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55 INCARCERATED PEOPLE WROTE US ABOUT THEIR INNOCENCE CLAIMS  
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Oishika Neogi and Curtis Brodner
December 23, 2025
New York Focus
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_ Some have waited years for a conviction review. Their letters paint
a picture of a review process rife with roadblocks, especially for
applicants who didn’t have lawyers. _

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_This story is a collaboration between New York Focus and __Columbia
Journalism Investigations_
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an investigative reporting unit at the Columbia Journalism School._

Terrell Eleby, a Brooklyn native incarcerated in New York’s
Shawangunk Correctional Facility, wrote to a conviction review unit in
Kings County in 2013, asking it to reinvestigate his murder and
assault convictions. He claimed in part that police had threatened
witnesses to keep them from testifying in his favor.
A decade would pass before he learned the unit rejected his
application.

Chad Richards, currently behind bars at the same facility for
possessing and selling cocaine, sought a conviction review from a
similar unit in Ulster County in 2019. It promised to follow up with
him in the “near future.”

Richards has yet to hear back.

And Luis Cherry, another incarcerated New Yorker, contacted a
conviction integrity unit in Suffolk County in 2024, when he learned
his accomplice’s attorney was disbarred for witness tampering after
bribing Cherry to lie on the stand. Cherry claimed the incident had
tainted his conviction. 

Cherry hasn’t heard back, either.

None of the men had legal representation when they applied to a
conviction integrity unit, or CIU. Like many incarcerated people, they
either couldn’t afford to hire a lawyer or couldn’t convince one
to take on their wrongful conviction claims. They applied on their own
— what the justice system calls “pro se.” Without legal aid,
they saw their county CIUs as one of their best shots at a fair
reinvestigation into their cases.

They’d soon learn that the CIU system can be just as opaque and
complex as the system that convicted them in the first place.
Navigating the CIU process alone, Eleby, Richards, and Cherry were
left wondering basic questions: Had the unit received their
application? Was it reinvestigating their case? What was the outcome?

In a year of reporting on the state’s 17 county CIUs, New York
Focus, in partnership with Columbia Journalism Investigations (CJI),
found that the units have failed to support
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innocence claims later upheld by the courts, and rarely acknowledged
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prosecutorial misconduct contributing to wrongful convictions. The
attorney general’s statewide unit — the only option for many
defendants — functions more like a mail-forwarding service
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than a vehicle for justice reform, the investigation found. And nearly
half of New York’s conviction integrity units have yet to support a
single exoneration.

New York Focus and CJI circulated an ad in prison newsletters seeking
to understand incarcerated New Yorkers’ experiences applying to
CIUs. It reached more than 50 facilities across the state. Fifty-five
people wrote back saying they had contacted a CIU; they detailed
experiences across 11 counties and the statewide bureau.

[parliament visualization]
The letters paint a picture of a CIU process rife with roadblocks,
especially for applicants who didn’t have lawyers.

More than two-thirds of the letters came from people who applied to a
CIU pro se. Most reported not knowing the status of their
applications. Fifteen said they never got an acknowledgement of
receipt from the CIU they’d applied to. Those who did said they
waited years for the units to inform them about subsequent
reinvestigations.

New York attorney Scott Stevenson, who has successfully represented
defendants before Queens County’s CIU, said there can be a
“yawning gap” between a lawyer’s ability to file a CIU
application and a pro se applicant’s.

CIU personnel may overlook pro se applicants with credible cases
because they might include irrelevant facts or botch legal arguments
that an innocence attorney knows how to strengthen, Stevenson and
other legal experts noted.

Many units don’t have the resources to sift through case files and
interview witnesses, said Marissa Bluestine, of the Quattrone Center
for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of
Pennsylvania Carey Law School. That makes cases where an innocence
attorney has already done this legwork more compelling.

_IN 2024, WE PUBLISHED AN AD IN THE PRO SE NEWSLETTER AND DISTRIBUTED
IT TO MORE THAN 50 CORRECTIONAL FACILITIES ACROSS NEW YORK. IN IT,
WE EXPLAINED THE ROLE OF A CIU AND INCLUDED THE THE FOLLOWING
MESSAGE: "HAVE YOU EVER APPLIED TO A CONVICTION INTEGRITY OR
CONVICTION REVIEW UNIT IN NEW YORK STATE? OR DO YOU KNOW SOMEBODY WHO
HAS? IF YOU HAVE APPLIED TO ONE OF THESE UNITS, WE'D LIKE TO HEAR
ABOUT YOUR EXPERIENCE. LET US KNOW HOW IT WENT." MORE THAN 100
INCARCERATED NEW YORKERS SHARED THEIR STORIES WITH NEW YORK FOCUS
AND COLUMBIA JOURNALISM INVESTIGATIONS REPORTERS SO FAR — AND SOME
ARE STILL WRITING TO US MORE THAN A YEAR LATER._

“There are a lot of units in the country — maybe even the majority
— that don’t look at pro se applications,” she said.

Sixteen of the state’s county CIUs either shared incomplete records
or did not respond to requests for data on the number of pro se
applications they have received. From 2018 to 2023, 90 percent of all
applicants to the Nassau County CIU represented themselves, according
to data that New York Focus and CJI obtained through a public records
request. (The Nassau County District Attorney’s Office did not
answer questions about how many of those pro se applications it
reviewed or reinvestigated.)

Putnam County District Attorney Robert V. Tendy told New York Focus
and CJI that a defendant represented by a lawyer has a clear advantage
with his county’s CIU.

“It’s a lot easier to pick up the phone and call an
attorney,’” he said. Otherwise, CIU personnel are “trying to
reach somebody in a jail in northern New York state, where you can’t
get through to anybody.”

Ten of New York’s CIUs have created online forms for pro se
applicants, which legal experts say can help. The forms give structure
and direction to applicants who do not have an attorney and who
otherwise would be left to guess what information is relevant. 

Here are three stories from pro se applicants who sought relief from
New York CIUs — and the hurdles they faced. 

Roughly 27 pro se applicants who wrote to New York Focus and CJI
reported having to wait at least a year for a CIU either to
acknowledge their applications or inform them of its decision. Some
have waited as long as 10, 12 and even 14 years. / Letters:
Respondents to New York Focus and CJI prison newsletter ad |
Illustration: Leor Stylar

Terrell Eleby: The Opaque Process

When Eleby first wrote to Brooklyn’s Kings County District
Attorney’s Office more than a decade ago, he didn’t know what a
conviction review process looked like. He’d long maintained his
innocence, but didn’t have an attorney to help him navigate the
system.

Eleby had written to defense attorneys across New York without much
luck. He had no trial transcripts; when he tried to obtain his
transcript from the court, the clerk couldn’t find it, according to
an affidavit filed in a later appeal of his case.

He requested his case documents from the Brooklyn DA’s office, which
told him that it couldn’t locate anything from his original arrest
and prosecution, according to a 2011 letter the DA’s office sent
Eleby, who shared it with New York Focus and CJI.

Eleby figured a lawyer could have helped him get these records and
other evidence to support his claim.

Police officers arrested Eleby in 1985 after a fatal shooting at a
drug dealer’s house in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood. The
crime shook the borough: Perpetrators killed three men, and injured
seven additional people, including two children. Some were held
hostage. Ten months later, a jury found Eleby and three co-defendants
guilty of murder and assault. A judge sentenced him to life in prison.

For decades, Eleby has insisted that he and his then-wife, Rosa Buie,
were visiting friends when the crime occurred. Buie corroborated
Eleby’s account in a statement she gave to a Brooklyn assistant
district attorney in 1985, records show.

According to Buie, she and Eleby were at a card game at her sister’s
house in Coney Island — about 10 miles from the crime scene — on
the night of the shooting. Buie and Eleby, who lived in Crown Heights,
three miles from where the murders took place, said they didn’t
return home until the following day. Soon afterward, police officers
knocked on the front door and arrested Eleby, who police said was
known to them due to a history of auto theft and other larcenies.

In an interview for this article, Buie reiterated what she’d told
the district attorney’s office four decades earlier. She said that
police used threats and told her not to testify in court.

“They gonna take my children,” she recalled, of the threats.
“All kinds of crazy stuff they were telling me.”

Eleby’s defense attorney did not call Buie to testify at trial,
records and interviews show. In 2011, as a pro se defendant, Eleby
filed a motion to throw out his conviction, accusing his attorney of
ineffective counsel. Five months later, a judge dismissed that claim,
and ruled Buie’s alibi statement inadmissible because it was not a
sworn affidavit. (Eleby’s defense attorney, Mary Bednar, who retired
from the New York family court bench in 2015, could not be reached for
comment; a woman who answered the phone at Bednar’s home said “she
is not going to talk” about Eleby’s case.)

More than half of the pro se applicants who wrote to New York Focus
and CJI, including Eleby, claimed some form of official misconduct had
contributed to their wrongful convictions.

Eleby wrote multiple letters to the Brooklyn CIU stating his belief
that police forced witnesses to implicate him in the high-profile
crime, he said. He finally heard back a decade later, in January 2023,
when the unit’s special counsel asked him to complete a special pro
se application form. 

He detailed his case in the 10-page form and listed witnesses, like
Buie, who could corroborate his innocence.

“That paper I signed was all in the cops’ handwriting. I got
myself in a hole that no one would believe.”

—Luis Cherry

The unit reviewed Eleby’s application and unit investigators tried
to interview Buie at her home. Buie told New York Focus and CJI that
she spoke with investigators for about a half hour. The Brooklyn
DA’s office said she wasn’t home, and didn’t respond to
messages.  

Eleby said no one from the unit called or visited him in prison. He
believes that if he’d had legal representation, the unit would have
communicated with his attorney. 

In September 2023, the unit sent Eleby a one-page letter informing him
that it did not find “any new evidence to reopen the case” and had
closed his application.

“Should you uncover new evidence in support of your claims, you are
welcome to submit a new application,” the CIU said. 

The Brooklyn DA’s office declined to provide New York Focus and CJI
with an internal memo detailing the reinvestigation, citing the fact
that Eleby’s case involved an alleged sex crime. 

In a statement, Oren Yaniv, a spokesperson for the Brooklyn DA’s
office, said the unit had “thoroughly reviewed this case,” but
“found no shred of evidence that points towards this defendant’s
innocence.” Yaniv said the first time the unit heard from Eleby was
in 2022.

He discounted Eleby’s earlier letters to the unit. The unit
“didn’t exist back in 2013,” Yaniv said. 

The Brooklyn DA’s office formed its first conviction integrity unit
in 2011, according to a report it put out a few years ago, and took
credit for its first CIU-backed exoneration two years later, records
show — around when Eleby said he first contacted the unit.  

A couple of years ago, Eleby turned to the New York attorney
general’s statewide conviction review bureau to plead his case, to
no avail. Last year, he said, he found an attorney to help him submit
a new application to the Brooklyn CIU. The attorney, De Nice Powell,
director of innocence investigations at the New York-based Appellate
Advocates, did not confirm that Eleby is filing a new application, but
told New York Focus and CJI in an email that she’s representing
Eleby “in connection with his Kings County murder conviction.”

Eleby, now 66, spends his days being escorted from one upstate prison
to the next as he battles stage four cancer and other health
complications, he said. He remains steadfast in fighting his
convictions.  

“For 40 years and seven months to date I’ve been fighting
alone,” said Eleby, who had just been released from a prison medical
unit. “Justice is all I seek and ask for.”

More than two-thirds of the letters New York Focus and CJI received
came from people who applied to a CIU pro se. / Letters: Respondents
to New York Focus and CJI prison newsletter ad | Illustration: Leor
Stylar

Chad Richards: The Waiting Game

Richards knows how frustrating a drawn-out CIU process can be. After
reading about a newly minted unit in the local newspaper six years
ago, he felt surprised.

“I didn’t even think it was real,” said Richards. Sentenced to a
maximum of 20 years for his drug convictions, Richards soon saw the
Ulster County CIU as his “way home,” he said.

He wrote to the Ulster County District Attorney’s Office seeking
information, and in July 2019, an assistant district attorney wrote
back, instructing Richards to mail in an application. The now-former
ADA urged the pro se applicant to “include as much detail as
possible” about his wrongful conviction claim in order to help the
unit “fully investigate.”

Richards immediately put together copies of papers he had already
typed out detailing his case. He was one of roughly 80 people arrested
during a massive drug sweep in Kingston, New York, in 2012, later
dubbed “Operation Clean Sweep,” Hudson Valley One reported.
Richards was convicted for having cocaine and selling it on two
occasions to a police informant.

Richards doesn’t dispute his drug possession conviction. But he
maintains he never sold cocaine.

The application he mailed to the Ulster CIU made these points, he
said. Two months later, the unit acknowledged receiving his
application; the former ADA wrote that the unit would review
Richards’s case and then contact him “in the near future.” 

But six years later, the unit has not followed up, and has not
responded to New York Focus and CJI’s recent request for comment.
During this time, Richards has sent four letters to the Ulster DA’s
office seeking an update, he said.

“It is totally possible he hasn’t heard back,” said then-Ulster
County Administrative Assistant DA Sajaa Ahmed, who handled the
office’s CIU matters, when asked about the status of Richards’s
application in April 2025. 

“It’s not because of any malfeasances,” Ahmed said. A new Ulster
County district attorney started in January 2024 and made its
conviction review process less structured.  

“If he hasn’t heard back from our office, he needs to. Even if
it’s a no,” Ahmed said. 

Ahmed requested details about Richards’s CIU application from New
York Focus and CJI, and said the Ulster DA’s office would “review
his request.” After a CJI reporter sent these materials, the office
did not respond to follow up calls, emails, and written questions
asking about that review.

“It’s like I never existed nowhere,” Richards said.  

Richards is among the roughly 27 pro se applicants who wrote to New
York Focus and CJI that reported having to wait at least a year for a
CIU either to acknowledge their applications or inform them of its
decision. Some have waited as long as 10, 12 or even 14 years.

[chart visualization]
New York’s CIUs aren’t mandated to notify an applicant when an
application is dismissed. But Richards believes they’re more likely
to do so if the applicant has legal representation. “They have more
respect for a lawyer,” he said, referring to CIU personnel.

He said he’s spent almost $7,500 in recent years trying to get two
lawyers to represent him in the CIU process. One lawyer visited him in
prison once, he said. Neither helped advance his case. (New York Focus
and CJI could not independently verify Richards’s version of
events.)

Without legal help, Richards filed a court motion to vacate his
conviction in 2015. A judge denied it in light of Richards’s
“prior criminal history,” court records show.

Richards said he has no idea where to turn for help — at this point,
he’s lost hope of ever hearing back from the Ulster CIU. Today, he
runs a magazine from his cell in Shawangunk Correctional Facility, in
Wallkill, New York.

As for writing the Ulster CIU, Richards hasn’t necessarily ruled it
out. “I’ll do it if they gonna respect what I say,” he said.

At least half of the pro se applicants who wrote letters to New York
Focus and CJI sought conviction reviews based partly on fairness
arguments. / Letters: Respondents to New York Focus and CJI prison
newsletter ad | Illustration: Leor Stylar

Luis Cherry: A Higher Bar

Cherry contacted the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office about
its conviction integrity unit in April 2024, not long after he’d
heard that the man who was convicted for being his accomplice in a
fatal shooting was doing the same.

Ten years earlier, Cherry had forfeited a trial when he pled guilty to
murder on Long Island.

He’s long claimed that he was forced to sign a confession statement
that he didn’t understand written by Suffolk County police.

“That paper I signed was all in the cops’ handwriting,” said
Cherry, currently in prison at Five Points Correctional Facility,
north of Ithaca, and serving a maximum life sentence for murder
charges. “I got myself in a hole that no one would believe.”(The
Suffolk County Police Department declined to comment.)

In 2019, the US Justice Department accused his co-defendant’s
attorney of witness tampering for bribing Cherry, years after his
guilty plea, to change his testimony and state that he had committed
the murder alone. The attorney, John Scarpa Jr., was convicted and
sentenced to two and a half years in prison. (Cherry’s co-defendant
is now serving more than 70 years in prison for murder and other
charges.)

In his 2024 letter to the Suffolk County CIU, Cherry wrote that he’d
faced unfair proceedings because of Scarpa’s bribery plot, among
other things. Cherry didn’t dispute his involvement in the crime.

Judges often overturn convictions based on evidence that police,
prosecutors, or other officials violated legal and ethical rules meant
to ensure a defendant’s constitutional right to a fair trial,
experts say. A prosecutor might have failed to share evidence that was
favorable to the defense before trial, for instance, or a police
officer might have coerced a confession.

Most New York CIUs support exoneration cases based on such claims,
too. Six CIUs, including Suffolk County’s, do not. Instead, they use
a higher legal standard requiring “clear and convincing” evidence
that the defendant didn’t commit the crime, such as DNA evidence or
proof of an alibi.

That standard is a high bar for any CIU applicant, according to legal
experts, but for pro se applicants, it’s “almost impossible” to
meet, criminal defense attorney Ron Kuby said. Some lawyers who handle
CIU cases will track down untested DNA samples and pay for new tests
on behalf of their clients.

Tom Hoffman, a defense attorney whose team has presented wrongful
conviction claims to CIUs seeking DNA tests, now covers testing
expenses for several CIU applications — often at a cost of hundreds
of dollars.

Hoffman said the units will “come up with all sorts of reasons”
not to test DNA evidence, “even though it’s kind of obvious that
they should be retesting.”

While CIUs have the power to reinvestigate any potential wrongful
conviction, it falls to applicants to collect evidence themselves and
make a compelling enough case to win their support. Often, units
won’t consider applications without new evidence to back them up.

“If you just show up, and you’re like, ‘I got convicted, I think
it was wrong,’ there’s a very low likelihood that you’ll even
get a response,” said Stevenson, the attorney who helped secure the
2021 exonerations of three men with the Queens CIU’s support. To get
the unit’s attention, he worked with six other lawyers to compile a
111-page motion arguing to overturn the men’s convictions.

“For 40 years and seven months to date I’ve been fighting
alone. Justice is all I seek and ask for.”

—Terrell Eleby

After the Queens unit agreed to reinvestigate the cases, Stevenson
kept working. He remembers going to the unit chief’s home during the
Covid-19 pandemic lockdown and combing through boxes of old files on
the front lawn.

The Suffolk CIU’s application form tells applicants it will only
review a case if “you did not commit or participate in the crime for
which you were charged or convicted, supported by information or
evidence not previously part of your original trial or appeals” —
a legal standard called “actual innocence.”

In an interview, Cherry said he didn’t remember whether he’d known
that the Suffolk CIU used the actual innocence standard when he
applied.

At least half of the pro se applicants who wrote letters to New York
Focus and CJI sought conviction reviews based partly on fairness
arguments. Four people made fairness arguments to county CIUs with
actual innocence standards; all four either had been rejected or were
waiting for a decision when they wrote.

Tendy, the Putnam County DA, said his unit would not back a pro se
applicant who discovers new evidence of misconduct, because that
applicant could ask a judge to overturn their conviction. A CIU should
not reinvestigate a wrongful conviction claim if a defendant still has
options in court, he believes.

“I’m not going to ever insert myself into the actual legal
process,” Tendy said.

The Suffolk DA’s office has taken a more flexible approach,
according to that unit’s bureau chief, Craig McElwee. He described
the absence of exonerating evidence as a “disqualifier” for CIU
applications, but also said that “a claim of egregious misconduct
and/or bad faith actors” can lead to “further investigation.”

The Suffolk CIU has supported three exonerations in its seven-year
history. While two of those exonerations involved fairness claims,
they each had extenuating circumstances, according to data from the
National Registry of Exonerations reviewed by New York Focus and CJI.

In May, McElwee confirmed that Cherry’s case has been assigned to an
ADA and that his records were being collected for a comprehensive
review; the CIU has declined recent requests for comment on the status
of Cherry’s application.

Cherry still holds out hope that one day he’ll get the chance to
argue his case to CIU personnel. 

“Sometimes, no news is better than news,” he said. Without a CIU
decision, he added, he has “hope there’s something good going.”

_Oishika Neogi and Curtis Brodner reported this story as CJI reporting
fellows. New York Focus and CJI provided editing, fact checking, and
other support._

New York Focus [[link removed]] is an independent nonprofit
newsroom investigating power in the Empire State. As the state’s
only nonprofit statewide newsroom, our goal is to help rebuild a local
news ecosystem that has faced years of relentless cuts

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