Volume 44, Issue I (Winter 2025)
By Vincent Southerland*
Experience teaches us that law enforcement misconduct is an urgent and pervasive concern that plagues the administration of criminal law nationwide, burdening the innocent and guilty alike with criminal convictions devoid of integrity and grounded in manifest injustice. Despite that fact, the criminal system’s capacity to confront the misdeeds of police and prosecutors—and the systemic taint of those misdeeds—is extremely limited. That dynamic drives the need for new tools and mechanisms to investigate allegations of law enforcement misconduct and its systemic impact. This Article provides critical insights about one such tool: independent systemic integrity reviews. Such reviews, conducted by a panel of individuals, explore and investigate allegations of law enforcement misconduct in the context of criminal convictions. While they can be deployed to investigate allegations of law enforcement misconduct in a single case, their focus is on uncovering the scale and scope of law enforcement misconduct across a cohort of cases. Following their investigative work, the review panel provides a report and recommendation to a jurisdiction’s chief prosecuting authority detailing their findings and the implications of their investigation on a series of criminal cases. Those recommendations, to be acted on by the prosecuting authority, can range from taking no action to supporting the dismissal of the conviction(s) and case(s) under review.
In this Article, I draw on my own experiences as a member of a panel of three individuals responsible for conducting the first independent systemic integrity review of its kind in Cook County, Illinois. I provide three pieces of advice and guidance for individuals, stakeholders, and jurisdictions seeking to replicate systemic integrity reviews in the search for law enforcement accountability. First, I suggest that those considering an independent systemic integrity review embrace its core function as a truth-seeking enterprise designed to address conviction integrity in the shadow of law enforcement misconduct. This framing, centered on the review’s core purpose, informs the contours of the work, the resources that an independent panel conducting the review might need, and the values that guide its investigative efforts. Second, I recommend that a systemic integrity review panel operate as structurally independent from a jurisdiction’s penal bureaucracy. Doing so limits the conflicts and biases that can accompany inhouse scrutiny, enhancing the value of a systemic integrity review to all those concerned about the operation of a criminal legal system. Finally, bolstered by the example of prolific journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells, I explain how attention to race and its dynamics yields benefits for an independent systemic integrity review in its truth-seeking role. Using the case that sparked the Cook County systemic integrity review, I demonstrate how race can provide explanatory context for the actions and decisions of law enforcement, the accused, and the host of entities and individuals touched by a criminal case. Those benefits, among others, lead me to conclude that anyone undertaking an independent systemic integrity review should be concerned with race and racial justice. I close by recognizing that, while independent systemic integrity reviews are not a panacea for law enforcement misconduct, when properly resourced, constituted, and oriented toward racial justice, they can play an important role in vindicating claims by individuals and communities alike who have labored under the harms of bad behavior by law enforcement for far too long.
*Associate Professor of Law, Faculty Director of the Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law, and Director of the Criminal Defense and Reentry Clinic, New York University School of Law. I am grateful to Daniel Harawa, Randy Hertz, Anthony Thompson, Kim Taylor-Thompson, Ndidi Oriji; the participants of the 2022 Decarceration Law Professors Workshop, including Amy Kimpel, Courtney Lollar, Alma Magana, Jocelyn Simonson, Lisa Washington, and Jamelia Morgan; the participants of the 2022 Clinical Law Review Workshop, including Brad Colbert, Kathryn Kronick, Kathryn Miller, Mariam Hinds, Lula Hagos, Michigan Supreme Court Justice Kimberly Thomas (then a law professor); participants of the 2024 Decarceration Law Professors Workshop, in particular, Amber Baylor, Laura Ableson, Nina Farnia, Zohra Ahmed; and attendees of the 2024 Clinical Law Review Workshop, in particular Caitlin Glass, Sarah Gottlieb, Mridula Raman, Kate Kruse, and Mia Jackson-Rosenthal. I am also deeply indebted to the members of the Cook County Working Group for their colleagueship and wisdom. Finally, I owe thanks and gratitude to Morgan Awner, Youssef Aziz, Olivia Fritz, Addison Jeske, Rahul Kak, Natalie Lima, Anna Milliken, Dana Rubin, and Apurva Panse, all of whom provided excellent and invaluable research assistance; and to the team of editors at the Yale Law and Policy Review. All errors are my own.
