Officials with the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office officially launched its new Justice Review Unit, which will be dedicated to reviewing wrongful sentences and convictions in felony cases in Shelby County.

The launch on Thursday, Dec. 1, comes nearly a month after the announcement of the unit’s formation. The unit is led by Chief Lorna McClusky and Deputy Chief Robert Gowen.

“For the first time ever in Tennessee we’re going to have a review unit that deals not only with wrongful convictions, but also wrongful sentences as well,” District Attorney General Steve Mulroy said, as he stood in front of the National Civil Rights Museum Thursday afternoon shortly before sunset. 

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Nearly 100 prosecutor’s offices and other local government entities have created conviction review or conviction integrity units since 2002, according to the JRU website. Nearly half of them have exonerated at least one person.

Mulroy said a wrongful conviction is a “profound injustice” for the defendant and could cause distrust within the community that “sends out ripples of distrust and alienation throughout the entire community.”

“But also from a public safety perspective, if you’ve got a wrongfully convicted person, that means that the real offender is still walking the streets of Shelby County,” Mulroy said. “And that’s bad for public safety.”

The only other conviction review in Tennessee is one created by the Davidson County District Attorney’s Office in 2016. It has exonerated six people.

William E. Arnold Jr. was exonerated by the Davidson County DA’s office’s conviction review unit in 2018 after spending nearly seven years of his 25-year sentence in prison.

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“If it were not for a conviction review unit, I probably wouldn’t be here talking to you today,” Arnold said. “I spent 2,491 days, two hours and 11 minutes — that’s six years and nine months — in the state penitentiary.”

Arnold helped get the JRU off the ground by leading the post-conviction justice working group in Mulroy’s external transition team. He examined other similar programs and reported back to Mulroy. 

Arnold was working in diversity and inclusion in Nashville when he was accused of sexually assaulting an 11-year-old boy.

The boy told his mother that “William” had assaulted him. His mother assumed he meant Arnold, but he meant a teenager with the same first name, and he didn’t correct his mother. Documents and media reports suggest the boy feared retribution from his mother, but he later told the truth.

Arnold applied for assistance from the CRU in 2018, and he was released from prison in April 2020, pending a new trial. His conviction was vacated that June.

“I was the first person that the first conviction review unit in Tennessee was able to help,” Arnold said during an interview in October.

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As soon as the unit launched Thursday, Arnold said he was excited to share the news with a friend of his, who he said was also wrongfully convicted.

“When you think of the number of Memphians who may have been wrongfully convicted over the years, this is an opportunity for them to come home to their families, come back home to our communities,” Arnold said Thursday. “Stronger families, stronger communities, we have a stronger city.”

McClusky said she thinks the unit will bring the community together in what she calls a “city of brotherly love.”

“The members of the community can know that when there’s a prosecution, it will be properly formed, properly move through, and the right person will end up off the streets,” McClusky said. “And isn’t that what we want? To feel like we live in a safe city? I think we can do that.”

Defendants or their attorneys can apply on the JRU website, or they can call the office at (901) 222-1301 to request to receive an application through the mail.

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The unit members will do a quick review of the case to see if the defendant is eligible. If the unit chooses to continue with further review, they will go into a second phase, where they will do a full file review and conduct extensive interviews with witnesses and potential witnesses.

“We will do every single thing we can to get to the truth,” McClusky said.

Mulroy emphasized the fact that the review unit will operate independently from the district attorney’s office and most of the work will occur on a different floor from the District Attorney’s Office at the Walter L. Bailey Criminal Justice Center located at 201 Poplar Avenue.

Here, JRU members will review files and interview applicants.

“The members of the unit will report only to me. They will be housed separately. They will do their work separately. We have separate phone numbers, a separate website,” Mulroy said. “It will truly be independent so that they can look objectively at the work that our office has done. And if we have done wrong, either wrongful conviction or wrongful sentence, they’ll make it right.”

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McClusky’s and Gowen’s offices, however, will be around the corner from Mulroy’s office.

Gowen said after talking to experts, the unit needs to hire an executive assistant who can track data points and see what policies need to change.

“Single-witness ID cases are a problem, cross-racial identifications are a problem,” Gowen said. “The way they do show-ups or lineups, or the way they do nonconsecutive picture arrays. All those are data points that we’re going to have to get our heads around and keep track of so that in the future we say, ‘Look, here are the issues.’ ”

Gowen said he believes his 24 years of experience working as a public defender will help defend those who are wrongfully convicted or sentenced in Shelby County.

“Lorna and I are both career (defense attorneys),” he said. “We’ve learned from the industry experts on these kinds of review units. You need someone with a defense background to take a fresh look at these cases. So it makes sense that we’re here. We’re essentially doing the same kind of investigation that we did as defense lawyers. We just have more resources now.”