Justice First

There is no longer any debate that the criminal justice system generates wrongful convictions, cases in which innocent people are sentenced to long periods of prison for crimes they did not commit. But in the absence of DNA evidence, proving actual innocence is a difficult undertaking.

Traditional appellate practice cannot address the plight of the wrongfully convicted, because new evidence cannot be relied upon on appeal. To address this problem, in 2002, CAL developed Justice First-The Collateral Relief Project, a program designed to detect wrongful convictions and aggressively pursue claims of actual innocence.

The mission of Justice First is to ensure that wrongful convictions are detected and investigated as early in the appellate process as possible. Cases referred to the project typically involve issues such as mistaken identifications, unreliable confessions, ineffective assistance of counsel, and prosecutorial misconduct.

Through careful screening, those cases that warrant additional factual investigation are quickly identified so that effective strategies can be developed and implemented. Teams of attorneys, law student interns, and legal fellows work together to ensure that no possible avenue of investigation goes unpursued. This approach has been remarkably successful, resulting in numerous reversals.

Recent Justice First victories include:

• robbery conviction vacated where our client was convicted based on a single-witness identification and the prosecution had failed to prosecute his alleged co-defendant. Suspecting a Brady violation, we conducted an extensive investigation, which included interviewing the co-defendant and his attorney and determining that our client and the co-defendant were strangers to one another. We asked the Bronx District Attorney's office to look into the matter. They conceded that a Brady violation had occurred: the complainant had told the trial assistant that he had wrongly identified the co-defendant. The conviction was vacated on consent, and the prosecution did not go forward with a retrial. The case was ultimately dismissed.
• attempted murder conviction vacated based on ineffective assistance of trial counsel, who, among other things, failed to discover evidence of our client's mental retardation and illness. Following a hearing, the court vacated the conviction, and our client subsequently received a much-reduced sentence.
• drug conviction vacated by the Appellate Division based on ineffective assistance of trial counsel, where our Justice First investigation had revealed trial counsel's heroin addiction during the proceedings. Although the trial court refused to vacate, finding that drug addiction is insufficient to establish prejudice, the Appellate Division reversed.

Claudia Trupp is the project's Director.