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Doni: Lucas County Commissioner Pete Gerken, and acknowledges that we don't always get it right when it comes to the outcomes of criminal prosecutions.

This sentiment is echoed by county prosecutor Julia Bates, who has formed a Conviction Integrity Unit to ensure that the actions of her office are transparent and uphold the values of honesty, fairness and that seeking justice remains at the core of their work.

Bates aims to prevent wrongful convictions like those of Willie Knight and Wayne Brady and Carl Willis.

She's with us today to discuss the importance of this program.

I'm Doni Miller, and welcome to the Point.

Connect with us on our social media pages.

But you know that you also know that you can email me at Doni underscore Miller at wgte dot org for this episode and other additional extras, please go to.org.

To the point I am excited for a number of reasons this morning.

First of all is that we have Julie Bates with us.

She is the Lucas County Prosecutor.

Been there a long time, does an amazing job.

I'm really, really glad to have you with us.

The other thing that is really exciting and innovative for this town is that Julia has developed a conviction integrity unit.

We're going to tell you what that is.

Julia is going to tell you why that's important.

Welcome.

Julia: Thank you.

Welcome, welcome so much.

So glad to have you here.

Julia: Thank you.

So what is for those folks who don't know what is a conviction integrity unit?

Julia: Well you think about integrity.

What does that mean.

Yeah.

Honest, trustworthy, forthright beyond words.

You know straightforward.

You know, just full of honesty.

And so what we are trying to say to the public, to the criminal justice system, we want to make sure that when we convict somebody that we have done that with integrity, that those convictions withstand scrutiny.

And what we have found, you might ask, well, why are you doing this now?

Why is this happening now?

Covid changed the way we did business quite significantly for many, many reasons.

You know, part of the problem was that we couldn't try cases.

So we were locked down.

Doni: courts were closed, Julia: courts were closed.

But that didn't stop crime.

I mean, crime was at an all time high and it had lots of shootings, lots of domestic violence, child abuse, things like that.

That happened during Covid, lots of drug and drug abuse.

You think people weren't working?

They were locked up in their houses, in their houses.

So we had to come up with ways to make our staff comfortable to, to we just had to invent, I think, some different alternatives, some work from home, some different units, some different specializations.

We added a lot of paralegals to help our staff get through it.

So that was one factor.

Another factor is money.

You know, in order to establish an integrity unit that in that requires additional staff and added additional money to do some of the testing.

And some of the investigators that goes along with.

Doni: So you're not taking, prosecutors that are currently working on their cases and having them do this?

Julia: not this is a brand, brand new unit.

The brand new employee.

Now, the employee that's running this worked for me in the Appellate Division.

So she was an appellate lawyer, but we moved her into this unit, and she's going to be the one that is mainly responsible for this.

But it requires money and it requires you time.

And so that being said, then we had a number of cases, Doni that came back to us after 20, 25 and 30 years that were given new trials based on things that had happened in those cases, predominantly, people that had recanted or evidence that had not been disclosed to us by the police department.

And so it's very difficult now after 30 years to retry cases.

But what should we do with those cases that should come back.

We want we want to look at those cases, scrutinize those cases, see where did things go wrong.

Is there something we could have done better.

Is there a mistake that we made or, you know, is it just unfortunate?

Share them out.

So and then finally, the commissioners were strongly in favor of this.

And since the commissioners fund our budget, the fact that they wanted us to undertake this endeavor and we're willing to support it and finance it helped us do it was pretty much a no brainer.

They're going to pay for it.

Well, heck, let's go.

So we started it about maybe a year ago.

We began by looking at other offices around Ohio to see what they did is there's an integrity unit in Cleveland, there's one in Akron, there's one in Columbus.

And now there's one in Cincinnati.

Doni: They actually are all over the country.

Julia: all over the country.

But they're not in Ohio as much, only the big cities.

And probably for the reasons that I told you, they may not have the cases that come back like the big city volume prosecutions.

They may not have the funding, they may not have the personnel.

Doni: Sure.

Julia: But in any event, Ali, who's Ali Braman, who's running this for us, went to these other offices and looked at what they did.

What are their criteria?

What cases do they look at?

what requirements do they have?

What's their protocol?

And we took those different offices and we sort of picked what we thought was the best tools from each one of those.

We're starting very small.

I mean, we're starting with one employee and we're starting with just a couple of cases, referrals from within the office cases that have come back to us with motions for new trial and and post-conviction motions and so forth.

But we found that in the beginning, we're going to look at cases that only involve very serious felonies.

So murder, rape, you know, look at theft.

We're not going to look at the beginning.

We're not going to look at those less less serious cases.

We're going to look at cases where the defendant is alive, is incarcerated or is in Lucas County and was convicted at trial.

So initially we weren't going to look at guilty pleas, you know, because when you plead guilty, there's a presumption that you did it with knowing in an intelligent legal advice and a waiver.

Doni: Are you looking at Alford plea?

Julia: Well, we're not at the beginning.

Not not to start with not to say that we want not to say that we shouldn't or couldn't, but we're just going to start starting small because this is some this is new, this is brand new, new ground.

And we want to make sure we, you know, as much as we say, we want to make sure that we got it right, we want to get it right on this.

So, what we are going to do is we're going to look at these cases with new eyes, old.

I mean, I look at it this way, if we can solve a cold case that has laid dead in the files for 20 or 30 years, like Father Robinson, like the cook brothers, and like so many of these other cases.

Doni: Right.

If we can do that with new technology, we can apply new technology to some of the old cases that resulted in convictions that have questions.

And while not every case has questions, some of the cases that have come back on us have significant questions like who did it to the guy, do it that was convicted of it, or did somebody else do it?

Or did they both do it?

So if we use new technology, we use new DNA, we use new investor creative techniques, and we scrutinize those cases, maybe we'll be able to find some answers.

Maybe not.

Maybe nothing will change Doni: but you got to do the work.

Julia: At the end of the day, we may say, you know what?

We've looked at this, we've scrutinized this, we've analyze this.

The person that we convicted is the person responsible.

But maybe we won't.

Doni: So how does the process work?

you get a case that these right now, these are internal referrals, which means they're coming from your staff, right?

To to, the, the young, the young woman who's running.

Right.

And then what happens?

Julia: Well, then she's going to try to get every piece of information that she can on the cases.

And Doni this is really a challenge because if you talk about a 30 year old trial, where's the the evidence is gone.

The transcript are gone.

things are sealed for us.

If the witnesses are dead, they've moved, they've died.

They're, you know, incompetent.

It's a challenge, but it's a challenge that we're going to employ and we're going to undertake.

So the first step is to try to accumulate the case file.

What?

What case file might still exist in our office.

Are there still witnesses in existence?

Are the prosecutors who handle the case still around?

Is the judge still around?

can we find the police reports that we have Jay Gast, who works in the office, who was a homicide investigator for Toledo police and works for us.

Now he's trying to track down the witnesses to see if we can still find these people.

We look at evidence that may have been tested, may not have been tested.

We found in a case we found DNA that was too microscopic to test today.

It's not.

This is huge to find DNA that can be tested today that 30 years ago could not be tested.

I mean, think of what that might say.

What if we find out that the DNA that we test, is not the person that we convicted, which couldn't have ever been done before?

So, I mean, this is really important.

And the other thing I want to say about this is this is not to say that the staff in the office doesn't operate with integrity, doesn't operate with their oath and the rule of law and their ethics.

But, you know, things happen.

You know, things can happen.

We want to make sure that what happened 30 years ago and 20 years ago that locked people up in prison is right, is full of integrity.

So it's not so much about what my people are doing today, because I think today we're looking very closely at what everyone does and how they do it.

It's what happened years ago.

things were different years ago.

I mean, we didn't have computers, you know, we didn't have the same kind of database that we have.

So everything was on a piece of paper.

Well, what if the police didn't give us a piece of evidence that was important?

What if we never saw it?

We never heard about it.

We never gave it to the defendant.

So those are very, very critical important things for us to look at.

Doni: Yeah.

I'm really glad that you raised the point about your staff.

because this is not about going back and finding out, accusing somebody on your staff of having not done their work.

Right.

That's not what this is about it.

All right?

Julia: This is just about making sure what happened.

I mean, why would somebody recant after 20 years?

Right?

Someone recanting after 20 years?

Because it has weighed heavily on their soul for 20 years.

What they live or now that they're out of jail and they're back in the community, do they not want to be labeled a snitch?

And so now they're saying, well, never mind.

I said, I said, I know who did it, but not really.

You know, I mean, there's so many different ways of looking at this, to look at it and to inspect it and to scrutinize it is hard.

It's going to be hard.

I think the statistics were that in all of the in all the cases that were looked at in all these different integrity units across the country, only about 1%.

Doni: I read that 1%, Julia: 1% was exonerated, right.

But that's 1%.

Doni: But that's still 1%.

Those are lives a 1% percent.

Julia: You know, we say in the baby when we talk about the babies, you know, if we save one baby, we saved one baby.

So that might be one.

But, you know, it's one that doesn't belong in jail.

Doni: That's right.

Hold that thought.

We need to get to a break.

But I really want to come back to this discussion.

Please don't go anywhere.

We will be right back.

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Watch, listen and learn at wgte dot org Doni: Hey, welcome back and remember to connect with us on our social media pages.

Also, I would love to hear from you at my email, which is Doni Underscore Miller at wgte dot org.

And you know, if you want to see this episode again or you want to look at anything else that we've done, on to the point, just go to wgte dot org To the point we are talking to Lucas County Prosecutor Julia Bates.

And if you missed the first part of this show, I encourage you to go online and tee it up and watch it.

We are talking about, the Conviction Integrity Unit, amazing effort to right some possible wrongs.

But take it.

Look, take a look at those cases that you think really need to be looked at again.

not about, not about challenging the work of your staff, but really about keeping justice at the core of what you guys do.

Julia: Yeah, exactly.

And you think can we get it wrong?

I can tell you what I can tell you about two stories.

And these are not anybody.

These are not people that were incarcerated.

But these are two stories that could have gone very, very wrong.

One of them was a case that resulted in the conviction of the cook brothers.

But initially, someone else was charged with that murder of Thomas Gordon and the rape of his girlfriend, Sandra Gorski.

Another man was charged with that crime, and I was assigned to that case as the prosecutor.

And we worked that case, and it started to wind its way through the court.

And when we got down right before trial, and this 18 year old fragile, abused victim who had been raped and stabbed and left for dead comes into the courtroom and she sees the man sitting at the defendant's table and she says to me, that's not him.

Oh my gosh, that's not him.

I talked about this when we launched this integrity unit because I said, what if we had done something different with that case?

We dismissed the charges.

He took a polygraph, he passed it.

We dismissed the charges on him.

And for a long time, we never solved that case as to who had done it.

And one of the things that happened in this community, if you remember back to 1980 and 1981, the series of killings of white couples parked in secluded venues continued right from that crime all the way until September of 1981, when Peter So Wiki was killed by Anthony Cooke.

Yes, but long story short, the cook brothers were responsible for that case, and we solved that case 20 years later.

But for 20 years, that man, heaven forbid, could have been convicted and locked up.

That was very tragic.

The other case I think about was a case that involved the murder of a woman.

She was raped and murdered and strangled, left in her apartment was an upstairs apartment.

And as the perpetrator came downstairs, the lady that lived downstairs said, oh, that's the boyfriend.

This dark person was in dark clothes.

She was elderly.

She wasn't wearing her glasses, but she identified the boyfriend.

We charged the boyfriend when we got the DNA back.

It wasn't the boyfriend.

So we dismiss the case.

And for a long, long time, we didn't solve that case until recently.

Where we did, we found the perpetrator turns out he was responsible for raping a 13 year old and the 17 year old here in Toledo and killing this woman.

He was tried, he was convicted, and he's incarcerated.

But you think about what if we had not done that, right?

So how many times maybe did we convict somebody where we didn't have DNA evidence?

Maybe we have it now.

We have it now.

We can test it now.

We didn't have it then.

So those those are things we should look at.

Those are important.

Those are important factors, I guess, to make sure the people that we serve, the victims and the community and the, you know, the the community at large understands that we are not here just to win.

We're not here just to lock people up.

We want to get it right.

Yeah, we have to get it right.

Doni: You can't have this conversation, though, without asking this question.

What about those people who have been locked up and they should not be, Willie Knightens case, for instance, 13, 12 years in, in prison for something that he didn't do.

does the does the system owe them anything for that mistake?

Well, Willie's case, and I hate to talk the specifics.

One way we do, we don't have to.

But I will say about in terms of that case, we are looking at that case.

That is a cannot there is a conundrum there because his case was pardoned.

So he's.

Yes.

That's right.

He's out.

He's pardoned.

But there's still a sealed file on his case.

And if you are found by the state of Ohio to be actually innocent, you're entitled to recovery from the state of Ohio for every year you were incarcerated.

But in order to do that, you have to be able to establish actual innocence.

And that's difficult.

It might be especially and particularly difficult for Willie Knight in this case, because all of his documents are sealed.

And so they're not at anybody at this point.

Nobody can get to get at it.

Right.

So it's a conundrum.

It truly is.

I don't know.

it's not my responsibility to offer the money.

I'm not in charge of the pot.

It goes through the Court of Claims in Columbus.

The attorney general is the person that's responsible for defending those cases.

But certainly if you've been erroneously convicted and locked up, you're entitled to that recovery.

And that is available, that is available to these people.

Doni: That's really good information, it seems.

So when I was preparing to to talk with you today, I read something about a review board.

Is there a review?

Julia: Well, in my office, I don't want to be the one that makes all of these decisions.

I mean, ultimately, Doni the buck stops with me because I'm the one that goes on the ballot and I'm the one that people pull the lever for, right?

Right.

But I want I have the best and the brightest people that work for me, that run these different divisions.

And so after we finish an investigation into one of these cases where we've looked at everything, we've analyzed everything, speculated, thought about it, you know, tested it, the person that's responsible, which is ally, will do a report.

And then the people that will review that report will be the chief of the criminal division, the deputy chief of the Criminal Division, the chief of the Appellate Division, the chief of the Special Units Division and the chief of the Civil Division, as well as myself.

So this is really a, a it's a wide berth of people with different backgrounds.

I mean, the people that do civil are not people that prosecute murders, but they do defend our county and our commissioners and our judges.

The appellate people defend the convictions, except when the conviction can't be defended.

So and then we have the criminal people.

So putting all those people in a room together to say, okay, here is what we found, what should we do?

And ultimately I'd have the final decision, but I'm not going to go against my staff, of my staff think somebody should be exonerated by George.

That's what will happen.

There's no I have no doubt about it.

No doubt.

Doni: So what do you say to those folks who say, you know, this is a great idea and we really love your intentions, but it how do you, how does the wolf watch the henhouse.

As they say I should be more independent of this review process from your office.

Julia: Well, I saw that in the letter to the editor about this.

You know, like what the.

You know, this is like really a huge conflict of interest.

But really, how I can explain it is twofold.

I'm ultimately responsible for these cases.

So while you could have a review board, who does a review board report to, you know who they answer to it.

They're not elected.

They appointed who they appointed by.

Are they appointed by the governor or they appointed by the mayor, or are they appointed by the police chief?

They appointed by me?

If they're appointed by me, better to have my own staff who I've hired and trained and who have taken that oath not only as a lawyer, but that oath as a prosecutor, because ultimately I'm going to have to make the decision.

Doni: But certainly, you understand the concern that it looks like, you are sort of policing your own or reviewing your own work, Julia: sort of like Internal Affairs does, is, I suppose, true.

But I in Cleveland, they tried it this way.

They tried an independent board.

It didn't work for them.

It was a well, I know some of the reasons why they didn't keep they didn't keep the confidences, I think.

And some of this stuff really is confidential until it comes, you know, like when you have someone that is turning state's evidence but that wants to be confidential, that's, you know, you need to keep that confidence because that's your integrity.

Right?

And if we're going to talk about integrity, integrity has to flow through the entire process.

So they no longer do it that way.

Every other office that we have looked at does it within the office, the office structure, because ultimately it's the prosecutor that's accountable.

I'm the one that has the decision.

I'm the one that's going to say yes or no.

And we haven't had it happen yet.

And Doni, I guess I can only say to you and to the community, it's a work in progress.

If we find that we need to add maybe a person to our review board who is from outside the office, a law enforcement officer, a defense attorney, a retired judge.

I can think of the number of different people that might be able to sit with us and assist us.

That's not something that I would necessarily, object to.

It's just because we're just starting.

Doni: Do you ever envision that you will be taking referrals from outside of your office?

Julia: Well, I hope we will.

It's just a question of, you know, if we all of a sudden started this unit and said, okay, everybody, defendants have at it.

Mothers, sisters, neighbors, girlfriends, police officers, defense attorneys, we could never handle it because we have one person so far.

We want to just we want to start small so that we can see how it grows.

I hope it grows, and if it grows, I hope we could open it up more.

Defense attorneys would be a great source of this, because they know the people that they've represented, that they know whether there's a problem or not.

Right.

You know, one of the problems we saw in some of the cases that have come back is the courts criticized the defense lawyers for not doing a good job.

Yes.

Well, you can't go back on Monday morning quarterback that you know, that's a problem.

You know we can't fix that right.

Is that an exoneration?

Not necessarily.

Would the verdict been different if the attorney had been maybe more competent?

I don't know, but it's that's hard for me to say.

Well, yes, we're Monday morning quarterbacking what some lawyer did 30 years ago, and he didn't ask this question.

He didn't ask that question.

Doni: One of the things that we want to leave you all with today is that this is the beginning of this program.

You're looking at 4 or 5 cases right now.

It's got one staff person.

So please don't inundate, Julia's office with requests to look at cases because it was just not the capability right now to do that.

Julia: But it can grow.

But it can if it's if it turns out that this is a good thing, just like a cold case unit, we started the cold case unit 25 years ago.

You know, with one cop.

Now the police department has a unit and we have a unit.

And, I mean, we've solved maybe 50 cases over the past 25 years that were laying dormant on a shelf.

Doni: We are so excited about this, and I want to thank you for spending your time with us this morning.

And I hope you'll come back and give us an update on how things are progressing.

And I hope that you will come back and see us again as well.

Enjoy the day.

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They do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of WGTE public media.

To the point is supported in part by American Rescue Plan Act funds allocated by the City of Toledo and the Lucas County Commissioners and administered by the Arts Commission.

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