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In their ongoing effort to investigate and identify wrongful convictions throughout the city, U.S. Attorney Ron Machen announced the formation of a “Conviction Integrity Unit” today.

According to a release from Machen’s office, the unit’s primary goal will be to “identify and investigate cases that resulted in wrongful convictions,” but will also “make recommendations about ways to improve training, investigations, and prosecution practices to ensure the integrity of future convictions.”

The formation of the “Conviction Integrity Unit” follows a four-year review ordered by the U.S. Attorney’s Office to go through “more than 2,000 files involving FBI analysis of hair or fiber evidence,” in cases where a wrongful conviction may have been made. That review was ordered after the 2009 exoneration of Donald Gates, who was convicted of rape and murder in 1982.

Most recently, Machen’s office exonerated Kevin Martin, who was convicted as being a part of a 1984 rape and murder in D.C. Martin originally pleaded guilty to taking part in a robbery, but not the rape and murder of the victim. After microscopic hair fragments found in the victim’s shoes matched samples from Martin, he pleaded guilty because his lawyer said he was afraid of getting convicted of greater charges if he didn’t comply.

After the Metropolitan Police Department located the necessary physical evidence to prove Martin’s innocence in January, the DNA was tested, proving he wasn’t guilty of rape and murder.

“As prosecutors, our goal is not to win convictions, but to do justice,” Machen said in a statement. “Although wrongful convictions remain a rare phenomenon, their consequences are tragic—for the defendants involved, for the victims of the crimes that remain unsolved, and for the community we work every day to protect. This new unit will work to uncover historical injustices and to make sure that we are doing everything in our power to prevent such tragedies in the future.”

Since exonerating Gates in 2009, Machen’s office has put in thousands of hours to go through evidence where proper DNA testing wasn’t available in order to find wrongful convictions. As the Post reports, Martin’s exoneration was the fifth in five years, with “federal prosecutors in D.C. [acknowledging] that errors by an elite FBI forensic unit have led to a wrongful conviction.”

With the formation of the “Conviction Integrity Unit,” the goal is that process for identifying wrongful convictions will be streamlined, establishing “a program that is both backward and forward-looking, combining a review of existing convictions with an analysis of data to determine ways to improve training, investigation, and practices.” The unit will be a part of the Special Proceedings Division in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and will handle post-conviction litigation for both the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and the Superior Court of the District of Columbia.