For many years the district attorney's office in New Orleans has been a cesspool of constitutional violations, consistently disregarding defendants' rights in order to secure convictions. The misconduct has been so egregious that the New York Times wrote an editorial about it in October, asking, "How many constitutional violations will it take before the New Orleans district attorney’s office is held to account for the culture of negligence and outright dishonesty that has pervaded it for decades?"
Change in New Orleans was supposed to come in the form of current Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro, who “promised that he is working to uncover and remedy the unjust convictions won over the years by his predecessors." Last year, he and the Innocence Project New Orleans even worked together to create the Conviction Integrity Project, which brought together attorneys and investigators from both offices to examine "questionable convictions" from years past. The goal wasn't only to ensure justice, but to do so without the years-long fights in court, which are expensive and contentious.
While conviction review units are not new, they are usually internal units of the district attorney’s office, making their objectivity and motivations questionable at best. But this project’s inclusion of the Innocence Project made it unusual and more promising. The Advocate likened the partnership to "Muhammad Ali taking tea with Joe Frazier."
But little more than a year after it was announced and just six months after it was funded, the Conviction Integrity Project is over.
From The Advocate:
Depending on whom you ask, the Conviction Integrity and Accuracy Project fell victim to irreconcilable differences or the city’s budget ax.
The City Council declined to renew the project’s funding for this year, a fact that a spokesman for Cannizzaro’s office blamed for its demise. IPNO Director Emily Maw painted a different portrait, however, saying that neither her office nor Cannizzaro’s pushed to keep it going.
Maw said Cannizzaro never came through with the staff or commitment he had pledged for a team in which lawyers and investigators from both sides would share case files and work together to turn up the kind of nefarious deeds, misidentifications, false confessions and other lapses that lead to bad convictions.
“When the project started off, they did not demonstrate any significant shift in the way they approached these cases,” Maw said. “Because it wasn’t a priority, it was not worth the investment anymore.”
This is a huge disappointment, given the innovative nature of the project. When it began, The Advocate reported that it was the first of its kind.
District attorneys across the country, from Brooklyn, New York, to Dallas to Jefferson Parish, have created in-house conviction-review teams. But it appears that none has invited advocates for convicted inmates to work side by side with prosecutors, [City Council member Jason] Williams said.
The project is not about searching for legal technicalities, they said, but finding cases in which prosecutors hid evidence or defense attorneys fell flat or witnesses just fingered the wrong person.
“This collaboration, frankly, is revolutionary,” Williams said. “We have an opportunity to get those people who are factually innocent out of jail. There are tons of cases for us to look at. That’s something we don’t have a shortage of.”
Now, Williams says that the project's results were disappointing and that the city council declined to renew funding because "looking at the results, [the project] just did not prove worthy."
The project was introduced in August of 2014 but not fully funded until this past July. But even as it dissolves in its infancy, the initiative does have a victory under its belt. The project is responsible for the release of Kia Stewart, convicted of murder in 2009 and freed this past April. From The Advocate:
Cannizzaro’s office agreed to abandon Stewart’s conviction for killing Bryant “B.J.” Craig after six witnesses who turned up after the trial pointed to another man as the killer. Stewart had been convicted based on the testimony of a single eyewitness, with no testimony from the lead detective in the case.
“We were able to achieve what everybody believed was a just outcome quicker than would have been achieved if it had been battled in the courts,” DA’s spokesman Christopher Bowman said, adding that Cannizzaro sees success in “the work we have done with the Innocence Project before the Conviction Integrity Unit, while the unit was in place, and hopefully going forward.”
So many in New Orleans are waiting for justice after being wrongly or unconstitutionally convicted under a system that brazenly violated the rights of so many. The Conviction Integrity Project was a promising concept, and it is beyond disappointing to see it deemed a failure so quickly.