Queens DA’s new wrongful conviction unit has opened 10 investigations
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Queens DA Melinda Katz pledged to create a conviction review unit during her 2019 campaign. Eagle photo by Caroline Ourso
By David Brand
A new wrongful conviction unit in the Queens District Attorney’s Office has re-opened 10 past cases to investigate claims of innocence and prosecutorial misconduct, Queens DA Melinda Katz said Tuesday.
The Queens DA’s Conviction Integrity Unit has fielded a total of 46 submissions and closed six since Katz began her tenure on Jan. 1. Late DA Richard Brown and his executive staff refused to create a CIU, leaving Queens as the only county in New York City without a wrongful conviction unit until Katz took office.
“No one is perfect. No system is without flaws. And we know, without a doubt, that mistakes can happen, resulting in a miscarriage of justice,” Katz said in a statement.
The CIU staff, led by former Innocence Project attorney Bryce Benjet, could have their work cut out for them.
Queens prosecutors, including many top officials who remain in the DA’s Office, have been accused of fostering an “office policy that was indifferent to misconduct and rewarded prosecutors for ‘winning’ cases,” according to a lawsuit filed by a man wrongfully convicted in Queens.
A state appellate court allowed defense attorneys representing clients in that lawsuit, and two others filed by wrongfully convicted men, to take depositions from top officials in the Queens DA’s Office — a rare occurrence.
“The misconduct causing our clients to be convicted came about because of policies at the DA’s Office,” Attorney Joel Rudin, who represents the three men, told the Eagle in November.
Assistant district attorneys “were evaluated on their success in winning convictions, but virtually never disciplined or evaluated for violating the fair trial rights of the defendants they prosecuted,” Rudin wrote in court documents.
“As a result, trial prosecutors would either deliberately, recklessly, negligently, or ignorantly” withhold discovery materials, he added.
Attorney John O’Hara (right), who had his own felony conviction cleared in 2017, filed the first application with the Queens Conviction Integrity Unit on Jan. 2. Eagle file photo by Mary Frost.
The first submission to the CIU, covered exclusively by the Eagle, was submitted on Katz’s second day in office by attorney John O’Hara, whose own wrongful conviction for voter fraud was overturned in Brooklyn in 2017.
O’Hara represents Howard Beach resident Joseph Meyer,who was convicted of first-degree gang assault and first-degree assault for his role in an attack on an off-duty police officer during a 2009 road rage incident near the Queensboro Bridge.
O’Hara’s application for review contends that the trial prosecutor withheld detectives’ written reports of interviews with witnesses and a treating physician — documents known as “DD5s” — as well as surveillance footage of the attack that was used to create an NYPD wanted poster.
He said he welcomed the news that the Queens DA’s Office had begun to increase staffing and resources for the CIU, but he criticized Katz’s description of wrongful convictions as “mistakes.”
“Nobody gets wrongfully convicted because a prosecutor made a mistake,” he said, adding that the issues he outlined in his application to the CIU “were all intentional.”
Katz pledged to create a conviction review unit at the beginning of her campaign for DA. In July 2019, she said her office would review every case that involved a lone witness.
“Without a doubt, a wrongful conviction destroys a life. But, it also devastates that wrongfully convicted person’s family,” she said in a statement Tuesday. “It is worth noting that when an innocent individual is locked away for a crime he or she did not commit, it means the guilty party has evaded justice and is free to commit other crimes.”
