In many cases, they made things worse

By Ryan Kost and Willow Higgins New York Focus

Calvin Buari had served nearly half of a 50-year prison sentence for a double homicide he didn’t commit when, in 2015, prosecutors in the Bronx District Attorney’s Office asked him to stop fighting his conviction.

• His attorneys had recently submitted a court motion seeking to overturn it based on new updates in his case. Five new witnesses had come forward to identify another murder suspect and offer Buari an alibi for the decades-old crime that left two men dead, slumped over in a car near the east Bronx. The prosecutors proposed an alternative to Buari. A new special unit in the DA’s office, called the Conviction Integrity Bureau, was starting to investigate wrongful incarceration claims outside of the court system – and his case seemed readymade. They promised a fair and independent review, a collaborative fact-finding mission.

But during that review, the bureau’s investigators showed up at the witnesses’ homes and workplaces unannounced. Their aggressive inquiries prompted the eviction of one witness from the domestic violence shelter where she lived. Another witness was so distressed by her encounter that she asked her doctor to write a note detailing her heart problems in case she needed it in court.

The tactics reminded Buari of the witness intimidation that he believes stymied an earlier attempt to clear his name. He began to question the bureau’s motives. “It made me see that these people would do anything just … to try to sabotage truthful evidence from coming forth,” he said.

In January 2017, a year after the bureau’s official inquiry began, he received a letter denying his innocence claim.

Buari then turned back to the court. Within four months, a New York judge threw out his conviction.

The Bronx County bureau is one of 17 conviction integrity programs across New York, which has more than any other state except California. The units, typically housed within DAs’ offices, were created over the past decade, during a national wave of criminal justice reform, to re-examine criminal convictions that those DAs may have gotten wrong in the first place. New York’s DAs have ushered in CIUs, as they’re commonly known, with high hopes and bold promises.

In 2015, while vowing to launch her own program, then-Bronx County DA candidate Darcel Clark reportedly called the units “standard operating procedure” in any modern DA’s office.

“Justice is justice,” she said at the time. “And this review is part of justice.”

Sandra Doorley, Monroe County’s top prosecutor, described her county’s CIU as a way to “help with a fair and just criminal justice system.”

“Convicting innocent people is a horrifying concept,” she said.

New York’s conviction integrity programs have fallen short of their promise, an investigation by New York Focus and Columbia Journalism Investigations found. Nearly half of them have yet to support a single exoneration. The 12 CIUs outside of New York City – which have been around for an average of six years each and collectively boast three dozen staff members – have only supported 12 exonerations between them.

Interviews with dozens of people and a review of hundreds of pages of government records reveal a CIU system operating almost entirely in secret, with no outside oversight. Most units across the state answer solely to the DAs who created them. Controlled by elected officials, units can become vulnerable to internal pressure to cover up past mistakes. And because there are no legal standards governing CIUs, personnel can commit the same abuses as their colleagues in DAs’ offices — to the detriment of the wrongfully convicted.

Applicants in New York have found the CIU process slow and haphazard, leaving them in limbo, sometimes for years, awaiting a response. More often than not, units denied the applicants identified in this investigation without a review, or rejected them after a reinvestigation without explanation.

New York Focus and CJI analyzed data from the National Registry of Exonerations, reviewed every known exoneration case in a New York county with a CIU, and interviewed more than 100 exonerees, defense attorneys, legal scholars, current and former CIU staff members, and elected district attorneys in order to evaluate the units’ efficacy. The investigation identified at least 27 defendants in the state, including Buari, who did not win support from a county CIU, only to have their convictions overturned by the courts later.

That’s one in every six exonerations since 2010 in the New York counties that have such units, according to a New York Focus and CJI analysis of national exoneration data. In most instances, CIU staff had access to the same information that prompted the judge to act.

The vast majority of cases involve Black and Latino defendants from across the state, including New York City, the Hudson Valley and western

See CASES, Page 18A

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The rise of CIUs in New York aligns with a national movement for justice reform led by so-called progressive prosecutors aiming to correct wrongful convictions. Studies estimate that innocent people could comprise as much as 6 percent of the U.S. prison population. That would translate to about

New York. Because they applied to a CIU, they spent more time fighting their wrongful convictions than if they had gone to a judge in the first place. In a few cases, the process took months. On average, however, it took more than three years. All told, defendants spent an average of 19 years in prison before clearing their names.

It’s difficult to know just how many wrongful conviction cases were dismissed or rejected by CIUs only to be upheld by courts later, because New York seals exonerees’ names in court records. In response to records requests, most of New York’s CIUs declined to provide applicant lists or provided partial lists. Reporters filed more than 100 records requests seeking basic information about how New York’s CIUs operate. Most units failed to respond.

In interviews, some district attorneys defended the work of CIUs. Former Erie County District Attorney John J. Flynn, who headed the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York from June 2023 to March 2024, said that a judge’s decision in a wrongful conviction case does not determine how effective the CIU is because judges and DAs don’t always agree.

“You’re not going to win every case,” said Flynn, who resigned from Erie’s top prosecutor post earlier this year after two terms. “That’s how the legal system works.”

But some CIU proponents admitted that the investigation’s findings cast doubt on the programs’ ability to live up to their mission. The gap between CIU and judicial decisions could signify that these units lack resources or that their review process has broken down, one expert said, but it could also indicate that New York’s DAs don’t evaluate wrongful conviction claims objectively.

“That’s a way of showing that these units – some of them at least – are not functioning properly,” said Barry Kamins, the former chair of the New York State Bar Association’s wrongful convictions task force, which in 2019 recommended that all 62 county district attorneys’ offices create conviction integrity programs. Kamins, a retired judge who now serves on a different statewide wrongful conviction task force, noted that some DAs believe that their offices never make mistakes and only convict guilty people.

“That’s unfortunate,” he said, “and that’s why there should be some structure in place to look at convictions.”

Failing best practices for conviction integrity programs

New York’s conviction integrity programs, which are among the oldest in the US, have expanded rapidly since 2010. Today, more than a dozen county DAs’ offices have one, and in just the last year, three newly elected DAs have pledged to create bureaus.

The basic model is simple: Defendants who believe they were wrongfully convicted can apply to have their case reviewed. The CIU decides if an application has merit and then launches a reinvestigation in which prosecutors weigh newfound evidence and may interview witnesses. If the CIU determines that a defendant is innocent, the DA’s office can support a motion to overturn the conviction. Throughout this process, the unit works with defendants and their attorneys, rather than against them.

Some units have a formal structure with designated staff. Others consist of informal panels of volunteers. Smaller DAs’ offices may have an ad hoc review process rather than a separate unit. All operate under the premise that prosecutors and police can make mistakes that put the wrong people behind bars.

Their path to exoneration is narrow. While defendants can appeal their convictions, appellate courts rarely overturn them. From 2007 to 2023, New York appellate courts reversed a conviction and then dismissed the indictment – the equivalent of a full exoneration – in less than 3 percent of all felony appeals, according to the justice reform group Scrutinize. Once defendants have exhausted their appeals, their options dwindle, making conviction integrity units a crucial last resort.

New York CIUs do not publish annual statistics about their caseloads, so it’s difficult to know whether they offer wrongly convicted defendants a better chance at success. The national exonerations data shows that conviction integrity units supported exonerating 93 incarcerated people between 2010 – when the state’s first one was created in Manhattan – and 2024. That accounts for roughly 60 percent of the total exonerations that have taken place in counties with CIUs.

Charles Linehan, who headed the Kings County CIU in Brooklyn from 2022 to last month, considers the unit a national leader and noted its role in roughly 40 exonerations so far. “Admitting when we’ve got it wrong in the past and correcting those mistakes is, to me, a huge indicator of success,” he said. The Brooklyn unit is one of only two in the state with an outside panel that reviews the unit’s findings and makes a final recommendation to the DA.

While a CIU’s process varies from county to county, experts have laid out best practices to ensure independence and impartiality – and most of the state’s programs fail to live up to them.

‘Harassing and intimidating’ witnesses

Buari has had an entrepreneurial spirit all his life. As a child, he sold homemade cookies at school and walked groceries to people’s cars for tips. By age 12, his friends had begun selling drugs. Seeing an opportunity to help out his single mother – and buy the Jordans that the cool kids wore – Buari joined them.

When Buari heard gunshots that day in 1992, he started running. He was “just trying to get out the way,” he said. By then, he’d established himself as a local dealer, and tensions had risen between rival outfits on his east Bronx block. Two men died in the shooting, and Buari’s life would never be the same.

Buari told police he had been near the crime scene, but the gunshots sent him running. Prosecutors didn’t believe him and promised leniency to several drug dealers in exchange for testimony that was used to convict Buari. He was arrested in 1993 and found guilty of second- degree murder two years later.

After nearly a decade of his own legal work, Buari filed his first innocence claim in 2003, when a dealer who had testified against him confessed to the crime. But the dealer later recanted under questioning from investigators with the Bronx DA’s office.

When the Bronx CIU reinvestigated Buari’s case more than a decade later, his attorneys brought it to the attention of then-DA Darcel Clark. In a January 2016 letter, defense attorney Myron Beldock told Clark that he believed the case “qualifies for your personal attention in carrying out your stated mission to see that justice is done.”

The Bronx assistant district attorneys assigned to the CIU effort vowed to conduct a “fair, impartial, and non-adversarial” review, Buari later claimed in a civil lawsuit.

But his attorneys soon heard that the investigators were intimidating witnesses.

Among them was Nakia Clark (no relation to the DA), a key witness for Buari’s innocence claim. On the night of the shooting, Clark, then 17, was outside her sister’s house when she saw a man shoot a gun into a car. She still remembers how the victims’ bodies jerked. At the time, Clark didn’t tell anyone what she observed; her sister had warned her not to speak to cops.

Two decades passed before Buari’s family would post notices about the case in the neighborhood and an investigator they had hired would find Clark and other new witnesses. Clark agreed to speak with authorities if an attorney accompanied her.

When CIU investigators contacted her in the summer of 2016, she’d just found a room at a domestic violence shelter in Kingston. The investigators showed up without notice, violating the shelter’s women-only rules. A shelter employee later told her that she would have to leave the facility – the one place offering her counseling, clothing, and other essentials – in order to guarantee its residents a safe space, she said. Clark had to pay for a hotel room out of pocket until she could find housing. Clark said she felt pressured by the CIU investigators and remembers them warning that she could get in trouble if she testified.

“It seemed like a threat,” she said in an interview. “Like if I testified and said the wrong thing, that I could wind up getting locked up.”

Both Clark’s sister and a third witness, Caroline Brown, also reported feeling intimidated by the investigators. Brown, who had learned about Buari’s wrongful conviction claims through a news article, called their behavior “harmful” to her health, according to Buari’s legal filings. The experience prompted her to bring a doctor’s note detailing her heart and anxiety conditions to a court hearing months after her CIU interview, in case she needed it.

The tactics ran counter to defense attorneys’ expectations. Records show Beldock had told the Bronx DA that the witnesses wanted legal representation during their CIU interviews. Another of Buari’s defense attorneys sent an email to a prosecutor overseeing the reinvestigation to raise concerns about the investigators’ “harassing and intimidating” conduct. The prosecutor did not respond to his concerns.

A spokesperson for the Bronx DA’s office declined to make the employees who worked on Buari’s CIU case available for interviews for this story. It’s unclear whether the office looked into the witnesses’ allegations about the investigators’ behavior or whether there were any consequences as a result; the office provided a written statement about the case but declined to comment further.

DA Clark, for her part, did not respond to a request for comment for this story, and the office’s spokesperson declined to make her available for an interview.

In the statement, the office acknowledged that its reinvestigation had “unique challenges” and noted that an earlier judicial ruling had accused Buari of intimidating witnesses – accusations that a different judge later discounted, records show. The office also questioned why any eyewitness to a murder would “feel the need for the services of an attorney.”

The Bronx CIU ultimately rejected Buari’s exoneration bid, stating that the new evidence didn’t prove “the conviction was wrongfully obtained,” the unit’s January 2017 letter to Buari stated.

Three months later, based on the same evidence that led the CIU to reinvestigate it, a judge vacated Buari’s conviction and ordered a new trial. In his written decision, the judge excoriated the way the Bronx CIU had treated the Clark sisters and Brown.

Their “involvement has only served to draw unwanted attention, and hostility from the Bronx District Attorney’s Office,” he wrote, noting the trouble that investigators had caused Nakia Clark and the way prosecutors had questioned Brown’s past drug use to discredit her. He called their treatment of Clark, in particular, “unconscionable.”

The ruling released Buari from prison. It took another 10 months for the Bronx DA’s office to dismiss the charges, making his exoneration official.

In an interview, Buari called his CIU experience “a waste of time.”

“They felt like I was a drug dealer, so I didn’t matter,” he said.

Ryan Kost and Willow Higgins reported this story for New York Focus. CJI reporting fellows Curtis Brodner and Oishika Neogi contributed to the data reporting and analysis. New York Focus and CJI provided editing, fact-checking, and other support.