What is a conviction integrity unit?

A conviction integrity unit, sometimes called a conviction review unit, is a group of lawyers and investigators inside a prosecutor's office who take a second look at convictions the office has already won. A 2016 national study by the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School defined the unit as one that "conducts extrajudicial, fact-based review of secured convictions to investigate plausible allegations of actual innocence."¹ The National Registry of Exonerations describes the units more broadly, as "divisions or programs within the offices of some state and federal prosecutors and some attorneys general" that "engage in a wide range of work, including investigating claims of wrongful conviction."²

What was new was the dedicated staff. "It's not that prosecutors have never been involved in exonerations, but that they make it a separate function, with employees that do nothing but that, is a new thing," Samuel Gross, a co-founder of the Registry and a University of Michigan law professor, said in 2016.³

A unit cannot free anyone by itself. When it concludes that a conviction should not stand, the office asks a court to vacate it or agrees with the defendant's request for relief, and the court decides. Pennsylvania's Supreme Court wrote in 2026 that this decision "is the exclusive province" of the court, although a prosecutor's agreement is "undoubtedly influential."⁴

The Quattrone Center's study, which drew on surveys of prosecutors' offices, said a unit "should be independent, flexible, and transparent in its work."¹ Its 23 recommendations include that a unit report directly to the head of the office and "should not be contained within the Office's appellate or post-conviction/habeas unit," that it include the view of at least one outside defense lawyer to guard against confirmation bias, and that people who worked on the original case be kept out of decisions about it.¹ It also called for a written policy on referring credible allegations of misconduct by prosecutors or police.¹

On outcomes, the study recommended vacating a conviction where there is "clear and convincing evidence of actual innocence," or where the unit "no longer believes that the current evidence supports the conviction beyond a reasonable doubt."¹

The units work alongside a duty the American Bar Association's model ethics rules place on every prosecutor. Since 2008, Rule 3.8 has said that a prosecutor who learns of "new, credible and material evidence creating a reasonable likelihood" that a convicted defendant is innocent must disclose it and, for a conviction in the prosecutor's own jurisdiction, investigate. A prosecutor who knows of "clear and convincing evidence" that a defendant was wrongly convicted "shall seek to remedy the conviction."⁵⁶

Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins created the first unit in 2007, after his office worked with the Innocence Project of Texas to review hundreds of old cases.³ By 2016 there were 24 county units, and units were responsible for 58 of the 149 exonerations the Registry recorded in 2015.³

As of October 2026, the Registry lists 114 units: 58 whose work appears in at least one recorded exoneration and 56 with none recorded.² Its 2025 annual report said the units "helped secure 23 exonerations" out of the 97 it recorded that year.⁷

Because a unit sits inside the office whose convictions it reviews, some critics question whether it will hold colleagues to account. A 2025 investigation by New York Focus and Columbia Journalism Investigations found that New York's units supported more than 90 exonerations over about 15 years and that prosecutorial misconduct may have played a role in half of them, but that officials acknowledged improper behavior by prosecutors in less than 20 percent of those cases.⁸ "It's a strong indictment about the integrity of these conviction integrity units," Bennett Gershman, a Pace University law professor who studies prosecutorial misconduct, told the outlet.⁸ A spokesperson for the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office said its unit did not find evidence of intentional prosecutorial misconduct in the cases the reporters examined.⁸

The opposite concern is that an office agrees to set aside a conviction without enough investigation. In June 2026, in Commonwealth v. Brown, four of the seven justices of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court found that the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office had agreed to a new trial for a man convicted of murder after "a selective, papers-only review," and that the office "cut corners and shirked its duties."⁴ The majority wrote that the office's "concession program is not an exoneration program," because the office also agreed to relief for some defendants it believed were guilty. It quoted a 2021 report by the office's unit describing cases that "did not warrant exonerations" but involved "excessive and unjust punishments."⁴ The court ordered Philadelphia judges to give the state attorney general notice and a chance to intervene before ruling on relief the district attorney agrees to.⁴

Conviction integrity units from several offices, the Quattrone Center and a group of legal ethics scholars filed briefs urging the court not to add procedures; the units' brief called them "unprecedented and unworkable."⁴ The Quattrone Center's brief said a unit's review "involves an exhaustive investigation of the case that may take years to complete."⁴ In dissent, Justice David Wecht wrote that the remedy "encroaches upon the executive branch's discretionary decision-making authority and upon the lawmaking function of the legislative branch."⁹

In a separate federal case we track, Judge Paul S. Diamond found in September 2026 that the head of Philadelphia's unit had done no investigation of his own before the office agreed that a 2009 murder conviction should be set aside.¹⁰ District Attorney Larry Krasner disputes the judge's findings.¹¹