The Brooklyn district attorney said on Friday that his office will ask a judge to overturn the sentences of three men who spent decades in prison for the death of a subway ticket clerk in 1995. , saying they were the victims of a police detective who forced a false confession.
The men, James Irons, Thomas Malik and Vincent Ellerbe, were found guilty as teenagers and were each sentenced to 25 years in prison. Ellerbe was released on parole in 2020, but the other two men remain in custody, according to a news release from the district attorney, Eric Gonzalez.
“The findings of a comprehensive, multi-year re-investigation of this case make it impossible for us to stand against the convictions of those charged,” Mr. Gonzalez said in a press release. The men will appear in court on Friday afternoon.
Mr. Gonzalez attributed the poor convictions to the fault of the case’s lead detectives, Louis Scarcella and Stephen Chmil. He said Mr Scarcella pressured juvenile defendants to confess, failed to disclose the shaky nature of witness identities and ignored factual inconsistencies in confessions and evidence.
Mr. Scarcella, who retired in 1999, has handled some of the highest-ranking criminals in Brooklyn in a unit that oversees more than 500 murders a year.
His reputation crumbled after one of his most famous investigations – in the murder of a Hasidic rabbi in Williamsburg – was cleared up in 2013 and defense attorneys allege he framed a suspect. Since then, more than a dozen convictions he helped secure have been handed down. Mr Scarcella has repeatedly said he did nothing wrong.
The murder of subway worker Harry Kaufman, 50, is dramatic even in a city then overrun with crime. Mr. Kaufman was irrigated with flammable liquid inside a token booth in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn that had been burned.
The liquid ignited with such force that the booth exploded, spewing broken glass, charred insulation and shredded wood all over the Kingston-Throop Avenue station. Police officers found an M-1 carbine near the wreckage. Mr. Kaufman died a few days later from his wounds.
On Friday, an attorney for Mr. Irons, David Shanies, called the pending pardons “the culmination of a years-long process” by the three men’s advocates and by the defendants. investigator with the Sentencing Review Unit at the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, which has overseen the reversals of 33 convictions since 2014.
Ronald L. Kuby, a veteran defense attorney who represented Mr. Malik at the initial trial and is representing Mr. Malik and Mr. Ellerbe in the pardon proceedings, said in an interview that the the original injustice was that “so far Scarcella is the hero and I am the villain. “
