These teams work to overturn wrongful convictions, freeing innocent people from prison. They can do much more, experts say

(CNN) — Kenneth Nixon went numb the moment he was found guilty in September 2005 for two murders he didn’t commit – a wrongful conviction that saw the then-19-year-old father of two condemned to spend the rest of his life in a Michigan prison.

“I couldn’t understand how this could happen,” Nixon, now 37, told CNN. “As Americans, we’re taught to believe that the system works – it gets it right … I didn’t understand how it could be wrong in such a big way.”

For years, Nixon spent time in the prison’s law library, educating himself so he could prove his innocence. Eventually, he courted the help of Michigan’s Cooley Law School Innocence Project, which championed his case.

But it was the effort of a team inside the very prosecutor’s office that worked to convict him that finally cleared Nixon’s name: The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Conviction Integrity Unit, one of more than a hundred such units around the country that re-evaluate cases and investigate claims of innocence.

When those claims are born out, these units work to have the prisoner released.

For Nixon, that day came 16 years after he was wrongfully convicted. His attorneys sought a review, and on February 18, 2021, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy acknowledged Nixon had not received a fair trial. His convictions were dismissed, his sentences vacated and the charges dropped.

“I can stand here and say this to you confidently: If it were not for the Conviction Integrity Unit, there is a high possibility that I would have died in prison for a crime I did not commit,” Nixon said.

In recent weeks, a series of overturned wrongful convictions – including one in Cook County, Illinois, and two in Los Angeles County, California – have been credited, in part, to the work of conviction integrity units, or CIUs.

Collectively, these cases illustrate the inarguable good CIUs can do to address a chilling reality: Innocent people have been and will be convicted and sent to prison for crimes they didn’t commit.

There have been more than 3,400 exonerations since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. The registry generally defines an exoneration – a subset of wrongful convictions more broadly – as a case in which a person is relieved of all consequences of a criminal conviction as a result of new evidence.

Of those, at least 729 exonerations – about 20% – were secured with the help of a CIU.

But there is room for improvement, experts told CNN. Many jurisdictions can’t afford a CIU or don’t have the resources to do the work well. And there are concerns some CIUs exist only as a political benefit for the district attorney – that no one is actually investigating innocence claims, or that the CIU operates to preserve convictions rather than question them.

But many CIUs do the work well, said Marissa Bluestine, the assistant director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, which works and consults with CIUs around the country. To do so, they need to operate independently and transparently, she said, but their mandate should also go beyond investigating old cases.

CIUs, she said, should be not merely reactive but proactive, working to ensure the errors that lead to a wrongful conviction don’t happen again.

“A good, functioning CIU isn’t just about looking backwards, but it’s about looking forwards as well,” Bluestine said, “and where can they interrupt the process on the front end to be able to prevent wrongful convictions from happening in the first place.”

Exonerations not the only metric for success

CIUs are relatively new. The first appeared in the 2000s, according to a list published by the National Registry of Exonerations, which is a joint effort by the University of California Irvine, the University of Michigan and Michigan State University.

When Jessica Weinstock Paredes, a former criminal defense attorney, joined the registry as its research scholar in 2019, it counted just 36 units. The list has since ballooned and diversified, she said: CIUs are often housed within a local prosecutor’s office, but now there are CIUs in the offices of state attorneys general and, elsewhere, committees that do similar work.

The CIU process varies between jurisdictions, experts said. But it generally begins with a request by an incarcerated person or their attorneys for the unit to reevaluate a case. If the CIU chooses to do so, it will reinvestigate it from the ground up, revisiting case files, interviewing witnesses and reexamining evidence.

Sometimes that investigation further incriminates the person, and sometimes it casts doubt on their conviction, said Bluestine. Usually, it’s somewhere in the middle.

Eventually, it’s up to the prosecutor to decide whether the new evidence is enough to change his or her mind about the conviction, or to cause the prosecutor to question it, even if it doesn’t necessarily prove an individual’s innocence.

If that’s the case, Bluestine said, most states require defense attorneys to file a petition with the courts seeking relief, and the prosecutor’s office will agree. Typically, a hearing will take place where a judge determines whether the individual is indeed entitled to that relief.

In cases where people are found to be innocent, that can lead to their release from prison and, hopefully, an exoneration.

But that’s not always the outcome, Bluestine said, and exonerations are not the only way to evaluate a CIU’s success. Other types of relief can result if the CIU is open to addressing wrongful convictions overturned for reasons other than someone’s innocence.

Wrongful convictions can also include, for example, cases in which procedural errors violated a person’s rights, according to the National Institute for Justice.

“The unit should also be open to other ways of addressing a wrongful conviction, even if it’s not actual innocence,” Bluestine said. “If it’s something where there was such prosecutorial police or defense counsel misconduct that we don’t have faith in the conviction itself, they should be willing to address that as well.” Similarly, if a defendant is found to have less culpability, there should be a willingness to adjust the sentence accordingly, she said.

Alternative outcomes could be that the defendant receives a commuted sentence, pleads guilty to a lesser crime, or that the prosecutor’s office supports parole, a commutation or compassionate release.

“There are definitely other ways to take action on a case, even if doesn’t get all the way to exoneration,” she said.

Indeed, about half the CIUs counted by the National Registry of Exonerations have yet to record an exoneration – but that could be due, in part, to the registry’s strict criteria for inclusion. The registry does not include wrongful convictions overturned for reasons that don’t include evidence of someone’s innocence, like for a procedural error that violated their right to due process.

A lack of exonerations doesn’t mean a CIU is not seeking other avenues for relief that are valuable and important, Weinstock Paredes said. But the registry specifically studies exonerations, she noted, and the number produced by a CIU can be at least one metric to measure a unit’s productivity.

‘Time is something you can’t get back’

Some are skeptical of CIUs that don’t produce exonerations – like Marc Howard, a professor of government and law at Georgetown University and the director of the Prisons and Justice Initiative. He’s not opposed to CIUs, calling them a “wonderful and much-needed institution.”

“If,” he added, “they actually do the job they’re stated to do.”

He believes some CIUs are a “sham,” established to suggest offices are evaluating cases without actually doing so – a concern shared by Nixon, the Wayne County exoneree.

“You have some conviction integrity units across the country that are just there in name only. They’re a publicity stunt for the prosecutor that decided to do it. It sounds good,” Nixon said. “But in reality, there’s nobody working.”

This can do further harm to innocent people in prison, Howard said, because the existence of CIU can give the impression that convictions are accurate, even if they’re not.

Howard also expressed concern some CIUs act to preserve convictions rather than genuinely explore overturning them, pointing to a potential conflict of interest: “They are set up by the very institution that contributed to the wrongful conviction,” he said, adding that structure requires “people to effectively police themselves.”

Bluestine acknowledged that “protecting against bias is a big issue,” and it’s important for a CIU not to be predisposed to uphold convictions. A CIU needs the right “orientation,” and while many consist of career prosecutors who do a good job, defense counsel experience “is certainly a good, important thing,” she said.

Howard echoed that: The CIUs he believes work well include former defense attorneys who are skeptical of evidence and familiar with the misconduct that contributed to wrongful convictions. But he also wants to see CIUs “empowered” by getting more resources and being allowed to operate independently within the prosecutor’s office, without the bias of the broader institution.

That can be particularly difficult for smaller jurisdictions and prosecutor’s offices, which not only lack resources but also make a non-biased review difficult, because everyone in the office is familiar with the case and the prosecutors who worked on it.

But at their best, CIUs are “absolutely important,” helping to “restore trust in the system,” said Nixon, who today is the president of the Organization of Exonerees – a group that helps exonerees transition back to life outside prison, many of whom, like Nixon, have benefited from the work of CIUs.

CIUs show prosecutors are committed to doing their job right, he said, and to acknowledging that errors happen.

“But they also play a role in educating prosecutors on the key factors that contribute to wrongful convictions,” he said. “And that’s important, because getting it right on the front end prevents people from losing their time. Time is something you can’t get back.”

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