CONVICTION INTEGRITY UNITS

By James P. Cooper IV^*

I. Introduction

Within the State of California, each county’s District Attorneys’ Office provides mission statements that are readily available on their respective websites. A sample of these statements provides the general sentiment within District Attorneys offices across the country: (1) protect the rights of the victims and their families¹, (2) ensure public safety², and (3) seek justice through ethical prosecution.³

These goals have generally been successful in convicting defendants who were accused of crimes. However, over the last forty years, there has been a discouraging presence of wrongful convictions. From 1989 to 2014, there have been 325 DNA exonerations in the United States.⁴ These stories of wrongful convictions, and how they occurred, can have a grave impact on a community’s trust in its law enforcement officials, essentially corroding the confidence citizens once had in their criminal justice system as a whole.⁵