Hennepin County Attorney’s Office introduces dashboard providing unprecedented transparency on Conviction Integrity Unit

Today, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office publicly unveiled an innovative new data dashboard providing an unprecedented degree of transparency into the work being conducted by its Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU).

CIU Dashboard Video

The CIU works to investigate criminal convictions within Hennepin County where there is a plausible claim that an innocent person was convicted or some other serious miscarriage of justice occurred and, based on the findings of those investigations, pursue appropriate relief for individuals.

The new dashboard provides aggregated data about the cases in which convicted individuals have applied to the CIU, including:

Number of applications received
Number of cases at different stages of CIU review
The CIU’s assigned priority level for cases
The decade in which cases arose
The most serious crimes of conviction in each case
The original and remaining sentences in each case
Applicants’ custody status
Certain demographic information about applicants

The dashboard’s interactive functions allow users to easily filter the data and view specific categories of cases of interest to the user. The underlying data is refreshed daily.

Information that could be used to identify specific cases or defendants will not be disclosed. Instead, all the data made publicly available is anonymized and aggregated.

The HCAO’s CIU dashboard breaks ground by going far beyond what similar units in prosecutor offices nationwide have made publicly available. The amount of information, the frequency with which it’s updated, and the ability of users to explore the data is unprecedented.

“We hold an important public trust at the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. We owe it to the public to be as transparent as possible about the work we do. This dashboard reflects this commitment to transparency and to ensuring that justice is done in every case,” Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said.

#30#