.

Thompson created the unit when he took office in January 2014. He assembled a team of 10 lawyers to review wrongful-conviction claims and questionable convictions, many of which occurred under the leadership of the previous D.A., Charles Hynes.

“According to [Assistant District Attorney] Hale, the unit has accepted about a hundred cases for review since March, 2014, and has made a determination in thirty-one. Most of the cases that the unit has handled so far involve crimes that were committed in the early nineteen-nineties, during the highest period of criminal activity in the history of Brooklyn, which were also Hynes’s first years as D.A. The highest priority for the unit, Thompson says, is to give freedom to people who were convicted during the concomitant era of mass incarceration but don’t belong in prison. He likens the work of the C.R.U. to that of a hospital’s triage center.”

Read the full article 

here

.