“The Watch” by Radley Balko has a profile on Virginia's culture warrior attorney general, Jason Miyares:
When Miyares disbanded the AG’s CIU [Conviction Integrity Unit], he effectively ended any proactive effort by the state of Virginia to seek out wrongful convictions.
Virginia has seen 66 exonerations in the era of DNA testing. That list includes unfathomable miscarriages of justice, including the wrongful convictions of the Norfolk Four (a textbook example of police-coerced false confessions), and the imprisonment of Keith Harward, who was convicted with bitemark evidence — one of the more transparently ridiculous fields of dubious forensics. Harward spent 33 years in prison before DNA testing finally cleared him.
The theme of the story is that Miyares is more interested in punishing perceived enemies (whether fellow attorneys or regular folk) than in pursuing justice. He apparently would rather just call ‘case closed’ when the wrong person is in jail, rather than pursue the actual perpetrator.
The article goes on to review the importance of Conviction Integrity Units, and the “culture of aggressive and abusive prosecutors” in Virginia, along with its “inadequate indigent defense system”.
Here’s hoping that the former DA, Mark Herring, still has some influence in the area and perhaps or someone inspired by him will have the opportunity to undo some of this damage.