How I Got Here: Andrew Markquart ’12

What exactly do you do?

The Conviction Integrity Unit has a two-pronged mission. One is to review our office’s own convictions for potential errors. That includes cases where an innocent person was convicted—the paradigmatic example of a wrongful conviction. We’re also looking for cases where perhaps someone was over-sentenced—where the facts of the case may support some kind of criminal charge but not the charge that they were convicted of or the sentence that they received. The second part of our mission is more forward-looking, which is to learn from past mistakes and develop better policies and practices within our office to avoid those mistakes in the future.

I started in July 2024. This is a brand-new unit, so we were writing all the policies and procedures, staffing, and setting up our database in the second half of 2024. Since the end of 2024, we’ve had our team in place, and we’ve been digging into cases, so I’m excited for what the rest of this year will hold.

How do you decide what cases to review?

It’s a hard question that involves a lot of judgment. Our process is driven primarily by applications from people who have a conviction in our county who want us to review their case. Our team is two lawyers, an investigator, a paralegal, and a victim specialist. We have to make smart decisions about how we deploy our resources and where we think it’s most likely to bear fruit.

We do an initial review to see if it’s the type of case that lends itself to  reinvestigation. We’re really looking for cases that have threads that we could pull on, as an investigative matter. Obviously, you don't know on the front end where anything’s going to lead, but you can at least imagine developing a set of facts that could justify some relief, whether that’s an exoneration or something short of that. Beyond that, we’re looking for red flags or things that point towards potential errors. But there’s no formula. It’s an exercise in judgment in terms of prioritizing which rocks to turn over. Because there are a lot of rocks out there.

For the cases where we decide to move forward, we will do a top-to-bottom reinvestigation: We review the entire prosecution and law enforcement case file; we go out and interview witnesses—including those who testified at trial, to see if, in fact, they told the whole truth and nothing but the truth. We’re also very interested in whether there are witnesses out there who, for whatever reason, haven’t told their part of the story. We do forensic testing, including DNA. At the end of the day, we have to determine whether the facts would support some form of relief. 

What do you like about your job?

I left the Great North Innocence Project in Minneapolis to take this job. A big part of the appeal was that the prosecutor’s office is really where the power is in our system. If you want to promote justice both at the systemic level and at the level of individual cases, nothing compares to getting inside the building and being able to use the tools that being part of the state affords you. I don’t just mean money but also access to government case files and all the nuts-and-bolts stuff that goes into an investigation is just easier to do from inside the government than from outside. I feel really blessed that I get to do work that is inherently really interesting. I get to come to work every day and work on murder mysteries. You know, it’s the stuff that they make podcasts about, but I get to do it every day. 

What skills help you succeed in your job?

Extreme attention to detail is very important. All the details in these cases matter, and the cases we work on are factually complex. I’m very internally driven, which is also important for this job because our work is different from that of prosecutors, who have court schedules and deadlines and calendars. Where there are external forces driving them, we have to have an internal drive to act. Going to Columbia Law School helped foster in me a general sense of curiosity and also, frankly, skepticism and an unwillingness to accept that just because someone has reached a conclusion in the past or that things were done a certain way in the past, that that might be the right conclusion or the right way to do things. If you have a strong status quo bias, you would do nothing in this job.

What is the hardest part of your job?

There’s no obvious playbook or formula for how to identify wrongful convictions, how to conduct these investigations, and how to make judgments about whether the result was fair. The early days of the innocence movement were largely driven by DNA exonerations—cases where the DNA really told the whole story and everyone was like, ‘Wow, this is obviously a mistake.’ Now, because of widespread DNA testing, a lot of the errors that occurred in the past get caught on the front end. Which is progress, right? The cases now are factually a lot more complicated and subtle, and usually there’s not one big piece of evidence that blows the case open. It’s more of a mosaic of piecing together small pieces of evidence. It makes for cases that can be more open to contestation than the classic DNA case. And that’s before you even get to cases where you’re making judgments about whether a particular sentence was excessive. So there’s a high degree of judgment involved, and the stakes are high, including for victims and for the community.

How do you manage those difficult judgments? 

You exercise as much care as possible to make sure you have all the facts. You work with a team and encourage a culture of skepticism and dissent so that you are less likely to get tunnel vision and fall into confirmation bias. And you rely on a group of people who can check your judgments. 

How did Columbia Law School prepare you for this job? 

I was able to work with Professor Jim Liebman and four other students investigating the wrongful execution of Carlos DeLuna in Texas in 1989. We wrote a long-form article for the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, which was then subsequently released as a book called The Wrong Carlos. We demonstrated in great detail how Carlos DeLuna was convicted and executed for someone else’s crime. 

It’s hard to imagine a law school experience that, in retrospect, draws a more direct line between what I was doing in law school and what I’m doing today. But I had really diverse interests in law school. I took a bunch of classes in national security law, election law, and immigration law, which I have always been interested in. But The Wrong Carlos definitely was the biggest formative experience I had at Columbia. I’m enormously grateful for the opportunity to work with Professor Liebman on that project. He was very much a mentor to me. 

Do you think The Wrong Carlos has had an impact on the criminal justice system?  

There is a greater recognition of the fallibility of our system, up to and including applying capital punishment, which thankfully we don’t have in Minnesota. There’s a recognition that we can get it wrong and do get it wrong. There’s an increasing recognition that one of the major players responsible for fixing those errors is the prosecutor’s offices that have caused those mistakes in the first place. That broader societal conversation has led to things like our Conviction Integrity Unit. And I do think The Wrong Carlos has been an important contributor to that conversation.

Even though Carlos DeLuna did not get justice?  

The Wrong Carlos is a somber book because Carlos didn’t have the triumphant walk out of the prison doors with the cameras all around. But even the case of someone who is exonerated while they’re still alive—something that we rightly celebrate—carries with it a strong undertone of sadness. The time they served, they’re never getting back. And they carry scars with them—no matter what, they always do. And there’s a recognition for society that our systems have failed. So even the most triumphant of cases is tinged with a certain amount of tragedy.

This interview has been edited and condensed.