Denver’s district attorney’s office unveils conviction review unit

DENVER (KDVR) – Denver’s District Lawyer has been seeking to proper some wrongful convictions from the previous. District Lawyer Beth McCann introduced on Wednesday that her workplace is now accepting purposes to assessment wrongful convictions.

Different counties throughout the Entrance Vary have rolled out related models through the years. Specialists mentioned evolving know-how helps to get case requests solved with some urgency.

“It’s critically essential to make sure that justice is finished in these uncommon cases when somebody asserts a respectable declare of precise innocence,” McCann mentioned on the announcement of the unit.

McCann mentioned it was at all times her objective to deliver a conviction assessment unit to the second judicial district, however now the district has some {dollars} to employees the unit and make it a actuality.

“Proper now, we’ve bought about $220,000. You recognize we’re hoping to have some interns assist us too [that] we will get from the regulation faculty,” McCann defined.

The DA’s workplace mentioned this may now put Denver in keeping with different areas within the metro.

“A conviction assessment unit is a crucial a part of the fashionable prosecutor’s workplace. Our neighbors within the first judicial district which is Jefferson County, the 18th, which is Arapahoe, Douglas and Lincoln Counties, and the twentieth up in Boulder have established these models,” McCann mentioned.

So why is the Entrance Vary seeing extra of those models approaching board now? Fox31 Authorized Analyst Chris Decker mentioned district attorneys are progressive prosecution.

“The incidence and claims of false convictions [have] risen, there [have] at all times been people which have been convicted and declare to be harmless, however with the evolving sciences of DNA and a few of the different retrospective scientific applied sciences, increasingly more circumstances are getting very onerous appears for precise innocence,” Decker mentioned.

The district lawyer mentioned that she’s anticipating a big enhance in requests. On high of innocence circumstances, the workplace may even go over clemency requests from the Governor’s Workplace and different lengthy sentences from the previous.