Wrongful convictions are like airplane crashes: rare but devastating — both in the lives they destroy and the damage they do to public trust.
And like airplane crashes, cases where innocent people are sent to prison demand thorough, independent investigation — to figure out what went wrong, allocate blame and prevent similar tragedies in the future.
What the criminal justice system needs, in other words, is the equivalent of a National Transportation Safety Board — whose painstaking post-crash analyses have helped make air travel the safety marvel that it is.
That, more or less, is what was proposed in Albany on Tuesday by a coalition calling itself, chillingly, It Could Happen To You.
The group’s members include Yusef Salaam, one of the Central Park Five, who spent more than five years in prison for an infamous rape he didn’t commit.
Also present was Alice Lopez, the widow of William Lopez, who was falsely convicted of murder in Brooklyn, spent 23 years in prison, then died of an asthma attack just six months after finally winning his freedom in 2014.
Determined to save others from their heartbreak, the group wants to create a state Commission on Prosecutorial Conduct.
Modeled on the existing Commission on Judicial Conduct, which oversees judges, the 11-member panel, appointed by the governor and Legislature, would have the power to investigate complaints against prosecutors and censure, suspend or remove any that it determines to have gone rogue.
That duty now belongs primarily to the courts — through panels operated by the Appellate Division that police all forms of attorney misconduct. Rarely, though, does this system take public action against prosecutors, even after convictions are thrown out. Almost never does an exonerated prisoner or the public get a full accounting of what went wrong.
Nor, in cases of error as opposed to misconduct, do prosecutors get clear guidance on best practices.
The wrongly convicted can and do sue, of course. According to coalition director Bill Bastuk, the City of New York paid more than $100 million in damages in the last year alone. But those penalties do nothing to hold wrongdoers, if any, accountable.
“We try to compensate this with money,” said Brooklyn Assemblyman Nick Perry, who cosponsors the coalition’s proposal with Syracuse-area Sen. John DeFrancisco. “But when you have lost your youth and vigor and vitality and dreams, there’s not enough money we can give to compensate for that.”
It should be said that the vast majority of prosecutors are honest public servants who work hard to keep the public safe while following complicated laws.
Yet wrongful prosecutions — whether due to misconduct or not — happen more often that we like to think. In the little more than a year since Ken Thompson took over as Brooklyn DA, his office his overturned no fewer than 11 murder convictions obtained by his predecessors — and is investigating dozens more cases.
Of the 1,540 exonerations tallied since 1989 by the University of Michigan Law School, 187 happened in New York — ranking it second among the states, right behind Texas.
The state District Attorneys Association opposes the commission based on a not unreasonable concern that it could expose prosecutors to harassment by defense lawyers and disgruntled convicts.
The sponsors must defend against this abuse with a mandate that the commission promptly and publicly dismiss frivolous complaints — and punish any repeat offenders.
They should also broaden the commission’s scope to automatically examine all overturned convictions — and study factors other than prosecutorial misconduct, such as false confessions, mistaken identifications and faulty police work.
The panel’s goal must be not simply to punish bad actors, but to end bad practices that, however rarely, put innocent people behind bars.
