Rejected by Conviction Integrity Unit, 27 New York Prisoners Exonerated Anyway
When a New York appellate court tossed the conviction of Kaitlyn Conley, 32, in January 2025 for the fatal 2015 poisoning of her employer, veterinarian Mary Yoder, 60, the case returned to Oneida County District Attorney (DA) Todd Carville. He has yet to decide on retrying her. But curiously, the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) in Carville’s office did not support Conley’s effort.
Conley was one of 27 state prisoners who won exonerations after being rejected by a CIU. That’s 27 people now released from prison sentences that they served for crimes they didn’t commit, with zero help from the government employees tasked with searching out such cases.
But the embarrassments don’t stop there. Only five of the 17 CIUs operating in the state have managed to support even one successful exoneration; seven have none. Said Barry Kamins, the New York State Bar Association’s former Wrongful Conviction Task Force Chair, “That’s a way of showing that these units—some of them at least—are not functioning properly.”
The task force recommended in 2019 that DAs in the state’s other 45 counties create CIUs, but only one has done so; Columbia County established its CIU in 2024. In each CIU, a prisoner applies for a review of his case that is first vetted by staff attorneys; cases they deem to have merit then advance to an investigation, and if the results convince the DA, a motion follows for the trial court to vacate the prisoner’s conviction and sentence.
An estimated 6% of United States prisoners are innocent, but New York appellate courts issued full exonerations—vacating a conviction and withdrawing the indictment—to just 3% of those who filed appeals between 2007 and 2023. That leaves a lot of prisoners reliant on a CIU. Since the state’s first was created in Manhattan in 2010, there have been over 150 exonerations in counties that have one. But the counties’ CIUs supported only 93 of those cases.
In Kings County, which includes Brooklyn, the CIU has supported 42 of 62 exonerations granted since it was created in 2011—the most of any unit in the state. It is also one of only two units whose recommendations are reviewed by an oversight board that makes a final recommendation to the DA. The CIU founded in Oneida County in 2013 is one of those that has yet to support any exonerations, including Conley’s case.
Another exonerated prisoner, Calvin Buari, called his effort with the Bronx County CIU “a waste of time.” The conviction of former prisoner Anthony Miller was overturned in November 2020, a year after the Monroe County CIU declined to support his bid for exoneration. That unit has rejected all 71 of the applications for review it has received since its founding in 2019. Said Families and Friends of the Wrongfully Convicted Executive Director Kevin “Renny” Smith, “If the [CIUs] are not functioning right, it makes no sense to have one.”
Source: New York Focus
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