An ex-detective’s overturned murder cases cost New York $110 million

A single New York City police detective accused of closing murder cases by fabricating false witness statements and extorting confessions has cost taxpayers $110 million in settlements to more than a dozen people whose convictions were destroyed after some spent decades in prison.

People investigated by former Detective Louis N. Scarcella have already received a total of $73.1 million in settlements from New York City and another $36.9 million from the state, according to the city and state comptroller’s offices. Payouts are expected to rise by tens of millions more as the men acquitted last year of burning a subway token attendant alive in 1995 have filed claims against the state.

The $110 million went to 14 different defendants, including a woman who died a few years after her release, a man who was just 14 when he was arrested on murder charges, and a man whose settlement went to his mother because he was getting older. the prison died. 37. One man, released from prison after 23 years, suffered a serious heart attack just two days later.

Mr. Scarcella has not been charged with any crime. But no other New York Police Department officer has ever come close to costing taxpayers so much, attorneys involved in the cases say. Wrongful conviction experts say the amount is “mind-boggling” and that Scarcella joins just a handful of other police officers in Chicago and Philadelphia accused of rigging dozens of cases costing millions.

In New York, a city with 36,000 police officers, data show that Mr. Scarcella’s cases represent about 15 percent of the nearly $500 million the city spent on overturned convictions between 2014 and 2022. The city often settles out of court for the possibility of a larger payout at trial.

“While many police officers in New York history have worked excessive overtime, no police officer in New York history and possibly the history of policing has cost taxpayers more than $100 million for misconduct,” said Ronald Kuby , a civil official. rights attorney who has won settlements in three Scarcella cases. “And there is more to come.”

Mr. Scarcella, now 72, was a homicide detective in Brooklyn North in the 1980s and 1990s, when the crack epidemic sent the city’s homicide rate soaring. Scarcella, a cigar-smoking legend known as “the closer” who retired in 1999, had a reputation for solving murder cases that stood in the way of his colleagues. By his own count, he presided over at least 175 cases and assisted with another 175 cases.

A Navy veteran who rose to fame as a carnival barker in Coney Island, he joined the police force in 1973, following in his father’s footsteps. His confidence and swagger landed him on “Dr. Phil,” where he bragged about his ability to extract confessions from suspects. But lawyers and even some colleagues wondered about his methods.

For years, lawyers including Mr. Kuby accused him of coaching witnesses, sometimes under threat, and not only extracting false confessions but fabricating them. Confessions that defendants later denied in several cases sometimes contained identical language, The New York Times found.

Police and court records documented how witnesses changed their accounts after Mr. Scarcella met with them.

But Mr. Scarcella’s work did not come under public fire until 2013, after a witness came forward to say that a detective told him which suspect to pick from the police lineup in the 1990 murder of a Brooklyn rabbi. By then, that suspect, David Ranta, had already spent more than twenty years in prison for the murder. The unnamed detective was widely believed to be Mr. Scarcella, who led the lineup. As the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office investigated the case, every aspect was unraveled.

The district attorney’s investigation found that Mr. Scarcella and his partner Stephen W. Chmil let violent criminals escape from prison to smoke crack cocaine and visit prostitutes in exchange for framing Mr. Ranta. More witnesses recanted, and evidence showed that Mr. Scarcella had investigated another suspect — who bore a striking resemblance to Mr. Ranta — but had not filed any paperwork on it.

After Mr. Ranta’s release in March 2013, an investigation by The Times revealed that Mr. Scarcella had repeatedly turned to a particular woman — who was addicted to crack cocaine — to testify in his murder trials. Only then did the district attorney’s office agree to investigate all of the detective’s murder cases in which he testified and there was a guilty verdict. Dozens of prisoners began filing motions to have their cases dismissed.

(Mr. Ranta was the first to receive a settlement: $6.4 million from the city and another $2 million from the state.)

Mr. Scarcella and his lawyers did not respond to messages seeking comment. In previous interviews and in court, Mr. Scarcella has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. He has said that Charles J. Hynes, Brooklyn’s former chief prosecutor, agreed in 2013 to review Mr. Scarcella’s cases only because he was up for re-election and under intense pressure. Mr Hynes lost the election by a huge margin and died in 2019 at the age of 83.

“I wouldn’t have been able to stay with my family for the last 30, 40 years if I had hurt someone,” Mr. Scarcella said in a 2013 interview with The Times. “I’ve never messed up a lineup in my life. I have never made a false confession.”

Eighteen people whose convictions were related to the detective’s work have had their convictions overturned after serving a total of 268 years in prison, police said. National exemption register.

To date, cases related to Mr. Scarcella account for about a third of the three dozen cases that the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Conviction Review Unit has sought to clear, and another handful of his cases have been thrown out by judges, Oren said Yaniv, a spokesperson for the Public Prosecution Service. the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office.

Nicholas Paolucci, a spokesman for the city’s legal department, said the settlements, which came from taxpayers, provided a measure of justice.

“The city has been burdened with costly settlements as a result of the work this investigator performed in the 1980s and 1990s,” Mr. Paolucci said. “The settlements provide a measure of justice to those wrongfully convicted and also resolve cases in the best interests of the city.”

Legal experts say that while the settlements are important and help get people’s lives back on track, they do nothing to prevent further misconduct.

“I actually think it’s really problematic because while it helps bring some measure of justice to the wrongfully convicted person who has been harmed by the system, it does nothing to address accountability because the taxpayers are the ones who bear the impact,” said Vanessa Potkin, director of special litigation for the Innocence Project, who was not involved in the Scarcella cases. Mr. Scarcella is still collecting his pension.

Vanessa Gathers received nearly $4 million after serving 10 years for manslaughter in a case in which prosecutors said her confession was “coaxed” by Mr. Scarcella. Mrs. Gathers died this summer at the age of 65. Her lawyer, Lisa Cahill, said Ms Gathers had missed the first decade of her granddaughter’s life and had lived with shame for years.

Ms. Cahill added that while the settlements in Mr. Scarcella’s cases may sound significant, the total “probably does not even come close to the true cost of his crimes, which are by definition generational.”

“Money doesn’t magically make these scars, the bitterness, the shame and the questions go away overnight,” she said.

Derrick Hamilton, who received $6.6 million from the city after 23 years in prison, now works on wrongful conviction cases for Cardozo Law School and co-founded an advocacy group called Families and Friends of the Wrongfully Convicted.

He led the charge against Mr. Scarcella even while he was behind bars, and said more defendants were still fighting to have their cases heard.

“It hasn’t stopped,” Mr Hamilton said said. “They are still coming.”