If you’ve been convicted of a crime you didn’t commit, you have a few options: You can try to get your sentence commuted, or appeal in court. And now through the Connecticut Conviction Integrity Unit, you can also ask the state to give your case another look.
The Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School offers guidance to conviction integrity units, also known as "CIUs," nationally. John Hollway, director, says such units can be understood as prosecutorial responses to the Innocence Project.
“It engages and creates sort of an extra-judicial process to understand actual innocence, as opposed to the appellate process, which is generally looking at due process,” Hollway said.
Connecticut’s CIU has closed 52 cases since it launched back in 2021. None of those have resulted in an overturned conviction. Marrissa Bluestine, assistant director at the Quattrone Center, says that’s not necessarily a good metric of a CIU’s success.
“An exoneration — where you get all the way through to proving actual innocence or proving the wrongful conviction, where the conviction and the sentence are vacated — is an extraordinarily rare occurrence,” she said. “And it is dependent upon luck as much as anything else.”
Would-be exonerees need that luck: They rely on old evidence to be available to be tested, and on old witnesses to be alive.
Rather, the Quattrone Center looks for successful CIUs to be independent, flexible and transparent. Bluestine says Connecticut checks a bunch of those boxes.
“The protocols are available online, that's a really good thing,” she said. “They lay out what the entire process is — also a very good thing. The protocols call for close to full cooperation with defense counsel as possible.”
Here's how the CIU process in Connecticut works.
First, the CIU reviews applications and decides whether to reinvestigate old convictions. If they find enough evidence that suggests someone is innocent or had a bad trial, they refer the case to the Conviction Review Panel, which makes a recommendation to the chief state’s attorney.
Kevin Lawlor, deputy chief state's attorney for operations, says the goal is to provide a “fast pass” alternative to a habeas appeal.
“Our habeas process in Connecticut, anyone will tell you, is extremely dysfunctional,” Lawlor said. “It takes people upwards of six years to work their way through the habeas process.”
The New Haven state’s attorney has the final decision on whether a conviction should be overturned. And that’s the case for Daryl Valentine. His case is the only case that has made it to the Conviction Review Panel. Valentine was convicted, twice, of the murders of two men in New Haven in 1991. He’s maintained his innocence for thirty years.
“I'm not guilty of these charges,” Valentine said. “It's hard. It's depressing. The burden wasn't only on me, it was on my family.”
Today, Valentine is out of prison. The Board of Pardons and Paroles commuted his sentence, finding he isn’t a risk to the community.
But his lawyer, Alex Taubes, says the fight isn’t over.
“He still carries with him the two felony murder convictions that he was wrongfully convicted, wrongfully incarcerated for over three decades,” he said. “That record still follows him and haunts him.”
But so far, Valentine says he feels strung along by the conviction review process. That’s because the review panel recommended keeping his conviction in place, even though testimony from key witnesses has been discredited.
The CIU also created two different reports about his case. The first one suggests there was evidence of misconduct by police. But the second one says that evidence was "insufficiently verifiable."
The CIU declined to comment on the discrepancy because the case is still pending.
But there’s still hope for Valentine. The final decision lies with the New Haven state’s attorney, who could overturn the conviction.
“I mean, I can't make up 32 years of incarceration, but it will be wonderful for him to stand up and say we made a mistake,” Valentine said.
While the CIU works through Valentine’s case, Bluestein says there are some other areas things the Connecticut CIU could be doing better. For instance, for the CIU to pick up a case, the applicant must identify plausible and verifiable evidence that would lead to a loss of confidence in the conviction. But that evidence often is produced over the course of the CIU’s investigation.
“A lot of units have that, but it's not a great practice,” she said. “Because when somebody applies to the unit, they're most often in custody, or they're in prison. They don't have resources to hire an investigator. They haven't been able to investigate their case. They don't work with a lawyer. So they all they know is, ‘look, it was wrong. I was convicted of something I didn't do.’ But they don't have the evidence. In fact, that evidence is only developed most of the time through the investigation done by the [conviction integrity unit.]"
Supervisory Assistant State’s Attorney Joseph Valdes says the CIU addresses that problem by interviewing applicants at the start of the process.
“We've had people who have focused on one thing and we look at that and we say, well, that's really something else," Valdes said. "But what about this? And we investigate the other thing that caused us to be concerned.”
CORRECTION: This story was updated after publication to reflect that the final decision in Daryl Valentine's case is up to the New Haven State's Attorney and not the Chief State's Attorney.
