By Willow Higgins and Curtis Brodner | New York Focus

This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Anthony DiPippo was in his prison cell one day in 2014 when he spotted a letter on the floor, lying beyond his reach on the other side of the bars. He noticed a logo: the New York Attorney General's Office.

That's the one, DiPippo thought.

Nearly two decades earlier, as a teen in the Hudson Valley, DiPippo was convicted of a high-profile rape and murder that he swore he didn't commit. He spent the next 17 years fighting those convictions, turning his street smarts into a legal prowess that impressed his attorneys.

The attorney general's letter was just a couple sentences long, DiPippo recalled. Investigators wanted copies of his legal documents.

DiPippo shipped them a box full of materials, and within a month, the department was reviewing his case with the support of a local district attorney. Its reinvestigation was going well: The department -- called the conviction review bureau -- found evidence indicating that he was wrongfully convicted.

Then, in the aftermath of a local election, the reinvestigation collapsed, a casualty of an AG bureau hamstrung by political and legal constraints. DiPippo had to wait another 10 months before a jury acquitted him.

New Yorkers with wrongful conviction claims have limited options for getting their cases reviewed. In 17 counties, they can reach out to a local conviction integrity unit, or CIU -- though New York Focus and Columbia Journalism Investigations found that the units often succumb to internal politics and fail to back credible claims. In the state's remaining 45 counties, the attorney general's statewide conviction review bureau is the only option.

Launched in 2012, the statewide bureau was billed as a landmark effort to combat wrongful convictions, acting when DAs' offices lacked resources to do so themselves. Then-Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced it would be well-staffed with prosecutors, defense attorneys, and investigators.

But for the most part, the bureau is a toothless initiative. Data, court filings, public records, and interviews reveal a department functioning more like a mail-forwarding service than a vehicle for justice reform. It's rarely intervened in potential wrongful conviction cases, despite receiving hundreds of pleas from incarcerated New Yorkers.

In a few instances, like DiPippo's, the AG bureau has gotten involved in a case that eventually led to a defendant's exoneration, but even then, DAs pushed back against its recommendations or co-opted its review process. And it has only one staff member, Gail Heatherly, who has run it while handling other responsibilities in the office.

Deference to DAs is baked into its structure. The AG bureau does not have jurisdiction over county-level criminal cases, so when a defendant writes in with a credible wrongful conviction claim, the staffer must seek permission from the DA's office that originally prosecuted the case. With a DA's blessing, the bureau can reinvestigate potential wrongful convictions in any county, even if a county has its own CIU.

The bureau almost never tries to seek that permission. New York Focus and CJI obtained a database of defendants who wrote to the AG bureau from 2012 to 2023, as well as the bureau's letters to DAs' offices about those applications. Out of 800 applications, the AG bureau flagged 16 -- less than 2 percent -- to DAs as meriting a closer look. In most of those letters, Heatherly offered assistance from the bureau, sometimes noting that it doesn't have jurisdiction to review the case.

The bureau also rarely followed up with DAs' offices to check in on a case, the records show, effectively leaving the defendant in the lurch.

It's difficult to know just how many exonerations have resulted from the AG bureau's efforts: The database does not include information on exonerees, the AG's office said, because such cases are sealed. Reporters identified five defendants not included in the data whose cases were reinvestigated by the bureau. Three of those defendants were eventually exonerated.

Those numbers seem low compared to other CIUs, said Marissa Bluestine, assistant director of the Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, which collects data on CIUs nationwide.

Patricia Cummings, a former CIU chief in Philadelphia, who led that unit through 21 exonerations during her tenure, said a statewide bureau can be an important venue for wrongfully convicted defendants, especially those who can't turn to a county CIU. But she questions the value of a unit that can't override prosecutors.

"They're not really filling the void if local prosecutors don't want to cede their jurisdiction," she said.

A spokesperson for Letitia James, who has been attorney general since 2019, declined to speak on the record about her office's conviction review bureau and did not respond to requests for information about its caseload.

The office also declined to answer other written questions from New York Focus and CJI.

Getting buy-in from two different agencies can be a tall order for defendants. Before his review fell apart, DiPippo had managed to persuade the DA who prosecuted him to greenlight the AG bureau's reexamination of his rape and murder convictions, but it was no small feat: The DA had stated publicly that DiPippo would "take his last breath in that cell."

DiPippo made his case in a nine-page letter meant "to convince him that this is a worthy enough case, that he got it wrong," DiPippo recalled.

"Trust your judgment and cede authority and jurisdiction to the [AG bureau] so that justice may be done," he wrote.

The attorney general's conviction review bureau began with lofty goals.

In 2010, Schneiderman, then a candidate for the AG post, pitched what he called an "actual innocence unit" that would "discover the truth about wrongful convictions, and let the chips fall where they may."

DNA technology was on the rise, Schneiderman argued during his campaign, exposing a growing number of wrongful convictions. The bureau could offer a service to DAs' offices that didn't have the capacity to review criminal convictions on their own, one person familiar with its launch said. The program was cutting edge -- the first of its kind in the country, the office touted at the time.

It took more than a year to rally internal support, according to a former AG employee. Some AG employees considered the bureau's mission a breach of decorum, the employee said; they worried that reexamining fellow prosecutors' work could affect their reputations. (They asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak about internal AG deliberations.)

That concern was put to the test when Thomas Schellhammer, a former county homicide prosecutor who first helmed the bureau, took Ronald Bower's case.

A defense attorney had written to the AG bureau about Bower, a security guard and father of two who was arrested days before his 30th birthday in 1991 on sex-related charges in Queens and Nassau counties. Bower, who had a clean record, maintained his innocence. But a jury convicted him of sexual abuse and sodomy charges, and a judge sentenced him to 18 to 54 years in prison.

Over the next two decades, an FBI agent, a New York City police detective, and a state investigator each came to believe Bower was innocent. Despite their support, Bower's convictions remained.

In May 2012, Schellhammer agreed to make Bower's wrongful conviction claim a "number one priority," according to Bower's attorney's notes of his exchange with the bureau.

Schellhammer went all in. For more than a year, records show, he interviewed witnesses and investigators to reconstruct the case. Yet he had forged ahead on the conviction review without at least one of the prosecuting DA's offices' knowledge, that office would later allege.

Schellhammer's reinvestigation eventually stalled because he couldn't get witnesses to cooperate, but he had come to believe in Bower's innocence and sought to help him. Ahead of Bower's scheduled parole hearing, Schellhammer wrote to the state parole board about his findings.

"It appears highly unlikely that Bower committed the crimes for which he was convicted," the bureau chief wrote. Bower was granted parole, but the board didn't have the authority to exonerate him.

Records from his hearing suggest that Bower believed the AG bureau's reinvestigation would continue. "They're not stopping until they get my name cleared," Bower told the parole board in 2014.

Then a DA who'd prosecuted Bower learned what happened at the hearing.

The Nassau County District Attorney's Office complained in a letter to the parole board that Schellhammer hadn't told them about his findings or that he planned to appeal to the parole board.

An assistant attorney general told the parole board that the AG's office would conduct another review. Two months later, the office walked back Schellhammer's findings.

They were "not supported by evidence," the assistant attorney general wrote in a follow up letter, which didn't mention what the second review entailed. In an interview, he told New York Focus and CJI that Schellhammer's decision to go to the parole board fell outside the AG conviction review bureau's scope. (He asked not to be named because he didn't remember the case well and no longer had access to his files.)

Schellhammer did not respond to multiple emails, phone calls, and a letter seeking comment. A woman who said she was his wife told New York Focus and CJI that he did not wish to speak with a reporter.

James Ferguson, a parole board commissioner at the time, said he and a colleague agreed with Schellhammer's conclusions. While they thought that the parole board was not the right venue for an innocence claim, the AG's office should have pushed for Bower's exoneration, he said.

"I do, to this day, believe that he was innocent," Ferguson said of Bower.

Today, because Bower's convictions still stand, he's registered as a sex offender. In an interview, he said he lives a quiet life with his cat.

Bower still feels betrayed by the AG's office. He believes the office prioritized AG Schneiderman's political reputation over his innocence.

"I trust animals, and that's basically it," Bower said.

In April 2014, about a month after the Nassau County district attorney had complained to the parole board, Schellhammer left the AG bureau, replaced by Heatherly, who was previously the head of the AG office's criminal prosecutions unit. New York Focus and CJI could find no evidence that the bureau reinvestigated a wrongful conviction claim without a clear invitation from a district attorney during Heatherly's tenure.

DiPippo began communicating with the AG bureau just months after the Bower fallout, during year 17 of his 25-to-life prison sentence at Sullivan Correctional Facility in the Hudson Valley.

As a teen, he and his friend, Andy Krivak, had attracted local authorities' attention for committing misdemeanor drug offenses. But in 1995, news of a grisly crime shocked their hometown of Carmel: the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl whose remains were found, hogtied and gagged, more than a year after she'd gone missing.

Within days of the gruesome discovery, officers pulled over Krivak in his vehicle with DiPippo -- then a known troublemaker -- and another friend riding as passengers. They searched the vehicle, found drugs, and arrested the trio, records show. The third friend, attempting to avoid jail, told officers that DiPippo and Krivak knew something about the murder. Police investigators pressured the friend by showing up at his job and school for weeks after the traffic stop, court records show. He eventually told them that the duo had committed the crime.

DiPippo insisted he was innocent. By the time he and Krivak went to trial, the third friend had recanted his allegations. But the case proceeded without his testimony, and the pair were convicted.

At 20, DiPippo went to prison "practically illiterate," he said, and taught himself the law with a dictionary and a thesaurus. He became obsessed with his case, documenting every twist and turn in dozens of neatly labeled volumes, which he routinely gave his attorneys to read after prison visits. Over the years, DiPippo found evidence suggesting police misconduct. He also identified a likely culprit: a serial rapist who he alleged had committed nearly identical sex crimes in Connecticut.

DiPippo remembers people in prison buzzing about the new AG bureau. He contacted Heatherly, but knew her office would need permission from the DA who'd prosecuted him in order to review his case. He contemplated how to approach then-Putnam County DA Adam Levy.

DiPippo had studied ethics for years in order to understand the moral principles that might influence decision-makers in the justice system. He wrote a letter to Levy that he considered to be the sum of his work.

"Conviction review is a gift, not a curse," he wrote to Levy. "You have to have faith it was created with cases like mine and Andy's in mind."

His plea worked. Levy invited Heatherly to collaborate on the case review. In an interview with New York Focus and CJI, Levy said he knew that the investigators from the sheriff's office who'd arrested the pair had troubling histories, but his office didn't have a CIU. They agreed to include Krivak's case in the effort, he said.

Soon, the prosecutors were working together to reexamine forensic evidence, witness testimony, and court documents. Levy and Heatherly flew to Florida to interview one of the original trial witnesses, who revealed that a senior investigator from the Putnam County Sheriff's Office had threatened her with prosecution if she didn't relay a false story that he'd fed her, according to a judicial decision in a lawsuit DiPippo later filed.

For more than a year, the reinvestigation seemed productive. By the fall of 2015, Heatherly and Levy had agreed to proceed with a motion to overturn DiPippo's conviction, interviews and a subsequent lawsuit and affidavit show. It was a shining example of how well the AG bureau could function.

DiPippo's attorney was simultaneously pursuing a separate appeal that, if successful, would also overturn his conviction -- leaving it in the DA's hands to drop the charges or re-try the case. With Levy's support, DiPippo's chances looked promising.

Then, amid the reinvestigation, Levy lost his re-election bid in November 2015.

Heatherly briefed the new Putnam County DA, Robert Tendy, on the reinvestigation. She had one objective, court records show: Explain why DiPippo might actually be innocent.

The review had unearthed "serious evidentiary issues," she wrote in an affidavit in a separate case. In addition to the coerced witness, new DNA testing failed to link crime scene evidence to DiPippo or his friend.

But the new Putnam DA disagreed. In an interview with New York Focus and CJI, Tendy said DiPippo's guilt was clear to him based on his own review. Walking back Levy's commitment, he withdrew his office's support for the exoneration motion, according to Heatherly's affidavit. And when an appellate court overturned DiPippo's conviction, he decided to re-try him.

"It appears that he blatantly ignored the overwhelming evidence that was uncovered during the AG's conviction integrity review," Levy said of his successor.

Tendy, for his part, said he never ignores evidence. He pointed to another defendant, identified independently by New York Focus and CJI, whose wrongful conviction claim was reinvestigated by the AG bureau. Tendy added it was him, not Levy, who would help exonerate that defendant.

"His comment is baseless," Tendy said.

Heatherly declined multiple interview requests for the story, referring all questions to a spokesperson for the AG's office.

In her affidavit, she called out the conduct of Tendy's office, singling out its "misstatements of fact" about the AG bureau's conclusions. Still, she said, she had to retreat.

"If the DA chooses to ignore our conclusions, effectively, we can do nothing further," she wrote.

Tendy called Heatherly's accusations "misguided."

Even when elected DAs take the initiative and invite the AG bureau to reinvestigate a case from the start, critics say the bureau might give into pressure from a DA behind the scenes."That's a colleague and you don't want to ... step on toes," said Jeffrey Deskovic, himself an exoneree, who runs a nonprofit for wrongfully convicted New Yorkers, referring to the AG bureau. "You're worried about politics then. You're not concerned about justice."

Following a 2014 innocence claim, then-Oswego County District Attorney Gregory Oakes invited the AG bureau to reinvestigate a potential wrongful conviction case, becoming one of the few DAs to seek out its help, records and interviews show. He had a clear purpose in mind: "to dispel the notion that we are engaged in some sort of 'cover up,'" he wrote to the bureau.

The case involved Gary Thibodeau, a middle-aged construction worker from a rural town near Lake Ontario, and had garnered significant local attention. As a teen, Thibodeau had a few run-ins with the law, in one instance serving a stint in jail for stealing tires. By 1994, Thibodeau found himself in far more serious trouble when he and his brother were arrested and charged with kidnapping an 18-year-old woman who disappeared from a convenience store in New Haven, about 45 minutes north of Syracuse.

His brother was ultimately acquitted. The two insisted that Thibodeau was also innocent -- he had an alibi, and there was no forensic evidence implicating him. At his trial, however, a jailhouse informant claimed that Thibodeau had admitted to being with the victim on the day of her disappearance, and that he'd asked whether police could identify incinerated human remains. Thibodeau denied that he was with the victim, and his girlfriend testified she'd spent the night with him. The judge sentenced him to 25 years to life.

After decades of failed appeals, Thibodeau's attorney learned in 2014 that the Oswego County sheriff had received several secondhand reports pointing to other suspects, and she filed a motion to overturn Thibodeau's conviction. At least nine witnesses claimed the other suspects had confessed to or implicated themselves in the crime.

Within months, Oswego DA Oakes filed an opposing motion. Local news outlets gave the case wall-to-wall coverage, and people who believed Thibodeau was innocent took to social media to accuse the DA of corruption. By April 2015, Oakes had invited the AG bureau to reinvestigate Thibodeau's case.

The AG bureau reviewed documents from the original trial and, according to public statements Oakes made later, interviewed the informant.

Over a year earlier, a local newspaper reporter had conducted an interview that cast doubt on the informant's trial testimony. In it, the informant said he didn't tell police that Thibodeau confessed to anything: "I just said he asked me one question," he told the Post-Standard. "He asked me if teeth burned, and that was it."

In the interview, a recording of which was shared with New York Focus and CJI, the informant described pressure tactics authorities used to get him to testify against Thibodeau.

"They were harassing me about it. 'We can put you in there. We can get you on this,'" he said. "I'm like, 'I didn't do anything. I'll tell you what he told me.'"

The informant did not respond to multiple emails, phone calls, or a letter seeking comment.

It's unclear whether the AG bureau gleaned the same information from the informant -- the bureau has never made its findings public -- but if it had, that information would have supported Thibodeau's exoneration motion.

A judge later ruled the witness reports about the other suspects amounted to hearsay and denied Thibodeau's motion.

In 2018, after Thibodeau had filed two unsuccessful appeals, Oakes told reporters that someone from the AG bureau had told him about its own interview with the informant.

"That's the most credible jailhouse informant I've ever spoken with," Oakes recalled her saying. "What he said 20 years ago is exactly what he's telling us now."

Oakes, now an assistant attorney general at the AG's office, declined to comment for this story.

Thibodeau's attorney said that after initially sending documents to the AG bureau in the spring of 2015, they had little communication.

"There was never any follow up," Thibodeau's attorney said, explaining that no one from the bureau tried to interview Thibodeau and that she wasn't aware of any attempts to interview the new witnesses.

She remembers feeling frustrated by the bureau's reinvestigation -- like it was "in name only," she said. She believes the saga illustrates that the bureau could never truly be independent from DAs.

In August 2018, while his attorney was preparing a motion for a rehearing -- the final step before escalating his case to federal court -- Thibodeau died at Coxsackie Correctional Facility near Albany at 64 years old. He had spent 23 years behind bars.

A few statewide conviction integrity units across the country have more expansive jurisdictions than New York.

In New Jersey, Delaware, and North Carolina, the statewide units can recommend exonerations without a DA's consent. Perhaps the most robust is the North Carolina Innocence Commission, an independent body with jurisdiction to reinvestigate any wrongful conviction claims. Its work has resulted in 16 exonerations since its inception in 2007. The Quattrone Center's Bluestine, who has reviewed New York Focus and CJI's analysis, said the other programs point to a more effective approach for rectifying wrongful convictions than New York's.

Some legal experts say that the state legislature could expand the New York AG bureau's authority to do the same. But Cummings, the former Philadelphia CIU chief, believes it would be politically challenging to pass such a bill in New York. "Prosecutors are not going to want to give up their power," she said.

Gregory Krakower, who was a senior adviser and counselor to former AG Schneiderman, helped conceive of the AG bureau. He noted that current state law allows Governor Kathy Hochul to grant the AG subpoena power and legal jurisdiction to investigate wrongful conviction claims.

Hochul's office did not respond to requests for comment.

Ten months after Tendy, the new Putnam County district attorney, halted the AG's conviction review, a jury acquitted DiPippo of rape and murder. His friend Krivak languished in prison and home confinement for more than six years before he, too, was acquitted.

By then, DiPippo had moved as far away from Putnam County as he could, settling in Montana. He used some of the nearly $15 million he received from civil lawsuits to buy a house.

DiPippo believes the AG bureau's conviction review, despite its abortive end, unearthed new evidence that worked in his favor and helped pave the way for the jury's acquittal. He suspects that he wouldn't have cleared his name as quickly without the bureau's investigative aid.

"It was a Hail Mary," DiPippo said of his initial letter to the bureau. In his case, he added, "It got caught."

Willow Higgins reported this story for New York Focus. Curtis Brodner is a CJI reporting fellow. New York Focus and CJI provided editing, fact checking, and other support.

This project was completed with the support of a grant from Columbia University's Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.