NEW YORK — Fueled by the freeing of a prison inmate who said a detective framed him in a 1990 murder, the Brooklyn district attorney's office has undertaken one of the nation's most ambitious efforts to revisit cases of people put behind bars decades ago to determine whether they were wrongly convicted.
District Attorney Kenneth Thompson is reexamining about 90 mostly homicide cases from the 1980s and 1990s — an era when New York City's murder rate was soaring — including nearly 60 cases linked to the same detective. While other prosecutors' offices have launched such projects, specialists say few, if any, have tackled such a sweeping examination all at once.
''No one else is dealing with this type of volume,'' said Samuel Gross, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and head of the National Registry of Exonerations. ''They're starting out on a long journey, and they don't know where it will take them.''
Thompson, who took office in January, is accelerating an effort started by his predecessor, increasing the number of prosecutors dedicated to the project from three to 10, hiring a Harvard Law School professor, Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., to guide the unit and appointing a panel of experienced lawyers to give their input.
He told a City Council budget committee last week that the annual cost will top $1 million.