This is the first installment in “Exploring Integrity: Reviewing Wrongful Conviction Remedies,” a series examining the impact of conviction integrity units on the American judicial system’s rate of wrongful conviction. Presented by the O’Brien Fellowship in Public Service Journalism, the investigation is supported by Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The black janitor had disappeared, but it had nothing to do with the white body found during a 1980 girls volleyball tournament.
Clarence Brandley admitted he’d slipped away to smoke and listen to music, but he maintained that his only contact with 16-year-old competitor Cheryl Dee Fergeson was when he found her, raped and strangled, in Conroe High School’s auditorium in Texas.
It would be almost 10 years before Brandley was exonerated, having escaped a date with lethal injection by six days, as depicted in the 2002 TV film Whitewash: The Clarence Brandley Story.
“In the 30 years this court has presided over matters in the judicial system, no case has presented a more shocking scenario of the effects of racial prejudice, perjured testimony, witness intimidation, an investigation, the outcome of which was predetermined, and public officials who, for whatever motives, lost sight of what is right and just,” said Judge Perry Pickett.
Now, 35 years since Brandley was freed before his 2018 death, much less known wrongful convictions in Texas and much of the country have helped spawn state- and county-operated teams tasked with reviewing cases in which questions of guilt remain. Overseen by attorneys general and prosecutors, conviction integrity units (CIUs) have often become a last hope for men and women who’ve exhausted appellate court reviews, or otherwise failed to attract a fresh look at factors that imprisoned them. Still, CIUs throughout the country progress or stagnate at varying rates, leaving a sweet and sour residual of thrills or devastation for those seeking relief. Criminal justice scholars and attorneys for the wrongfully convicted find value in their presence on the legal landscape, while other advocates for justice say CIUs leave a lot to be desired.
“Certainly, now we have no way of knowing how many innocent people a year are being convicted, because of this ad hoc way” of investigating, says professor Marissa Bluestine, assistant director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
At the same time, says Bluestine, without CIUs, university-centered initiatives, and independently formed innocence projects, wrongful convictions would continue to stand and potentially increase.
“The truth is if you don’t have anyone looking for them, you are very unlikely to find them,” she adds.
Bluestine leads a team of six in supporting innocence organizations and conviction integrity units nationwide, as part of a cooperative agreement with the Bureau of Justice Assistance. Since its formation in 2013, Quattrone Center’s database of CIUs has grown from about 60 to 132, including Santa Clara County, California — the first, established in 2002 — and county units in Virginia and Arizona, formed in 2025.
In Michigan, there are five CIUs — one at the state level, and one each in Wayne, Macomb, Oakland, and Washtenaw counties.
“It tends to be after an election,” when new CIUs are launched, Bluestine says, “in the January or February period after an election season.”
During her six years as Quattrone Center’s assistant director, her staff has offered consultation for newly formed CIUs, and ongoing assistance in matters ranging from case intake to ethical considerations. She traces the evolution of CIUs from the 1989 landmark DNA exoneration by legal partners Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, who launched the Innocence Project, to the early 2000s when law schools and collaborators began to follow suit, comprising what’s informally known as “the innocence network.”
Typically consisting of a director, administrative staff, and case investigators, CIUs most often revisit cases where DNA evidence is not central to a crime.
Dating back to the 1887 hanging of William Jackson Marion, killed in Nebraska after he was tried for the murder of a business associate, high-profile wrongful convictions have plagued the legal system.
“You are waiting patiently to hear me make some confession,” Marion told the crowd attending his execution, according to the Nebraska State Journal. “I’ve made no confession to nobody and I’ve got no confession to make. All I have to say is God help everybody.”
Following Marion’s death, John Cameron, the man who’d allegedly been murdered, was found alive and well in Kansas.
But still, Bill Proctor, a Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame inductee and retired WXYZ (Channel 7) Detroit reporter, found himself targeted for criticism, even by fellow journalists, when he investigated the case of Temujin Kensu in 1993.
“It’s this guy, Proctor, who’s upsetting relatives of the victim by doing this story on the guy who killed their son,” he recalls hearing.
Kensu, 62, has served nearly 40 years in prison and remains incarcerated at Macomb Correctional Facility, in poor health, after Michigan’s statewide conviction integrity unit denied his bid for exoneration in 2023. Despite having witnesses who placed him 400 miles away from the shooting of college student Scott Macklem, in broad daylight, Kensu, then known as Fredrick Freeman, has gained international support — but not freedom.
“Conviction integrity units are the government’s response to proven decades of government misconduct,” says Proctor, a licensed private investigator whose work has contributed to 16 exonerations.
Lack of action, or even responses, after advocating to CIUs on behalf of clients has left him unimpressed, referring to most units as “public relations.”
“It is not a mystery that cops lie,” he says. “It is not a mystery that prosecutors accept the lies and con games. It is not a mystery that cops and prosecutors walk the halls of prisons and talk to jailhouse snitches.
“Yes, I know that human frailty is a part of the formula, but I am sorry, at this stage, understanding the notion that wrongful convictions take place in America, no, I am not excusing the government. The government is supposed to be the gatekeeper.”
Proctor’s prescription for the greatest use of CIUs involves their collaboration with the wider innocence network: “Their creation and existence has never been enough. They need to help universities develop a reform package that would help the nation move forward.”
Like Proctor, Bluestine says CIUs are far from a cure-all, setting their own criteria for case reviews, and not typically impactful in and of themselves: 60 to 70 percent of annual exonerations are attributable to innocence organizations.
But support from CIUs has been beneficial in reducing the length of time involved with exonerations, such as when units provide information from original prosecution files not always available to defense lawyers, Bluestine adds.
“So a well-functioning conviction integrity unit can save years,” she says.
“They join in the motion (for relief), they don’t fight it in court.”
While complete exoneration isn’t always the outcome, “case corrections” are ethically required when a CIU determines that a defendant is likely innocent, says Bluestine — but case corrections sometimes require the innocent to accept “no contest” pleas or make other concessions that leave them short of the redemption they deserve.
Clarence Brandley won his freedom, but never received compensation, or even a formal apology, for his conviction.
“I’ve had to counsel individuals on that very issue, and it’s heartbreaking. As an innocence lawyer, I want to fight it all the way,” says Bluestine. “But it’s not my life.”
O’Brien Fellowship reporters Mia Thurow, Sofie Hanrahan, and Reyna Galvez contributed to this report.