CINCINNATI — Hamilton County Prosecutor Connie Pillich announced Friday that her office is creating a new conviction integrity unit (CIU).
The unit, a campaign promise of Pillich's, will review cases where defendants may have been wrongfully convicted or experienced sentencing inequities.
"Let's keep in mind that we're human. We make mistakes. We're not infallible, and if there were mistakes made, we should do what we can to correct those errors," Pillich said during a sit-down interview Friday. "Because the last thing I want to do is put an innocent person in jail for a crime they did not commit."
WATCH: Here's what the new conviction integrity unit will do
A national search is now underway for a CIU director. According to the job posting, the position comes with a starting salary of at least $120,000. The director will be the driving force behind day-to-day operations, Pillich said.
"The director will be a prosecuting attorney with that criminal litigation experience, and the director will make a lot of the decisions about how the unit is run, what cases they decide to review," she said.
Pillich said the ideal candidate would have at least 10 years of criminal litigation experience.
"Hopefully in the courtroom as well as in the appeals court or other types of motion practice," Pillich said. "They have to be willing to dig into these files for months."
The unit will act independently of the prosecutor's office. Pillich will eventually hire two more roles for the unit: an investigator and a paralegal. She told us the unit should be up and running by mid-year.
"While the conviction integrity unit is a part of my office, it will be physically separated from the main office," Pillich said. "It will naturally require someone who did not grow up in this office prosecuting criminal trials. It has to be that way because I need someone who doesn't have any skin in the game. I need someone who can bring a fresh perspective."
Pillich said the best example of why "we need this so badly" came in December, when she announced that she dismissed the high-profile, 1995 murder case against Elwood Jones after learning modern-day medical testing "excludes" Jones as a suspect.
"In (the Elwood Jones) case, we found that several years after the trial, it was learned that a lot of information from the investigation had not been released to the defense counsel," Pillich said.
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Hamilton County Commissioner Denise Driehaus said she supported funding for the unit during the budget process, calling it "very compelling" and "innovative" work that's part of a national movement.
"I think it brings transparency to the process. It also gives people confidence in the system, because sometimes mistakes are made," Driehaus said. "We've got new evidence, we've got new technology, we've got new science related to different cases."
Conviction integrity units have popped up all across the country. Nearby cities like Indianapolis, Columbus and Cleveland all have CIUs. Pillich said she has been developing the unit for about a year by researching best practices from successful conviction integrity units across the country.
Interested candidates can apply through the prosecutor's website under the "join our team" section.
