Valerie Newman

Valerie Newman, a veteran Michigan public defender who handled many high-profile appeals, never intended to work as a prosecutor. And she could not imagine that her longtime adversary would want to hire her. But when Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy announced in 2018 she was establishing a new Conviction Integrity Unit in Detroit to root out wrongful convictions, a pressure campaign began.

People who saw the job listing for the unit's chief urged Newman to apply. She was resistant to the idea at first, but soon warmed to it.

"If it didn't work, I was going to quit, and I was going to go back to [the State Appellate Defender Office]," she said. "If it was going to be real, and if it did work, it's like the old adage, right? You can do more good from the inside than you can do from the outside."

Little did Newman know, people were also advising Worthy that hiring Newman — who had spent 23 years at the State Appellate Defender Office and argued twice before the U.S. Supreme Court — would bring immediate legitimacy to the new unit.

Conviction integrity units in prosecutors' offices are a relatively new and uncommon phenomenon. The first was established in Dallas County, Texas, in 2007, and there are now 114 nationwide. Nearly half of them have not recorded any successful exonerations, according to the National Exoneration Registry.

At the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office, Newman now runs one of the more successful ones. Her unit has obtained relief for wrongfully convicted people in 47 cases, she said. The unit receives about 300 requests for review per year, mostly from incarcerated people.

The unit consists of Newman and nine staff members: three full-time attorneys, two part-time attorneys, a paralegal, two detectives and one administrative staff member. Two of the full-time attorney positions and one of the detective positions are funded by federal grants.

Newman spoke with Law360 about how her unit operates, rank-and-file prosecutors' perception of its work and the grim duty of informing victims' families that the person convicted of killing their loved one may actually be innocent.

This interview has been edited for length, clarity and content.

What would you attribute the success of your unit to? Is there a secret sauce, whether it's more funding at the local level or the way that you allocate your resources?

I think there are a number of factors. First and foremost, you have to have support from the elected official, and Prosecutor Worthy is very supportive. She's vocally supportive. She talks about the unit in public, and she's very proud of the work that the unit does. I think you have to start there, right? You have to create a good working environment for the people in the unit to know that their work is appreciated and that the elected prosecutor is willing to listen to what they have to say.

She might not always agree, which is fine, but there's a respectful discourse there. ... You would think every prosecutor who started a unit would be supportive, but some are, you know — support looks different depending on the politics and other things. And Prosecutor Worthy has always been openly supportive of this.

Her support of the unit leads to two other areas of support. One is financial. So the prosecutor has always advocated for general budget funds to be applied to the unit. Given our county and given the volume, it's almost impossible to have sufficient resources to not have a backlog. But we have good resources, and the prosecutor has always listened to me when I've advocated for more resources.

So you absolutely need the resources to be able to do the work, and we have resources from two separate avenues. One is the prosecutor, of course, advocating with our funding commission that the resources be applied to our unit. The second is grants. We are extremely fortunate in our office to have a grant unit that helps with federal grants. Federal grants are tough to get, and once you get them, they have very stringent reporting requirements and a lot of rules that you have to follow.

In terms of the way the rest of the office views and interacts with you, is it something akin to an internal affairs unit where people are worried when you reach out to them about a case?

Well, I think there is a perception in the office, especially when we first started, that it was going to be sort of a looking-over-your-shoulder type of unit. I don't know for a fact, but I think that perception has dissipated over time because that's not what we do. It's not in any way, shape or form what we do.

So, is there some animosity? Of course. How could there not be, right? Sometimes people are still in the office. We review their cases. We make a determination that the person was wrongfully convicted, and people don't always agree with us, and that's OK. But I do make a point of sitting down with prosecutors, if they want to, but at least, you know, reaching out to the prosecutors who tried the case to explain why we are recommending release to [Prosecutor Worthy] and why [she] has agreed with our recommendation, and I try to reinforce that rarely is it that anyone has done anything wrong.

I've talked to lots of people and spoken at lots of conferences. You have to have something new. So we do not look at a case and say, "Oh, we think somebody screwed up," or "We think the court got it wrong, and so we're going to take this to the prosecutor and we're going to ask her to make a different decision." We can't do that. What the courts have decided upon, they've decided upon. That's final.

What we do is we look to see if there is something new that was not presented in court, that, if true, we can show that the person's factually innocent. Sometimes we can solve the crime. Obviously it's not tested in court, but we have enough evidence that if the case were to be tried, we think there's proof beyond a reasonable doubt that someone other than the person convicted committed the crime.

Sometimes we can't get that far, but we find something that so undermines the integrity of the conviction that the office won't stand behind it. But the office can re-charge. The office can retry that case if that's a decision. Usually our cases are homicide cases. So if we recommend to the prosecutor that release be granted, and the prosecutor agrees, then we have to go into court because only a court can overturn a conviction.

That's an extremely important thing that people don't understand. The prosecutor can't say, "I think this person was wrongfully convicted, let them out of prison." She doesn't have that power. Only a judge has the power to vacate the conviction. The prosecutor's power is to allow me to go into court and say, "This office agrees that this person deserves relief." The judge can agree or disagree. That's up to the judge. The case would go back to the homicide division. They would review it, and they'll make a determination whether or not the case would be retried.

Walk me through how cases are selected, and the process from looking at a case and then filtering it and then presenting it to the prosecutor.

Most of our cases come from people who are in prison who don't have lawyers, but we also sometimes get outreach from lawyers. We sometimes get outreach from judges or prosecutors or members of someone's family. So the cases come from all over, but roughly 80% of the cases in my unit come from people who are in prison, don't have a lawyer. They write a letter, they say, "I'm innocent."

We send them an application. There's a fair number of people that drop out at that stage; they just never complete the application. If they complete the application and it comes back, I review it. My review is pretty quick, pretty down and dirty. I just want to make sure that the basics are there.

The person can't be serving other lengthy sentences. I look at some court opinions, and often cases get a no right there. So, for example, someone's convicted and they raise self-defense at trial. There's no question they shot and killed somebody. The only question was their intent. How is my unit ever going to uncover new evidence that proves innocence in that case? Because the only question at trial was intent. The jury made that determination, and there's no way to look behind it. We have to have something solid and new, a lead that we can investigate that can identify the actual perpetrator.

If it passes my quick review, it goes into a queue and waits for an attorney to get assigned. That starts a deeper review, which starts with a transcript review, then a deep procedural history to make sure that everything they're saying is new and has never been litigated. If we think there might still be merit to it, we start ordering the prosecutor's file and police file and any other files we can.

The attorney will write up a preliminary memo. That memo comes to me, and I talk about it with the attorney, and we make a decision together. Do we keep going, and what does the investigative path look like? If the answer is yes, then we bring in a detective, and we start investigating.

We write up a memo, then it goes to the entire team. That's the other thing that I think is part of our success: I attribute my success to my team, and I run the team with a consensus model. No case goes to the prosecutor until the case is presented to the entire team.

We sit down. We have a long meeting, as long as it takes to go through every detail of the case, to poke at it. Did we miss something? What else should we do? Are people convinced? Are people not convinced? Only after the entire team is satisfied that the case should go to the prosecutor do we reach out to the prosecutor and say, "Hey, we're ready to present a case." Then we'll sit down and meet with her.

Whoever worked on that case will be in that meeting. So it'll be me, the attorney, and the detective. And then the prosecutor grills us. She puts us through our paces. Lots of questions. She might say, "I'm not entirely convinced. I'd like to see you do X, Y, and Z," whatever it might be, and then we will go do X, Y, and Z, and go back to her.

The final decision is hers and hers alone, and she doesn't always agree with us. If she says yes, I have a procedure where I notify the police department. I notify the victims. I have a whole process of things that I go through before we set a court hearing and go to court.

In a lot of cases, I've seen victims angry and unwilling to let go of their idea that this person did it even after exoneration. So when you have new evidence of a person's innocence, how do they typically react to this news?

Ninety percent of the time they're great. I remember our very first exoneration was Richard Phillips. [Editor's note: Phillips was exonerated in 2018 after spending nearly five decades in prison for an armed robbery and a murder, both in 1971. At the time, he had been in prison on a wrongful conviction longer than anyone else in U.S. history, according to the University of Michigan.]

The victim's parents were still alive. And this is pre-COVID when you would actually go meet with people in person. And I went and met with them at their home. That's where they were comfortable. That's where they wanted to meet. [One of the victim's relatives] wanted nothing to do with me [and] was in another room and pretty closed off.

We presented everything that we had, and they felt terrible for Richard Phillips. I mean, they could see everything we presented, and I think in that case ... no one really thought Richard committed this crime, so I don't think it was too much of a shock.

We had another case where the victim's sister, in court at sentencing, told the court and everyone in the courtroom, "You have convicted the wrong man. Everyone knows this man did not kill my brother." And she was right. That was another innocence case. I felt like we had substantial evidence that pointed to the actual perpetrator. And so when we called her, she was thrilled.

We've had a few cases where people have been very angry. We had one case where the victim's mother insisted on meeting with the prosecutor, and again, in keeping with the prosecutor's very victim-centered approach to the office, she agreed to that meeting. After meeting with the prosecutor, the woman felt much better.

But she called me after the court hearing [where the defendant's convictions and sentences were vacated] and told me she had still been unsure until she saw the person talk, and she looked into his eyes, and she could tell that he did not kill her son. Some of these are so incredibly, intensely emotional.

The victim notification is tough, but if you do it right from a trauma-informed perspective, and you're not just kind of rote, "This is who I am, this is what we did, this is what we found." You can't be like that. You have to listen to people. I've met with people for hours and just let them talk and let them get out their anger until they can calm down and hear what you're saying and start processing things.

--Editing by Alex Hubbard.

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