22 THENEWYORKER,MARCH2, 2020
“might chafe at the prospect of their col-
leagues looking over their shoulders, to
investigate claims of innocence or im-
propriety.” He’d worried, too, about
whether prosecutors reviewing convic-
tions “would feel inhibited by conduct-
ing a full-scale reinvestigation of the work
of someone who may be a longtime friend
or a trusted colleague.” He added, “I’m
happy to report today that the office cul-
ture, I believe, is committed to this en-
deavor, and that fears that we anticipated
simply have not materialized.” In a speech
the year before, he had announced, “Our
results have been unequivocal. The sys-
tem we have devised works.”
But for many years Vance’s office
would not reveal whom it had exoner-
ated. In 2018, the journalist Tom Rob-
bins, writing for the Marshall Project
and New York magazine, pressed the office
for details. Vance gave him seven names.
After looking into those cases, Robbins
wrote, he found that “one of the defen-
dants on Vance’s list was convicted after
a retrial, while another was released only
after he pleaded guilty to lesser charges.”
He concluded, “All told, after eight years,
Vance’s unit has exonerated only five de-
fendants who were wrongly convicted—
compared to two dozen in Brooklyn.”
Vance’s office asked a judge to vacate
the convictions of two male co-defen-
dants later that year, after a collaborative
investigation with their defense teams.
Barry Scheck, a co-founder of the Inno-
cence Project, which pioneered the use
of DNA evidence to secure exonerations,
was involved in the case. In a press re-
lease from the D.A.’s office, Scheck said,
“We are hopeful that the Conviction In-
tegrity Unit will make this level of col-
laboration a standard part of its process
moving forward.” (The D.A.’s office
moved to vacate the conviction of an-
other Scheck client this past January.)
For years, though, New York City
defense attorneys have traded stories about
their frustrations with Vance’s program.
“There just haven’t been that many rever-
sals coming out of Manhattan,” Joel B.
Rudin, a civil-rights attorney, told me.
Robert Gottlieb, a longtime defense at-
torney who worked as a prosecutor in the
Manhattan D.A.’s office in the late sev-
enties and served on Vance’s transition
team, brought a case to the Conviction
Integrity Program in 2011. He said that,
at their first meeting, “there to my right
was the very prosecutor who tried the
case! My immediate reaction was ‘What
the hell is he doing here?’ It was his trial
that had to be investigated and reviewed.
And, not only was he sitting there, but
he interrupted me while I was speaking.”
John Hollway, who oversees the Quat-
trone Center for the Fair Administra-
tion of Justice, at the University of Penn-
sylvania Law School, told me, “There
are jurisdictions that are earnestly in-
volved in good-faith review of cases where
there’s a possibility the system reached
the wrong conclusion. There are also ju-
risdictions that have a smoke-and-mir-
rors approach. They say they’ll establish
a unit, but then they don’t take the cases
sincerely and earnestly.” These units are
often referred to as “CRINOs,” short for
“conviction review in name only.” These
days, Hollway said, “I think we’re get-
ting more real units and less CRINOs.”
Scheck has written extensively about
best practices for conviction-integrity
units. He advocates for D.A.’s offices to
bring in defense lawyers with experience
in wrongful-conviction cases to oversee
their units, as has been done in Philadel-
phia. To conduct a true reinvestigation,
he said, “you have to come at it with a
completely open mind.” Rudin told me,
“If the district attorney doesn’t put in a
structure that’s independent of the orig-
inal prosecution and trust it, and doesn’t
act with a skeptical mind toward old con-
victions that have been obtained on flimsy
evidence, then it’s worthless.” He went
on, “They assume that when someone’sbeen prosecuted and convicted that they’re
guilty, and they don’t want to face the
unpleasant truth sometimes that they’ve
sent someone to prison who isn’t.”O
ne day in court, Christine Keenan
announced, “This case has been
thoroughly reinvestigated.” She did not
give any details, but the review did not
seem to have been especially thorough.
At the start of Smokes and Warren’s hear-ing, in the fall of 2018, Keenan had not
seen the original police file for the case.
She said that she had asked an investi-
gator to retrieve it from the Midtown
North Precinct, but was told that the file
was not there. In December of 2018, she
told the judge, “We found this file on the
Wednesday before Thanksgiving, because
I personally crawled through a disgust-
ing basement in the police precinct.”
Sussman, the attorney, shot back,
“Why wasn’t this done a year ago? Why
wasn’t this done two years ago?”
As the hearing went on, it became in-
creasingly contentious. On January 25,
2019, the lead prosecutor on the 1987 case,
Michael Goldstein, came to court. He
had worked in the D.A.’s office through-
out the eighties, and now had a private
practice. As Henning asked him detailed
questions, he started to seem annoyed,
resting his head on his palm. “It was a
very big trial,” he said. “There was a lot
going on.” Before the trial, Goldstein had
written a confidential memo for his su-
pervisor, noting, “This case has a num-
ber of problems.” Now, confronted with
this memo, he said, “Most cases aren’t
easy—they all have problems.”
When it was Keenan’s turn to ques-
tion Goldstein, she ran through the
statements that the defense’s witnesses
had made about being coerced by law
enforcement. At times, her questioning
seemed like a defense of the prosecuto-
rial profession: “Did you ever in your
career put a witness on the witness stand
to testify when you thought he was
lying?” “Have you ever threatened a wit-
ness?” “Would you ever urge anyone to
testify falsely?” Goldstein answered no
to all these questions.
George Delgrosso, the lead detec-
tive, testified on February 11, 2019.
Delgrosso, who had retired from the
N.Y.P.D. in 2001, was now in his
mid-sixties, with a ruddy complexion
and white hair. The first questions he
faced concerned an incident that had
occurred in 1978. Delgrosso had got into
a bar fight with another police officer
which left the other man unconscious.
Afterward, he falsely claimed that a
group of neighborhood kids had started
the fight and assaulted them both. He
testified that the story was “fabricated”
by his police-union delegate and his at-
torney. The truth came out during an
N.Y.P.D. Internal Affairs Bureau inves-