The American Bar Association (ABA) House of Delegates — the policymaking body of the national bar association — unanimously adopted a Massachusetts Bar Association-submitted resolution on conviction integrity at the 2025 ABA Midyear Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, on Monday, Feb. 3.
The resolution, which passed without dissent after it was presented to the ABA House of Delegates by Past MBA President Kay H. Hodge, urges state, territorial and tribal bar associations to convene a working group of key criminal justice stakeholders to study and make recommendations about best practices for conviction integrity units and programs in prosecutorial offices and for effectively supporting and expanding the capacity of innocence organizations, innocence units/programs and innocence advocacy to prevent and remedy wrongful convictions.
It is modeled after the work of the MBA’s Massachusetts Conviction Integrity Working Group, which was started in 2018 by the late Kevin Curtin and Richard Cole. The group released a report after years of study in 2021, “Conviction Integrity Programs: A Guide to Best Practices for Prosecutorial Offices.” Later renamed the Massachusetts Conviction Integrity Task Force (MCITF), the group has also produced a virtual training video for Massachusetts prosecutors, given presentations to judges, and successfully launched a groundbreaking “Innocence Initiative,” recruiting MBA member attorneys to volunteer with Massachusetts’ innocence organizations to expand their capacity to represent people who maintain they were wrongfully convicted. (For more on the MBA’s work in this area, visit the MBA Innocence and Conviction Integrity Initiatives webpage.
"Thank you to Richard Cole, co-chair of the MCITF for the MBA, who drafted the resolution, and to Kay Hodge, who presented the resolution to the ABA House of Delegates, and to all the members of the MBA and MCITF who worked together to bring this critically important issue to the ABA," said Martin W. Healy, chief legal counsel and chief operating officer for the Massachusetts Bar Association. "We are proud that their efforts to bolster conviction integrity and support the work of innocence organizations in Massachusetts will be used as a model by other bar associations around the country.”
Read the adopted ABA Resolution and supporting information from the MBA here.