And the winner is…. drum roll..
Top legal and true crime network Law&Crime announces the winner of its first annual America’s Greatest Detective award – Special Fields Bureau Chief Cynthia Garza of the Dallas County Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU). America’s Greatest Detective was established by Law&Crime to honor the brilliant and complex investigative work of crime-solving professionals across the country, nominated and voted on by Law&Crime’s dedicated audience. Garza accepted the honor on Saturday at the 2023 CrimeCon CLUE Awards in Orlando, Florida.
Garza currently leads the Dallas County CIU, a branch within the District Attorney’s office for re-examining cases that have been the subject of a wrongful conviction allegation. Having successfully secured an impressive 32 exonerations since it was founded in 2007, Dallas’ CIU is notably one of the most successful in the nation. The longest-tenured prosecutor in any CIU in the country, Garza has worked on more than half of the unit’s total exonerations, equaling 340 years’ worth of wrongful imprisonment.
In May 2023, her team was behind the exoneration of Tyrone Day, a man who spent 33 years of his life wrongfully convicted of sexual assault at the age of only 19 years old. After over a decade of investigation, Garza’s team successfully established that Day’s conviction was based on mistaken eyewitness identification after uncovering new DNA evidence.
Of her commitment to uncovering the truth, Garza states “Every time I hear something, I want to know more about it. Curiosity and the desire to know the truth are the driving forces behind all of these investigations. You don’t stop at Point A, you’ve got to move forward and plow through it because it’s only by asking questions that you get to the answers that you really need.”
This year, Law&Crime partnered with the world’s leading true crime event, CrimeCon, to present the winner of America’s Greatest Detective at the festival’s CLUE Awards ceremony on Sept. 23 in Orlando. The awards were livestreamed on Law&Crime’s cable and OTT network as well its YouTube channel with over 5 million subscribers.
