That predates my being at the commission, but looking back at the notes from the study commission, that was really where the compromise was.
Chief Justice Lake was one of the former chief justices of the North Carolina Supreme Court. He brought together a group of folks from all across the different areas of the criminal justice system to talk about the causes of wrongful convictions and how we should address wrongful convictions in North Carolina.
In bringing together those various stakeholders, that was where they landed. What were we going to do about wrongful convictions in North Carolina and where should the focus be? Ultimately, they decided that the focus should be on claims of factual innocence.
They looked at what areas our post-conviction appellate processes and post-conviction motions for appropriate relief were not able to address in North Carolina. They felt that claims of factual innocence were the ones that were falling through the cracks, that those could not be handled very well in these other court processes and that those were the ones that needed this extra attention and an extraordinary process with this extra broad statutory authority, this investigative power, that we really don't see in any other process.
I don't know any other lawyer, at least in North Carolina and probably in the U.S., who has the authority of both criminal and civil procedure that can go out and get all of this information to try to get to the truth. It is very different from the adversarial system we're normally working in in criminal law. Therefore, when they were thinking about giving this much authority and power to an agency, they felt like that needed to be narrowly tailored to actual innocence.