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New Westchester DA Revamps Conviction Review Unit, Puts A Public Defender in Charge
By
George Joseph
Published Feb 23, 2021
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Westchester County DA’s Office
By
George Joseph
Published Feb 23, 2021
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Westchester County’s new district attorney, Mimi Rocah, is following through on her campaign promise to revitalize her agency’s conviction review unit. This week, the county’s top prosecutor announced that Anastasia Heeger, a public defender and exoneration expert, will be heading the bureau, which is tasked with investigating claims of wrongful conviction.
Heeger previously served as the director of the Office of the Appellate Defender’s Reinvestigation Project, where she challenged potential wrongful convictions on behalf of low-income residents in the Bronx and Manhattan.
The decision to bring in Heeger, an outsider, marks a departure from the previous DA’s administration, which had relied on a veteran prosecutor to lead case reviews.
“You can’t possibly expect someone who has been in a prosecutor’s office working alongside their colleagues to be completely objective when looking at cases,” said Rocah in an interview explaining her decision. She added that the appointment of a former exonerations attorney will provide a level of expertise that her agency had previously lacked. “There’s no one in the DA’s office who has experience in doing exoneration work. It’s not something that you can just pick up one day because you’re interested in it.”
The Westchester DA also announced several other new positions in the office. Jennifer Sculco, who previously helped tackle a corruption case against corrections officers at Rikers for the New York City Department of Investigation, was made Deputy Bureau Chief of the agency’s new Law Enforcement Integrity division. Brian Weinberg, who previously investigated political corruption in Mount Vernon for the state Attorney General’s Office, will lead non-law enforcement public corruption probes.
Listen to George Joseph's report on WNYC:
Rocah said she hopes this week’s new hires will encourage members of the public to bring abuse and corruption allegations to her office. During her campaign last year, she repeatedly criticized her predecessor for failing to properly investigate allegations of police corruption in Mount Vernon revealed in a series of secret recordings captured by a police whistleblower and published by Gothamist/WNYC.
Bobby Brown, a former Mount Vernon resident who says he was wrongfully convicted of drug charges, said the moves sounded like a good first step. “It's a whole new year. It’s something different,” he said. “Somebody is looking into things that were supposed to have been looked at a long time ago.” His attorney, Karen Newirth of the Exoneration Project, said she hopes that the DA's new conviction review unit will investigate Brown's wrongful conviction claim.
The Westchester District Attorney’s announcements follow an update provided by the Mount Vernon Police Department last week about its departmental probe into the corruption allegations contained in tapes recorded by police whistleblower Murashea Bovell.
In a statement, a city spokesman announced that an internal police review had cleared Sean Fegan, a sergeant who the whistleblower and another officer in the tapes had previously accused of tolerating misconduct during his time as leader of the department’s narcotics unit. Fegan did not respond to Gothamist/WNYC’s request for comment. The spokesman also confirmed that one of the department’s former narcotics officers remains suspended while another is still under active investigation.
Two days later, the department also promoted Bovell, the whistleblower, to the rank of sergeant, his first promotion by rank since he joined the department more than a decade ago.
In a separate statement, the Westchester County District Attorney made clear that it is currently conducting its own investigation into the corruption allegations raised in Bovell’s tapes “as well as other evidence.”
“We will work with all local police department internal affairs bureaus as necessary and appropriate,” said Rocah. “However, we want to be sure that Westchester residents understand that our investigations will always be conducted independently from any department where personnel are under investigation. A local police department’s conclusions about its own internal investigations cannot and do not represent the conclusions of the Westchester District Attorney’s Office.”
George Joseph reported this story for the Gothamist/WNYC Race & Justice Unit. If you have a tip, or if you work or have worked in a prosecutor's office, a law enforcement agency or the courts, email reporter George Joseph at [email protected]. You can also text him tips via the encrypted phone app Signal, or otherwise, at 929-486-4865.
Tagged
wrongful conviction
mount vernon
Westchester DA
Race And Justice Unit
George Joseph
George covers Brooklyn for THE CITY with a focus on criminal justice and housing. He previously worked for WNYC and Gothamist, and has published stories with NPR, ProPublica, Esquire, and The Intercept among other outlets.
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