New Haven civil rights attorney Alex Taubes was more than hopeful on May 20, 2022 when State’s Attorney Joseph Valdes, the attorney running the state’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) showed him the draft memo on the CIU’s assessment of his client Daryl Valentine’s claims of innocence.
On that day, Taubes sat with another attorney who represented Valentine, criminal defense attorney Vishal Garg, while Valdes showed them a memo with exculpatory information. At that point, it seemed that vacating Valentine’s murder conviction was almost a formality.
But February 3, 2023 dashed Taubes’ hopes.
The CIU released a memo dated more than four months earlier, on Sept. 16, 2022 – three days after the oral argument in Valentine’s habeas appeal — and a memo from the CIU Panel explaining that the unit would not take any action on Valentine’s case because “no new relevant evidence was presented to the Panel that the jury and Courts had not already considered and the Panel had not lost confidence in the conviction.”
It was the first substantive decision on one of the 131 claims filed with the office as of December 31, 2022 and it makes one wonder if CIU stands for “Conviction Integrity Unit” or “Cover It Up.”
The procedural history of Daryl Valentine’s case is as frustrating as its fact pattern.
Valentine was arrested in 1991 for a murder that he has, rather convincingly, maintained he didn’t commit. A jury convicted him but that first conviction was reversed on appeal. At his second...
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