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DALLAS -- Craig Watkins may be the only prosecutor in America who is making his name getting people out of prison.

As district attorney of Dallas County, Mr. Watkins is using DNA evidence to investigate more than 400 guilty verdicts notched up by his predecessors. His office's Conviction Integrity Unit, launched last year for this purpose, has so far cleared six men wrongly convicted of rape, murder or robbery.

In the past two decades, more than 200 convicts nationwide have been freed thanks in part to DNA testing. The tests involve taking biological material such as blood from the person convicted and comparing it to a sample left at the crime scene. These efforts are usually spearheaded by defense lawyers, not prosecutors.

Exonerated by DNA

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Read about six men who have been exonerated during the tenure of Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins.

• Plus, read excerpts from an interview with exoneree James Woodard.

Mr. Watkins, who became the first African American district attorney in Texas when he was elected in 2006, said in a recent interview that he has been accused of being "a criminal-loving DA, a hug-a-thug DA." But he says such criticism of him and his office misses the point: "We have the constitutional obligation to seek justice."

Each exoneration has pushed Mr. Watkins further into the spotlight. He has been interviewed by television crews from around the globe. The Democratic party in Texas considers him a rising star, though Mr. Watkins says he hasn't made any decisions about running for statewide office.

But the exonerations have also brought intense scrutiny of the 40-year-old Mr. Watkins, who spent most of his career as a small-time defense lawyer. Critics, including some fellow prosecutors, say he seems too eager to besmirch his predecessors' reputations for the sake of a little publicity. They note that politically, these cases are easy targets: None of them were tried by him.

"Where I think he's doing a grave disservice is trying to create this image that the criminal-justice system is fatally flawed and that only people like Craig Watkins can save it," says Joshua Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore., who serves on the board of the National District Attorneys Association.

Mr. Marquis says Mr. Watkins could make other prosecutors' jobs harder by contributing to what he considers the public's false impression from TV cop shows that most prosecutors are bloodthirsty and routinely railroad defendants. In fact, he says, the percentage of people who are wrongly convicted is "very small."

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Brian Harkin for The Wall Street Journal

Dallas Prosecutor Craig Watkins says he's been called a 'hug-a-thug D.A.'

Mr. Watkins says his office is simply shining a light on a problem, and that progress requires being honest. "You have to gain the public's trust," he says.

He points to his overall record, which is similar to his predecessor's. According to court data, 61% of capital-murder cases his office has handled so far have resulted in convictions; the previous district attorney, Bill Hill, got convictions in 55% of capital-murder cases during a comparable period of time. Mr. Watkins has convicted 48% of murder cases and 34% of sexual-assault cases involving an adult, compared to 48% and 31%, respectively, for Mr. Hill.

Freed After 27 Years

One difference is that Mr. Watkins more often opts for alternative methods of punishment. For example, 40% of drug-possession cases have been given deferred adjudication during Mr. Watkins's tenure, compared with 29% for a comparable period under Mr. Hill's. Deferred adjudication typically lets first-time, non-violent offenders avoid jail time by completing probationary requirements such as drug-treatment programs.

"It's about, 'OK, We're going to punish you and the punishment is for a purpose, but at the end of the day because you made a youthful indiscretion, we don't want you to have this criminal history and be here for the rest of your life,' " says Mr. Watkins.

James Woodard is among Mr. Watkins's supporters. Imprisoned for 27 years for the 1980 rape and murder of his girlfriend, Mr. Woodard always said he was innocent. He said his requests for DNA testing were denied by Mr. Hill, the former district attorney.

A few days after Thanksgiving last year, Mr. Woodard was told to change into civilian clothes and go see the warden of his east Texas prison. He was taken to Dallas, where he met with Mr. Watkins the next morning. "He told me that they were going to do a test," Mr. Woodard says, referring to a DNA test. "And if things work out he will try his best to free me. Without him, it would have never happened." Mr. Woodard was freed in April.

Mr. Hill says he can't discuss specific cases, but he says his staff was overwhelmed by thousands of requests for DNA tests once Texas authorized them in 2001. Even those the office thought were without merit were submitted to a judge, Mr. Hill says, adding that during his tenure more than 10 inmates were cleared. "If you read the paper, you'd think he did them all," Mr. Hill says of Mr. Watkins.

While it's true that Mr. Hill and other prosecutors sometimes end up exonerating defendants after they've been convicted, few prosecutors take it upon themselves to review old convictions.

That's in large part why Mr. Watkins's approach marks a change for Dallas, criticized for decades as a convict-at-all-costs county. It gained national notoriety in 1988 with the release of "The Thin Blue Line," a documentary recounting the case of a man railroaded by prosecutors and wrongly convicted of murdering a police officer.

Dallas County has had a string of district attorneys with tough-on-crime reputations stretching back to the legendary Henry Wade. Mr. Wade held the position from 1951 through 1986. He prosecuted Jack Ruby for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald and was the named defendant in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that decriminalized abortion.

Mr. Wade was famous for never losing a case he personally prosecuted, and for getting juries to impose the death penalty nearly every time he asked. His staff of assistants was almost as successful, and all told, won convictions in more than 150,000 cases.

Shifting Political Winds

Mr. Watkins grew up in Dallas and was only 19 when Mr. Wade left office. After graduating from Texas Wesleyan University School of Law in Fort Worth, he worked briefly in the Dallas City Attorney's office and as a public defender. In 1997, he set up his own law practice where he handled everything from criminal defense to real-estate closings, to personal-injury cases. The office was in Fair Park, a mostly black neighborhood south of an interstate that historically served as a dividing line in this largely segregated city.

When he first ran for district attorney in 2002 and again during his successful campaign in 2006, Mr. Watkins focused on the hardships faced by the city's minority communities. He promised to change the culture of local law enforcement to rely more on alternative sentencing.

Mr. Watkins did not have strong ties to the white establishment during his political climb, and he was not endorsed by the local newspaper. Few gave his second bid for the district attorney's office much of a chance in 2006 when he faced off against long-time prosecutor Toby Shook, a Republican who had spent 23 years in the district attorney's office.

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Associated Press

Craig Watkins, seen here presenting documents connected to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, has set up a Conviction Integrity Unit.

But the political winds in Dallas County were shifting. Unhappiness with the Bush administration's policy on the Iraq war was growing, and trickling down to local politics in this long-time Republican stronghold. Some voters, especially in the growing Hispanic population, were outraged by revelations that in dozens of cases, Dallas police officers framed Mexican immigrants for possessing "drugs" that turned out to be chalk.

That year saw a Democratic sweep, with the party winning 42 judgeships and the district attorney's office.

By 2006, a dozen people had already been exonerated in Dallas County thanks to DNA testing. That was largely thanks to a crime lab that had preserved physical evidence in cases going back for decades. A law enacted in 2001 allowed convicts to petition courts to have old evidence like rape kits tested using modern DNA science. That alone unleashed a flood of requests. Judges, however, could turn down these requests, and prosecutors often opposed them.

A Painstaking Process

Soon after Mr. Watkins was sworn in, DNA evidence cleared a man in a pending case. Disturbed, Mr. Watkins asked the Innocence Project of Texas to begin reviewing all DNA requests, even those that had been rejected previously. The non-profit group is affiliated with the Innocence Project, a national organization that works with inmates who are trying to prove they were wrongly convicted. In May 2007, Mr. Watkins hired Mike Ware, a longtime criminal-defense lawyer and law professor, to set up and run a formal unit inside his office to conduct investigations and order tests.

Reviewing these cases is a painstaking process, in which DNA testing is usually just one step. There are files to pore through and witnesses and victims to re-interview. Each case can take as long as a year to complete. Then there's the matter of finding the real perpetrator if a conviction is overturned.

"Many times, you bring these cases to district attorneys and they say, 'You can't go see my file. I won't do anything.' There's a knee-jerk reluctance to revisit anything," says Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project. He thinks this will eventually change, and that Dallas County's aggressive approach will serve as a model for others. "Watkins takes the view that if he can correct a wrongful conviction, that's a good thing." Dallas County has had more exonerations than any other county in the country, according to the Innocence Project.

At a recent meeting in Mr. Watkins's office on the top floor of the hulking brown criminal courthouse near downtown Dallas, prosecutors debated which labs to hire and which DNA testing techniques to use for a particular case.

Mr. Watkins, who is 6 feet 5 inches tall, slouched in a chair, fidgeting with a rubber band around his wrist and asking the occasional question.

"How long did this guy stay in jail?"

"Did he go to trial or did he plead?"

"Can we find out who did it?"

Mr. Watkins says he doesn't believe in most instances that his predecessors deliberately convicted the innocent. But in some of the cases he has looked at, he says, "it's pretty evident the person didn't do it, and you have to wonder what was going through the prosecutor's mind at the time."

Such statements infuriate some former prosecutors. "These cases were prosecuted just like they were in New York and California," says Mr. Shook, the former chief assistant district attorney. "It wasn't a situation of 'Let's just get 'em whether they are innocent or not.' "

Most of the exoneration cases date from a time before DNA science existed, says Mr. Shook, and reflect the problem with relying on eye-witness identifications, rather than a rush to judgment on the prosecutor's part.

Longtime county commissioner Kenneth Mayfield, a Republican and former prosecutor from the days of Henry Wade, says defense lawyers and the Innocence Project could handle the DNA cases without the help of the district attorney's office. That could save taxpayers the nearly $500,000 a year that the county added to Mr. Watkins's $36 million budget at a time when many departments' budgets are under strain, he says.

But for Frederick Heath, Mr. Watkins's work is a worthy investment. The pastor of the Eighth Street Baptist Church in suburban Grand Prairie, Texas, Mr. Heath served as foreman on the jury that convicted James Curtis Giles for rape, assault and robbery in 1983. Mr. Giles was cleared last year by DNA testing soon after Mr. Watkins was sworn in. It was the case that prompted the district attorney to establish the Conviction Integrity Unit.

Rev. Heath says the jury was compelled by the fact that the victim identified Mr. Giles in a photo array. He now regrets the verdict and says "no one in his right mind" would want to put an innocent man in prison.

The pastor didn't vote for Mr. Watkins in 2006, but says he likely will in the future: "He's doing what every DA should do."