Oct. 30--A day after judges vacated wrongful murder convictions in Brooklyn and Dallas, top local prosecutors from across the country took part Wednesday in a Chicago conference on what role prosecutors should play in uncovering and correcting their own mistakes.
It would have been difficult a few years ago to envision prosecutors from Cook and Lake counties attending the event put on by Northwestern University's School of Law, given the chilly relations between the school's Center on Wrongful Convictions and prosecutors in those counties, a dynamic repeatedly mentioned by speakers.
After a law professor warned those in attendance, including some who spent time in prison for crimes they didn't commit, that the event was no place for "rude interruptions," Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez drew laughter when she began her remarks by saying, "Just a few years ago I could never imagine that I would be here."
"Go ahead, we can all laugh," she said.
But later Alvarez made it clear she disagreed with some of the vocal critics -- including those at the school -- who believe she has acted too slowly to drop charges when there is convincing evidence that a person has been wrongfully convicted.
"In my opinion, some of that analysis has been unfair and unbalanced, but some of it has also been right on the mark," she said.
The conference Wednesday focused on the increase around the country of so-called conviction integrity units -- specialized teams of attorneys in a county prosecutor's office who independently investigate claims of wrongful convictions, often from decades earlier.
Alvarez set up such a unit in Cook County in 2012, staffing it with five attorneys from a total staff of about 860, she said. So far, the group has vacated the convictions of nine defendants after reviewing 155 cases, she said, and another 180 cases are being reviewed.
The conference featured panels that included Judge Paul Biebel, who presides over Cook County's criminal division, Lake County State's Attorney Mike Nerheim, Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson and the heads of conviction integrity units in Dallas, Cleveland and Santa Clara County, Calif.
Alan Beaman, who was exonerated last year of the 1993 murder of his ex-girlfriend in McLean County, told the conference that the judge cited his lack of remorse before sentencing him to 50 years in prison. Beaman spent 13 years behind bars before he was released.
"Our legal system not only convicts innocent people, but it punishes them more severely than the guilty," said Beaman, noting that people had at first complained he'd only been released on "a technicality" because prosecutors had failed to turn over evidence to his lawyers.
When Nerheim took over an office that had developed a national reputation for prosecuting innocent men, the Lake County state's attorney had to "be creative" in setting up a unit to examine innocence claims, he said. Running an office that's small compared with others known for bungling felony prosecutions, Nerheim went outside his agency, enlisting a volunteer legal panel to audit claims of innocence and discuss them with his office.
Nerheim said he was "trying to restore the reputation of my office" when he took over in 2012. He enlisted outside help with his panel, he said, because having an internal review unit could mean putting claims of innocence before some of the same attorneys that originally handled the cases.
"I think the best way to try to pierce through that cognitive bias is to get as many fresh eyes on the case as we possibly can," Nerheim said.
The panel's review process has yet to result in an exoneration.
Among the topics discussed by the panelists were the ingrained reluctance by prosecutors to admit making mistakes, the need to have a process to identify claims worth investigating, keeping an open mind when investigating those claims and the likelihood that many individuals are wrongfully convicted of lesser crimes.
Thomas Breen, a Chicago criminal-defense attorney and former prosecutor, told the crowd that no one should chalk up wrongful convictions as just an unavoidable cost of the criminal justice system.
"Don't ever say in the war on crime, innocent people may be killed or incarcerated because that ain't what our system is," he said. "It ain't perfect but with that attitude it will never be worth anything."
sschmadeke@tribune.com
dhinkel@tribune.com
