Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., is overseeing a unit that is working on approximately 100 cases.
Incarcerated for almost 25 years for a murder he did not commit, Fleming was finally exonerated in a Brooklyn courtroom this past April. A receipt from a phone call helped prove that Fleming, as he had consistently said, had been vacationing at Walt Disney World in Orlando on the night of the murder in 1989. The receipt had been in his case file all those years.
Fleming’s case is one of many that are now under review at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office since District Attorney Kenneth Thompson took charge last January. Eight have already been exonerated out of scores of potentially wrongful convictions.
Under Thompson’s direction, the old Conviction Integrity Unit has expanded to become the Conviction Review Unit. The objective of the new unit is simple: to bring the innocent to justice and restore faith in the legal system.
“The goal is to get to the truth,” says Thompson. “We cannot have innocent people in prison for murders they did not commit.”
Thompson has brought in Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Harvard law professor, as a consultant on the design and operation of the new unit. As both a professor and attorney, Sullivan has real-world experience and a sophisticated eye for the legal process.
After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1994, Sullivan went on to become director of The Public Defender Service for the District of Columbia. Later, he joined the faculty of Yale Law School and was recruited by then-dean and current Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan to Harvard.
