What you are trying to achieve is forbidden by JPA spec. single-valued path expressions are valid in select clause but collection-valued path expressions are not valid. See chapter 4.8 of the spec. I cite Pro JPA book:
The following query is illegal: SELECT d.employees FROM Department d
The same is applies for Criteria queries. Why not just query for Unit and call getDocumentList()?
EDIT: You can also try to reverse the query:
SELECT d FROM Document d WHERE d.unit.id=:id