DA’s about-face
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 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 Tuesday that it was important to ensure that “only the guilty are convicted,” and that the public perceived such cases as “tests of the integrity of the system.” But his move marks a major turnaround: City Paper has covered Williams’ resistance to forming a conviction-integrity unit since 2011.
In 2009, Williams ran on a “smart on crime” platform 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 dissented from reforms proposed by the state Senate’s Advisory Committee on Wrongful Convictions. Last year, Pennsylvania Innocence Project legal director Marissa Bluestine said the DA had sought to dismiss on procedural grounds every claim of actual innocence the project put forward.
On Tuesday, 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 City Paper 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.
In Philadelphia, Eugene Gilyard and Lance Felder were sentenced to life terms for murders that new evidence strongly suggests two other men committed. In October, a Philadelphia judge ordered a new trial for the men, over prosecutors’ objections, stating that the “evidence supporting the convictions … was terribly weak.”
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 for wrongful convictions aren’t even entitled to an apology.
