DA Seth Williams creates unit to exonerate the innocent
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Philadelphia District Attorney Seth Williams today announced that longtime homicide prosecutor Mark Gilson will head a conviction-integrity unit charged with exonerating people imprisoned for crimes they did not commit.
Williams said that it must be ensured that "only the guilty are convicted," and that the public perceived such cases as "tests of the integrity of the system." But the announcement marks a major turnaround: CP has covered Williams' resistance to forming a conviction integrity unit since 2011.
Williams ran on a "smart on crime" platform in 2009 and said that he would "seriously consider" creating such a unit, which now exist in a number of district attorney offices including Manhattan and Dallas. But he later resisted doing so, and even went so far as to dissent from reforms proposed by the state Senate's Advisory Committee on Wrongful Convictions. Last year, Pennsylvania Innocence Project Legal Director Marissa Bluestine said the D.A. had sought to dismiss every single claim of actual innocence they made on procedural grounds.
Today, Bluestine joined Williams at the press conference and praised the new initiative.
Williams said "he's sorry it took this long," and that the office had been busy making reforms to areas like the charging unit, which should decrease wrongful convictions. Just last year, Williams told CP that his appeals and Post-Conviction Relief Act (PCRA) units "constantly review cases post-conviction" and "do exactly [what] 'conviction integrity' units do elsewhere." But they don't: PCRA units typically fight innocence claims.
One such case in Philadelphia involves Eugene Gilyard and Lance Felder, sentenced to life terms for murders that new evidence strongly suggests two other men committed. In October, a Philadelphia judge ordered a new trial over prosecutors' objections, citing the new evidence and stating that the "evidence supporting the convictions...was terribly weak."
Williams announcement comes after the Philadelphia Police Department agreed to implement recommendations to reform interrogation practices to decrease the possibility of wrongful confessions. Exoneration advocates hope that the state legislature acts next to loosen restrictions on DNA testing. And unlike other states, Pennsylvania provides no financial restitution to the wrongly convicted. Currently, those who are freed after spending years behind bars on a wrongful convictions aren't even entitled to an apology.
