By TREVOR BOYER and LEONARD GREENE| NEW YORK DAILY NEWS |
MAY 16, 2019 | 6:46 PM
Kevin Smith, who spent 27 years in prison for a crime he says he didn’t commit, is pictured Thursday in Brooklyn. Smith said his case has been with the Brooklyn Attorney office’s Conviction Review Unit for five years. (Trevor Boyer/for New York Daily News)
Brooklyn’s vaunted Conviction Review Unit is no longer functional, leaving cases of innocent prisoners in limbo, critics charged Thursday.
The unit — established in 2014 under Brooklyn DA Kenneth Thompson — was hailed as a national model for its work overturning 21 convictions in its first three years.
But the wheels of justice have ground to a near halt, with only four convictions overturned since the beginning of 2017.
“This Conviction Review Unit is broken,” said Lonnie Soury, a co-founder of Families of the Wrongfully Convicted, which held a rally outside the office of Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez.
“It needs attention. Granted it needs more money, but it needs good people.” Soury said. “You don’t get ahead by freeing the innocent, but in fact, you should. Every innocent person that has been incarcerated means a criminal is out in our community.”
Soury said Gonzalez has failed to live up to the promises he made to
follow Thompson’s lead on innocence issues and misconduct cases. Thompson, Brooklyn’s first black district attorney, died from cancer in 2016 after less than three years in office.
Doreen Giuliana, 58, of Brooklyn, said her son John Giuca, 36, was convicted of felony murder in 2003 and spent 14 years in upstate prisons.
His case was overturned in 2018 because a prosecutor withheld evidence, but he has been held on Rikers Island while the DA’s office decides whether to retry him.
Giuilana said her son has been offered a plea deal that includes a sentence of time served, but he refused to plead guilty.