Inside the Philly DA’s Fight to Free the Wrongfully Convicted
Larry Krasner’s Conviction Integrity Unit, which acts as the city’s in-house Innocence Project, is trying to fix sentencing errors past
By the time Chester Hollman III met with Patricia Cummings, in the spring of 2019, he’d lost all hope of ever getting out of prison. Even when Cummings assured him that he had a strong case, he was reluctant to believe her. And why should he? For nearly 15 years, a string of top-notch lawyers had been fighting, pro bono, to overturn his his 1991 murder conviction. Hollman, short and stocky with gleaming eyes, was 23 years old when he was sentenced; by 2019 he was 49 years old. Now Cummings, a Texan who worked for the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office — the same entity that put him behind bars — was here saying, once again, that the evidence the commonwealth used to lock him up was suspect.
“I’m just like, okay, maybe this is going to happen,” Hollman told me recently, recalling those early meetings with Cummings. “But I also knew to prepare myself for another letdown.”
Cummings is the head of Philadelphia’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU), a branch of the prosecutor’s office tasked with reviewing old convictions for error or malfeasance. Think of it like the…
