LA County District Attorney Announces Wrongful-Conviction Unit
Los Angeles County joins just over a dozen counties around the country with such a team.
LA County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey had asked the County Board of Supervisors for nearly $1 million to fund the team back in April. The team will be comprised of three prosecutors, a paralegal, and a senior investigator.
Lacey’s office justified the funding request in order to stay abreast with the increased attention being paid to innocence claims as a result of an increasing number of innocence projects and other wrongful-conviction units.
Los Angeles County has had a trio of notable wrong-convictions thrown out going back to 2013, the most recent being the release and $8 million payment to Obie Anthony after he had spent 17 years wrongfully imprisoned for a killing in South Los Angeles.
Innocence projects were responsible for bringing all three of those cases back to the court.
For full details on LA's new unit, see here.
Image Credit: Flickr User diacritical , https://flic.kr/p/83XWe7 via (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
