Under Melissa Nelson, Jacksonville's prosecutors could search for wrongful convictions

Incoming State Attorney Melissa Nelson said Monday she will consider assigning a group of prosecutors to seek out and reverse wrongful convictions, signaling an openness to a tenet of criminal justice reform that has grown increasingly popular in other parts of the country.

The establishment of a so-called “conviction integrity unit” at the local State Attorney’s Office would make it the first in Florida to join an emerging trend that has taken hold in prosecutors’ offices spanning Houston to New York.

“That is something that I’m very, very interested in,” Nelson said during an editorial board meeting with the Times-Union on Monday afternoon.

Rather than rely on defense attorneys to bring forward flawed convictions to argue in court, offices with integrity teams have a formalized process to hear directly from inmates and can also review past cases for mistakes. They can then decide on those cases without having to commit to costly and drawn out court battles.

Nelson said she plans to meet with the New York-based Innocence Project, a nonprofit devoted to reversing wrongful convictions, to discuss potentially creating such a unit. She said her main concern is cost. The units have necessitated annual budgets of about $1 million or more in major urban corridors such as Brooklyn and Los Angeles.

The philosophy behind such units is to shift emphasis away from winning convictions and toward seeking justice on a fundamental level.

Public Defender-elect Charlie Cofer said he first learned of Nelson’s interest in creating such a unit after meeting with her Friday. He called the fact that Nelson is exploring the idea a very good sign.

“I hope that she is able to do it,” he said.

About 30 conviction integrity units have been launched around the country, more than half of them in the last two years, according to a report by the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania.

The units are popular in the northeastern United States, Texas, and some western states, but are virtually unheard of in the southeast.

The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission provides some precedent for such an ideal to take hold in the southeast, but that commission was created by the state legislature, rather than a sitting prosecutor.