Long-Term Confinement
PRISONS ARE A part of America’s mythology. The names, the tales, the legends that swirl about them are the common property of schoolboys and scholars, the stuff of which novels, ballads, and a whole generation of movies were made. We are a nation whose greatest pride is the idea of our own freedom. We will make all variety of sacrifice, endure any hardship, and even surrender a measure of that freedom if circumstances are such, but we will never let go of the idea that we are a free people, for that idea itself is the nutrient that staffs the American Dream. It is no accident that America was the first country to make imprisonment—the loss of freedom—the standard punishment for convicted criminals. And it should come as no surprise that the United States has the largest prison population of any country in the world.
As of 2013, there were approximately 2.4 million people behind bars in the US, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies. Second was China with about 1.6 million although its total population was more than four times that of the United States. While the US represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it houses 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. The US also leads the world in the rate of incarceration with about 716 per 100,000 of the national population. The rate in China is 121 people per 100,000.
Of course, the prison population is apt to grow a degree or two as states abolish capital punishment. In the past ten years, five states— Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, and New Mexico—have brought the total to eighteen states as well as the District of Columbia. In Nebraska, the legislature voted to abolish capital punishment in June 2015, but four months later a petition drive by proponents of the death penalty mandated that a referendum on the issue be held in November 2016. In addition, Kansas and New Hampshire have carried out no executions since 1976, which amounts to a de facto moratorium on the death penalty. Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania declared a moratorium on all executions in February 2015. A number of states—Tennessee, Ohio, Georgia, Oklahoma, Florida, and Alabama—had placed a stay on the death penalty, which was lifted in June 2015 when the Supreme Court voted 5-4 that lethal injection did not violate the constitution.
But as the number of executions declines, prison terms necessarily grow longer. Life without the possibility of parole, or LWOP as it is called, invariably is the sentence that replaces death and helps account for the growth of the prison population. The exceptional length of sentences imposed, again longer than any other industrialized nation, came into focus gradually as a number of long-term prisoners were exonerated after serving unconscionably long terms—twenty years, thirty years—sometimes even longer. In some jurisdictions, the longer sentences appeared to be accompanied by an unusually high rate of conviction. In Brooklyn, New York, it was exceptionally high, especially in the precinct of a detective by the name of Louis Scarcella.
The Scarcella Factor
New York
By all accounts, Louis J. Scarcella was a homicide detective of legendary dimensions. Scarcella, who retired in 2000 after serving for twenty-six years on the New York City police force, earned the Chief of Detectives’ Award for Outstanding Police Investigation several times and was deemed by his colleagues in Brooklyn’s 90th Precinct to have no equal when it came to closing a case. More often than not, Scarcella got a confession from the suspect with a conviction to follow. He maintained his status as a cop’s cop thirteen years into his retirement, but in 2013 things started to go wrong. In just a few years Scarcella was accused of being a “dirty cop” who framed innocent people, using every illegal trick at his disposal, from forced confessions to witness tampering, not excluding physical abuse that resonated from the long-ago past when the so-called “third degree” was looked upon as standard practice.
By the spring of 2015, more than a dozen of Scarcella’s cases had either been overturned or ended in exoneration of those convicted. It appeared to be just the beginning. Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson had ordered the review of a total of seventy-one convictions involving Scarcella. It all began in March 2013 when a man convicted of murdering a rabbi was released from prison after serving more than twenty-three years.
David Ranta
New York
In 1991, David Ranta was convicted of fatally shooting Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger, a Holocaust survivor and prominent Hasidic rabbi in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The shooting occurred in the early morning hours of February 8, 1990, in a robbery gone wrong. Chaim Weinberger, a jewel courier, was hurrying toward his car carrying a suitcase filled with fifty pounds of uncut jewels worth some $250,000 when he noticed that he was being followed by a man with a pistol. Weinberger jumped into his car and sped away, knocking the gunman down as he fled. Rabbi Werzberger was nearby, warming up his own car, when the killer turned, shot him in the face, and took off in his car. Werzberger died four days later.
The police had no viable suspects until two men being held on criminal charges in other cases offered up the name of Ranta, said to have been an unemployed drug addict. One of the men was a convicted rapist, the other a convicted drug user with five open robbery cases pending. Both reportedly implicated Ranta in an effort to get a break on their legal troubles. Scarcella hunted down Ranta, who was then interrogated by Scarcella and his partner, Stephen Chmill. On the basis of their testimony and a purported signed confession, Ranta was convicted and sentenced to thirty-seven and a half years in prison. Twenty-three years later, he was released under the most unusual circumstances.
In 2013, Brooklyn prosecutors asked a judge to turn Ranta loose. After two decades of opposing Ranta’s appeals, Kings County (Brooklyn) district attorneys reevaluated the case and determined that he should never have been locked up. A recently formed Conviction Integrity Unit began reviewing the case in 2011, and events turned in Ranta’s favor when one of the witnesses who had testified against him—the convicted rapist—told investigators that Scarcella had coached him and suggested he identify Ranta from a police lineup. The detective, he said, had told him to “pick the guy with the big nose,” which happened to be Ranta. The other witness also recanted. All that was left now was the uncertain testimony of a young teenage boy who said he saw two suspicious-looking men sitting in a station wagon at the scene of the crime around the time Werzberger was shot, and a presumed confession Ranta had signed. The youth also said that he had been told to “pick the guy with the big nose.” As for the confession, Ranta had denied confessing right from the start. His statement was written on the face of a manila file folder which, he said, was blank when he signed it. He said he thought he was signing a form that would allow him to make a phone call. Following his release, Ranta agreed to a $6.4 million settlement from the City of New York.
The Ranta case, described in detail in an article written by Sean Flynn in the August 14, 2014 issue of GQ magazine, pried the lid off a Pandora’s box of tainted cases involving Detective Scarcella. Almost immediately, other inmates began insisting that they, too, had falsely confessed to crimes they had not committed under pressure of one sort or another applied by Scarcella. Reporters for The New York Times, poring over old court records, discovered that a number of presumed confessions in Scarcella’s cases began with similar terminology and sounded as if they had been composed by the same person. They also found that a crack-addicted prostitute by the name of Teresa Gomez was a key witness, sometimes the only witness, in six Scarcella cases. In May 2013, the DA’s office announced that it would review fifty-seven trial convictions of inmates arrested by Scarcella, and that number continued to grow.
Scarcella, retired more than thirteen years at the time of Ranta’s release and living on Staten Island, denied having framed anyone or forcing a confession. According to GQ, he told The New York Times: “I have to be a pretty smart guy to lock someone up, get it through the DA’s office, get it through a trial and jury, and convict a guy. I’m not that smart. It’s not a Louie Scarcella show.” But in a larger sense it was, and it was just beginning.
Derrick Hamilton
New York
By the spring of 2014 it had become an epidemic. Between March 2013 and April of the following year, The New York Times had, according to Sean Flynn, carried thirty-four articles dealing with Scarcella and his arrests. Ironically enough, it was a convict serving big time who was the first to notice a disturbing pattern in Scarcella’s arrests. He seemed to be involved in an unusually high number of cases in which those convicted claimed they had been coerced into confessing; also, the same eyewitness was used to provide critical testimony of their guilt. Derrick Hamilton, forty-nine years old, was convicted of murder in 1991 and sentenced to twenty-years-to-life in prison. As it happened, he served twenty-three years of that sentence, but while in prison he did not waste his time. He studied hard, and in the process of becoming a jailhouse lawyer he freed himself and turned the light on the corrupt practices of Detective Scarcella.
He was on parole for manslaughter when he was arrested and charged with the fatal shooting of a man by the name of Nathaniel Cash in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. He was clearly guilty of violating his parole at the time because Hamilton owned a hair salon in New Haven, Connecticut, and was not allowed out-of-state. What brought him to Brooklyn was a going-away party for a friend who was about to depart for prison on a drug conviction. The state’s chief eyewitness was the victim’s girlfriend, Jewel Smith, who initially told police she had not seen the shooting. Later, however, questioned by Scarcella, she said she had seen the murder and implicated Hamilton. She subsequently changed her story again, saying she had been pressured by Scarcella who threatened her with a charge of perjury and the possibility of jail time if she did not identify Hamilton. The defense countered her testimony with eight witnesses, including a former New Haven police officer, who testified that Hamilton was still in Connecticut at the time of the shooting, but it was of no help to Hamilton.
From the start, he had insisted on his innocence and was determined to prove it. The story of his autodidactic embrace of the law and his successful campaign to free himself is recounted by Stephanie Clifford in The New York Times, January 10, 2015.
Hamilton led a group of similarly inclined inmates which met weekly in the law library at the Auburn Correctional Facility in upstate New York. They called themselves the “actual innocence team.” Hamilton took a paralegal course while in prison and began researching his case on his own and with the help of outside lawyers. He got a job in Auburn’s law library where he met with other members of what became the “actual innocence team” who were working to overturn their convictions, many of which involved the detective work of Louis Scarcella. They organized themselves into an efficient work team.
Daniel Rincon, convicted of a 1991 quadruple murder in Manhattan, wrote the letters in which he would summarize the cases in concise narratives and send them to journalists and lawyers.
Shabaka Shakur, convicted of a 1998 double murder in Brooklyn which Scarcella investigated, was the researcher. He looked up case law and crafted the legal arguments.
Nelson Cruz, convicted of a Brooklyn murder in 1998 in a Scarcella-Chmil case, was the artist. He would sketch out crime scenes indicating where witnesses and victims stood.
One afternoon a week they would write their names on the law library sign-in sheet and take their seats at tables with a security officer stationed above them. Hamilton would put up a chalkboard and distribute handouts that summarized what they would work on that day. They received instructions on how to use the legal-research service Westlaw and proceeded to draft legal motions, letters, or responses to arguments. Hamilton’s efforts finally bore fruit when he was granted parole in December 2011.
His fortunes improved even more in 2014 when Kenneth Thompson was elected as Brooklyn district attorney. Thompson, who had earned a reputation as a champion of civil rights, defeated Charles J. Hynes in the Democratic primary, having run on a platform of judicial reform. He wasted no time in showing he was as good as his word. Shortly after taking office, he formed the Conviction Review Unit and ordered the review of around one hundred cases where questionable conduct was involved. Hamilton’s was one of the first cases to be investigated. The Conviction Review Unit found that the forensic evidence, such as the path of bullets and where the victim’s bleeding occurred, was inconsistent with the testimony of the eyewitness and determined that she was not credible. Members of the unit journeyed to North Carolina to interview Jewel Smith and, according to prosecutor Mark Hale, they found her to be “unreliable, incredible and for the most part untruthful. They had to depend on her credibility to convict Mr. Hamilton,” he said, and as a result, “his due process rights were violated.” On January 9, 2015, Hamilton was exonerated.
From the time of his parole, Hamilton has been active in campaigning to root out cases of wrongful conviction. On a spring morning in 2014, he championed a massive rally at the steps of City Hall in Lower Manhattan. Most in attendance were ex-cons and the friends and relatives of those still in prison who claimed to be innocent. Hamilton passed out black baseball caps with white stitching that read “wrongfully convicted” above the brim and “victims of detective scarcella” on the right temple. The rally was organized by Lonnie Soury, a consultant who works on cases of wrongful conviction and false confessions. At the rally, Soury described Scarcella as “a symptom of a deadly disease.” The real problem, he said, was not one detective, but the sprawling system that supported and rewarded him.
The Three Brothers
New York
Three half-brothers hold the distinction of being the first of Scarcella’s presumed “victims” to be exonerated. Two of the brothers were convicted as accomplices in the same murder, the third in a separate one. But they all had two things in common: They were arrested by Scarcella and convicted on the basis of testimony offered by Teresa Gomez.
The 1985 murder of Ronnie Durant had gone unsolved for two years until Detective Scarcella entered the case. Magically, a witness by the name of Teresa Gomez emerged who said she saw two of the brothers—Alvena Jennette and Darryl Austin—rob and kill a man. Durant’s nephew told police that Jennette and Austin had committed the crime, but two other witnesses told a different story. They said that although the two men were at the scene, they had nothing to do with the shooting. The statements of those two witnesses remained secret for nearly thirty years.
The third brother, Robert Hill, was implicated in another murder about two years later. A drug dealer by the name of Donald Manboardes was murdered in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. A tip from none other than Teresa Gomez led to Hill’s arrest, but he was released after being questioned. A week later, Gomez entered the scene again. Still insisting that Hill had killed Manboardes, she now told Scarcella that Hill was also responsible for the murder of one Bruce Siblings in December 1986, a month before Manboardes was slain. With Scarcella in control, Hill was arrested and charged with both crimes. Now on a roll, Scarcella began looking into the murder of Durant. With Gomez acting as his virtual partner, Scarcella arrested Jennette and Austin and charged them with Durant’s slaying.
In 1988, Hill went on trial for the Siblings murder. At the trial, Gomez testified that she was hiding in a closet in a crack house and, watching through a keyhole, had seen Hill put a pillow over Siblings’s head and shoot him. The defense called to the stand an investigator who had visited the scene of the shooting and testified there was no keyhole in the door of the closet through which Gomez could have witnessed the shooting.
Hill was acquitted in the Siblings case and was then tried for the Manboardes murder. Gomez again was on hand to deliver her version of events. In the Siblings trial, she had testified under cross-examination that she had not seen that shooting, but now she told the jury she had seen Hill and Manboardes arguing on the street about drugs. Then, she said, Hill drew a pistol, shot Manboardes and, together with another man, dragged him into a taxi. The taxi driver said that a man who claimed to be Manboardes’s brother did in fact put him in the cab and directed the driver to take Manboardes to a hospital. But now, the driver said he was unable to identify the man. Another witness for the prosecution said she had heard Hill, in a conversation with an acquaintance, say he had killed one man and was not afraid to kill again. It was later revealed that Hill’s attorney was told that three other witnesses who were present at the shooting would testify that while they had seen Hill put Manboardes in the taxi, he was not the shooter. However, none of the three was called by the defense to testify. Hill was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to eighteen years-to-life in prison.
Shortly after Hill’s trial was concluded, Jenette and Austin went on trial together for the murder of Durant. Both were convicted almost entirely on the basis of Gomez’s testimony. Police notes indicating that a witness to the shooting said neither man was the gunman were not shared with the defense. Jenette and Austin were convicted of second-degree murder and given the same sentence as Hill.
More than twenty years after the fact, the cases of the three half-brothers came under the scrutiny of DA Thompson’s Conviction Review Unit. The investigation of Scarcella’s involvement was given impetus by a report in The New York Times accusing Scarcella of misconduct in as many as fifty-seven cases involving fabricating evidence, coercing witnesses, and concealing evidence of defendants’ innocence. It was not long before the convictions Austin, Jennette, and Hill were overturned. In a statement on May 6, 2014, Thompson said: “Based on a comprehensive review of these cases, it is clear that testimony from the same problematic witness undermined the integrity of these convictions and resulted in an unfair trial for each of these defendants.”
In a rarely seen sequence of events, it was on the initiative of a motion by the district attorney’s office that charges against all three defendants were vacated and dismissed. Jennette had been paroled in 2007 after serving thirteen years of his sentence. Hill, who was scheduled to be paroled in less than a month, was released immediately after spending twenty-seven years in prison. It was too late for Austin. He died in prison in 2000 after serving thirteen years.
In June 2014, Hill and Jennette filed a lawsuit seeking $150 million from the City of New York, alleging that they had been framed by Scarcella. Austin’s mother filed a similar suit on behalf of his estate. In January 2015, the City agreed to settle the three claims for a total of $17 million. The money was distributed on the basis of time spent incarcerated: Hill received $7.5 million; Jennette, $6 million; and $3.85 million went to Austin’s estate.
Upon their release, Jennette reflected on their ordeal and told the Times in an interview: “The last time I saw my brother was at sentencing (twenty-seven years earlier); the next time I seen him was in a casket. This is the thing that really, really troubles me. He could not be here to share this. He was always optimistic that we would get out some day and that a wrong would be righted.”
Rosean S. Hargrave
New York
New ground was broken in the Scarcella saga in the spring of 2015. For the first time, his name was introduced in proceedings leading to the release of a man who had served twenty years in prison for a crime of which he was innocent. The 1991 crime was the fatal shooting of a correction officer, an offense which invariably is treated with more urgency than one involving a civilian. The accused, Rosean S. Hargrave, was given short shrift. He was arrested one day after the shooting and his trial lasted just two days. At the time of the murder, Hargrave was seventeen years old. Arrested with him was a fourteen-year-old youth by the name of John Dwayne Bunn.
The shooting occurred on the night of August 13, 1991. As the story unwound in trial testimony, Rolando Neischer and Robert E. Crosson, both probation correction officers, were sitting in a parked car in the Kingsborough housing projects in Brooklyn when two youths on bicycles approached the car and ordered them to get out in an attempted carjacking. A gun battle ensued in which Neischer was fatally shot. Crosson, who survived, initially described the assailants as “light-skinned” black males in their twenties. It was a description that fit neither of the defendants. All the same, Scarcella, presumably acting on an anonymous tip, arrested Hargrave and Bunn the following day. Crosson then identified both boys as the killers, and it was his testimony on which the defendants were convicted. Ballistics and body fluid evidence recovered from the scene were not tested. Fingerprints that were found inside the car did not match those of either youth. Still, both were convicted without much fanfare. The defense had little to offer. Such evidence that might have helped their case was withheld by the prosecution. Hargrave was sentenced to thirty years-to-life. Sentenced as a juvenile, Bunn was given nine years-to-life.
It was the investigation of Scarcella’s cases that brought attention to Hargrave’s plight. After twenty years, he was still under lock and key in the Southport Correctional Facility, a maximum-security state prison reserved for inmates with severe behavioral problems. Bunn, turned down for parole three times, was finally released in 2009. The New York Times, which had been conducting its own investigation, included Hargrave’s case in a series of articles examining Scarcella’s record. In September 2014, a hearing was held on a defense motion to vacate Hargrave’s conviction. It was here that Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice ShawnDya Simpson delivered a scathing critique of Scarcella’s role in the defendant’s conviction.
Justice Simpson began by noting that Scarcella had become something of “a legend” for his record of convictions. But, she said, “There’s an old saying, when it’s too good to be true, it usually is.” She then cited five previous wrongful convictions in which Scarcella played a key role.
“It has been established,” she said, “that the cases of David Ranta, Derrick Hamilton, Robert Hill, Alvena Jennette, and Darryl Austin were comprised of the intentional acts of Detective Scarcella, which led to the extinguishment of the judgment and sentence in those cases by the decision of the district attorney’s office. In each of those cases, Detective Scarcella procured identification testimony that was false and predominantly the basis for their conviction.” She went on to say, “The scant evidence that convicted the defendant makes the new-found wrongdoing of Detective Scarcella significant.” Since the end of the trial, she noted, “potentially exculpatory evidence” had been destroyed, further undermining the possibility that Mr. Hargrave could find justice.
The hearing came to a moment of TV-like drama when Scarcella took the stand to testify before a muted courtroom. His testimony, however, offered little in the way of new insights. He began by telling the court that he had played only “a minor role” in the Hargrave case. According to Times reporter Stephanie Clifford, he uttered some version of “I don’t recall” more than twenty times. In about an hour’s worth of testimony, he emphasized that he did not work alone on investigations and that the prosecutor shared the responsibility. Under cross-examination by defense attorney Pierre Sussman, he said that the practice in Brooklyn at the time was for prosecutors to authorize all arrests. Questioned about his consistent use of Teresa Gomez as a witness, Scarcella said, “The district attorney interviewed her extensively and used her as a witness.” Detectives were told to “bring it to the district attorney’s office.” Sussman asked if Gomez was a crack abuser and if Scarcella had given her money and food. He answered “yes” to each question. Noting that Scarcella shared a New York Police Department card with his partner, Stephen Chmil, he asked if it was true that the words “adventurers, marathoners, regular guys, and mountain climbers” were printed in the corner. Scarcella responded, “It’s a fact that three of four things we stated were definitely true. The mountain climbers part of it was because it sounded good. It was a funny card.” The hearing ended on a potentially explosive note when Hargrave and Bunn followed Scarcella into the hallway. “Scarcella,” one of them shouted, “why you do it, man? Why you frame me?”
In April 2015, Judge Simpson ordered Hargrave to be released from prison. In summary, she observed that the defense has not been able to conduct its own investigation as the evidence “cannot now be located and may have been destroyed.” She further noted that the only evidence the prosecution relied on was the eyewitness testimony of the victim’s partner which, she continued, could have been supported or contradicted had the evidence available been tested. She also cited the brevity of the legal proceeding. “It appeared,” she said “to be a summarily tried case, with missing evidence and a rushed process.” She concluded, “The finding of this court is that retired Detective Louis Scarcella was, at the time of the investigation, engaged in false and misleading practices. The pattern and practices of Detective Scarcella, which manifested disregard to the rules, law and truth, undermine our judicial system.”
The relation of Scarcella’s activities to the structure of the criminal justice system as a whole was summarized nicely by David A. Love on the Grio website:
Police officers such as Louis Scarcella give good cops a bad name, this much is certain, but he is merely the tip of the iceberg. Remember that such individuals are allowed to operate in the criminal justice system because they are part of a larger web of corruption. The Detective Scarcellas of the world are unmonitored, given the reign to commit their wrongdoing, and are even awarded medals for it.
Moreover, Scarcella never convicted or sentenced innocent people; he merely arrested them. And he was on the force at a time of high crime, the crack epidemic, when public officials wanted to show they were taking bold steps to control crime, even if they were secretly framing people. Dirty cops, corrupt prosecutors and unscrupulous judges join forces with ineffective defense lawyers and gullible juries to create this problem.
Shabaka Shakur
New York
By 2015, the name Louis Scarcella had become part of the lexicon of New York’s criminal justice system. It was as if his specter inhabited every space of what was commonly known as the halls of justice, leaving behind the taint of moral corruption. Curiously enough, it was Scarcella’s reputation for manipulating the truth that allowed Shabaka Shakur to go free after being wrongly imprisoned for twenty-seven years. But then that just leveled the scales because it was Scarcella’s apparent penchant for framing the innocent that had sent him to prison in the first place.
Shakur was convicted in 1989 of murdering two of his acquaintances—Stephen Hewitt and Fitzgerald Clarke—the previous year following a dispute over payments on a car. The basis for his conviction was a statement that Scarcella said he took from Shakur which said in part: “They were going to kill me. I know C [Clarke] and Steve for about two years. They deserve to die.” Shakur denied ever having made the statement. The only eyewitness was Clarke’s brother who fingered the defendant as the killer. Although the evidence was slight, Shakur was convicted in a three-day trial and sentenced to two consecutive terms of twenty years to life.
The case came under review some twenty-five years later as part of Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth P. Thompson’s investigation of Scarcella’s cases. In 2014, Thompson’s Conviction Review Unit looked into the case and decided to uphold the conviction, saying that the work of the police and prosecution was not faulty and that the evidence was properly handled at the trial. A year later, with Ronald L. Kuby and Leah Busby serving as defense counsel, Shakur was granted a hearing at which Justice Desmond A. Green, of State Supreme Court, ordered a new trial for Shakur, saying there was “a reasonable probability that the alleged confession of defendant was indeed fabricated.” The judge went on to say that Scarcella’s account of how he got the confession “is particularly troubling and causes serious doubts.” He cited in particular Scarcella’s “propensity to embellish or fabricate.”
In his motion for a new trial, Shakur presented two alibi witnesses who did not testify at his trial. Justice Green noted that the two witnesses “would have impacted the decision of the jury in favor of the defendant.” He concluded: Scarcella “did not show defendant a statement and ask him to read it. He did not read a statement to defendant. He did not ask defendant if he was willing to be videotaped. No one from the district attorney’s office came to the precinct with video equipment to talk to the defendant. According to defendant, the next time he saw Detective Scarcella was at the pre-trial hearings.” While finding Scarcella’s statements to be unreliable, Judge Green did not find Shakur’s to be entirely trustworthy either. He said he was unconvinced that the defendant’s claim of actual innocence was necessarily supported by the facts.
A day after a new trial was ordered, DA Thompson said he would not retry or appeal the case. “Our ability to retry has been compromised by a number of factors,” the judge said, “including the death of the main eyewitness (Clarke’s brother). Therefore, I have decided not to prolong Mr. Shakur’s incarceration with a lengthy appeal or retrial and will consent to his release.”
The following day, the indictment against Shakur was dismissed and he walked free.
Upon his client’s release, Kuby, said, “Twenty-seven long years. That’s a long time to take away from a human being. It’s a tragedy, but an avoidable tragedy. For every wrongful conviction, there is a guilty person walking around free. There’s an innocent person whose life has been destroyed. And there’s a justice system that has lost some of its legitimacy.”
Martin Tankleff
New York
Scarcella was hardly unique. In one of the most bizarre cases in recent history, a corrupt cop railroaded a seventeen-year-old youth into confessing, albeit briefly, to the murder of his parents. The young man, Martin Tankleff, ended up spending seventeen years in the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, on not a shred of evidence except for a trumped-up confession. The case received nationwide publicity. It was the subject of a book published twenty years after the crime and several television specials, including an episode of 48 Hours on CBS. Right from the start, the story had all the subterranean shades of doubt and wonder that would have been nutrient for the imagination of Franz Kafka.
Martin Tankleff awoke one morning in his comfortable home in Suffolk County, Long Island, to find his parents had been murdered. It was September 6, 1988, and Martin was preparing to begin his senior year in high school. Events intervened. Moving through the silence of the house, he found his father, Seymour, slouched in a chair in his home office, unconscious and bleeding heavily. After dialing 911, he found his mother, Arlene, lying dead in her bedroom. She had been stabbed and bludgeoned brutally.
When the police arrived, it did not take them long to finger Marty as the prime suspect. The lead detective, James McCready, did not believe Marty could have slept through the mayhem undisturbed. He also said the son did not look properly aggrieved at the sudden loss of his parents. McCready went for the quick kill. He took Marty to the stationhouse where he was interrogated without a lawyer or an adult present. He was not read his Miranda Rights. The detective suggested that Marty had blacked out and did not recall committing the murders. To clinch his case, McCready told the suspect that his father had come out of his coma briefly and named his son as the killer. Obviously stung and well out of his depth in dealing with the aggressive questioning, Marty hesitantly confessed, wondering whether he indeed might have blacked out; then, deciding otherwise, he recanted almost immediately.
In the meantime, McCready had drawn up a written confession that Marty never signed but that was nonetheless introduced by the prosecution at his trial. There was no physical evidence. The defendant’s oral confession was elicited by McCready on the strength of a flat-out lie. In fact, Seymour Tankleff had never regained consciousness before dying. Martin was framed by a corrupt cop, run through a morally tarnished criminal justice system, convicted of murdering both parents, and sentenced to two twenty-five-year terms.
Eager for a quick resolution to the case and apparently indifferent to the call of justice, the police never so much as considered the possible involvement of the most obvious suspect. The Tankleffs had hosted a card party on the evening of the murders. Among the guests was Seymour’s business partner, a man by the name of Jerry Steuerman who owed him half a million dollars. Steuerman, who was believed to have criminal connections, was the last to leave the party. Shortly after the killings, he faked his own death and fled to California using an alias. But none of this was revealed until 2004, fourteen years after Martin was convicted, when he was finally granted an evidentiary hearing.
From the time he was arrested, Martin had the unwavering support of dozens of friends and relatives, including the sisters and brother of his parents. He also attracted the pro bono efforts of a number of attorneys, including former prosecutors; a private investigator; a retired New York City homicide detective; and several organizations devoted to weeding out cases of wrongful conviction, among them Barry Scheck and the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. Dozens of witnesses testified on his behalf at the hearing. It was there that Steuerman was first identified as the overlooked suspect.
According to defense witness testimony, Steuerman’s son had sold cocaine out of the bagel stores owned by the partners. The son’s enforcer had bragged over the years about having taken part in the Tankleff murders. The drug enforcer’s records contained the name of an accomplice who admitted having been the getaway driver on the night of the murders. Perhaps most tellingly, Tankleff presented evidence, unchallenged by the prosecution, that McCready and Steuerman were acquaintances and business associates prior to the murders. McCready had denied any association with Steuerman during the trial. McCready was further discredited when a scathing report by the New York State Investigation Commission on corruption and misconduct in Suffolk County law enforcement disclosed that he had perjured himself in a previous murder trial.
On December 21, 2007, the Appellate Court vacated Tankleff’s conviction and ordered a retrial “to be conducted with all convenient speed.” Six days later, Martin was released following a bail hearing. On January 12, 2008, then Governor Eliot Spitzer appointed Attorney General Andrew Cuomo (who would later replace Spitzer as governor) as special prosecutor in the case. On June 30, Cuomo’s office announced that it would not retry Tankleff, citing insufficient evidence to prove his guilt. A month later, all charges against him were dismissed. He later was awarded $3.4 million by the state after settling his wrongful conviction lawsuit.
By the time he was released, Tankleff had spent nearly half his life in prison. Now, at age thirty-six, he was ready to start anew. The law, which had betrayed him in his youth, would become his accomplice as he approached middle age. He earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Hofstra University and a law degree in 2014 from Touro Law School on Long Island. He soon joined with Barry Scheck in forming a Long Island organization that would mirror the work of the Innocence Project on behalf of those wrongfully convicted. Scheck, noting that he is “tremendously proud” of Tankleff, said: “The terrible injustice he endured has no doubt given him a unique understanding of the flaws in the system that will make him a powerful advocate for those trying to prove their innocence. As he knows all too well, we can certainly use more great litigators willing to take on this extremely difficult work.”
Married now and the father of an eighteen-year-old stepdaughter, Marty has even grander plans for the future. In May 2015, he announced that he was considering running for Congress in his Long Island district against the Republican Peter King who has held the seat for more than twenty years. He would run as an Independent rather than as a Democrat. “That way,” he said, “my allegiance is to the people; it’s not to a political party … Think about the impact I could have on the criminal justice system by being in Congress.”
Ricky Jackson
Ohio
Ricky Jackson holds the record. The fifty-seven-year-old exoneree owns the unenviable distinction of serving the longest time in prison—thirty-nine years, three months, and nine days—of any defendant exonerated in US history. Jackson and two other men—the brothers Wiley and Ronnie Bridgeman—were sentenced to life terms for the 1975 murder of a money-order salesman outside a convenience store in Cleveland. The Bridgeman brothers were eventually paroled, Wiley in 2002, Ronnie a year later. Jackson was not released until he was exonerated in 2014. All three men were convicted solely on the eyewitness testimony of a twelve-year-old schoolboy who, as it developed, was not an eyewitness at all.
When fifty-nine-year-old Harold Franks left the neighborhood store on May 19, he was confronted by two men who demanded he turn over his briefcase. When he resisted, one of his assailants clubbed him on the head with a pipe and splashed acid in his face. The other robber then shot him twice in the chest and fired a second shot through the store’s glass front door which struck the fifty-eight-year-old co-owner of the store, Ann Robinson, who survived. The two thugs fled with the briefcase containing $425 in a green car that was parked a short distance down the block.
A few days later, twelve-year-old Eddie Vernon went to the police and told them he was on a school bus near the scene when the murder occurred and that he knew who the culprits were. He identified Jackson, eighteen at the time, as the shooter and the Bridgeman brothers as accomplices. None of them had a criminal record. All three were arrested six days after the crime. They were charged with aggravated murder, aggravated attempted murder, and aggravated robbery. They went on trial separately in August. Vernon’s testimony was the pivot of the state’s case, but it was somewhat flawed. Initially, he had told police that he was on the bus coming home from school when he saw the two men attack Franks as he got out of his car and walked to the store. At the trial he said he had already gotten off the bus when he saw Franks attacked as he left the store. Ann Robinson testified that she was unable to identify the robbers.
The defense seemed to have a stronger case. A sixteen-year-old neighborhood girl testified that she had entered the store just before the attack took place and saw two men just outside. Neither of the men, she said, was Jackson or the Bridgeman brothers. Several of Vernon’s schoolmates who were on the bus with him said they had heard gunshots, but none of them was able to see who did the shooting. Despite the frailty of the prosecution’s case, the three men were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
The case was already thirty-six years old and Jackson well into his middle years when it came to the attention of Kyle Swenson, a reporter for Cleveland Scene magazine. In a detailed article published in 2011, Swenson noted the inconsistencies in Vernon’s testimony, the absence of any physical evidence, and that Vernon had been paid fifty dollars by Ann Robinson’s husband in exchange for his testimony. Swenson contacted Vernon and asked for an interview, but Vernon demurred. Ever persistent, Swenson reached out to Vernon’s pastor, Arthur Singleton, and sent him a copy of the article. Singleton approached Vernon but without success. In 2013, Singleton visited Vernon, now in his fifties, in a hospital, where he was being treated for high blood pressure. Later, in a sworn affidavit, Singleton said he again asked Vernon about the article. This time, Vernon opened up. “Edward Vernon told me that he lied to the police when he said he had witnessed the murder in 1975,” Singleton said in the affidavit. “He told me that he tried to back out of the lie at the time of the lineup, but he was only a child and the police told him it was too late to change his story.” Vernon broke down and wept, Singleton said. “I could see the weight … being lifted from his shoulders.”
With the pastor’s statement on the record, events began to turn in Jackson’s favor. Brian Howe and Mark Godsey, attorneys with the Ohio Innocence Project, filed a petition for a new trial in Jackson’s behalf. Similar petitions were later filed on behalf of Wiley and Ronnie Bridgeman. Ronnie had since changed his name to Kwame Ajamu. The Innocence Project’s investigation uncovered new evidence that placed the burden of the wrongful conviction on corrupt police practices. It found that when Vernon tried to recant his identification of the three defendants, the police intimidated him into testifying falsely. The defense never was told that the witness had asked to recant his accusations. Police reports obtained by the Project also indicated that the police had considered two other men—Paul Gardenshire and Ishmael Hixon—as suspects but cut short their investigation when Vernon made his identifications. The license plate on the getaway car was matched to a vehicle belonging to Hixon, whose police record included a robbery and shooting a year earlier. In 1976, a year after the Franks murder, Hixon pled guilty to more than a dozen counts of aggravated robbery,
At a hearing in November 2014 before Judge Richard McMonagle in which Jackson asked for a new trial, Vernon came clean. “I don’t have any knowledge about what happened at the scene of the crime,” he said. “Everything was a lie. They were all lies.” Vernon told the judge he was on the bus when he heard two pops that sounded like firecrackers. The bus was close to the crime scene but not near enough for him to see what was happening. His identification of Jackson and the Bridgeman brothers was based on a rumor he heard on the streets. “I’m thinking, ‘I’m doing the right thing,’” Vernon said. “I told the officer, ‘I know who did it.’” He told the court he tried to recant, but detectives took him into a room and told him that it was too late. They told him that although he was too young to go to jail, they would arrest his parents for perjury if he denied his statement. It was because of these threats, he said, that he agreed to testify at the trials. “All the information was fed to me,” he said. “I don’t have any knowledge about what happened at the scene of the crime.”
On November 21, Jackson’s conviction was vacated and he was set free. Released along with him was Wiley Bridgeman, who was paroled in 2002, then returned to prison on a parole violation. In February 2015 a judge declared them innocent. Jackson was awarded $1 million in compensation. Bridgeman and Ajamu were to split $1.6 million between them. In May 2015, Jackson filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the City of Cleveland and former police officers.
May was not a good month for Cleveland’s police force. The US Department of Justice, following a long investigation, imposed tough new standards on the city’s police. The agreement was part of a settlement over what federal officials have called a pattern of unconstitutional policing and abuse. A review released in late 2014 found that police officers had used stun guns inappropriately, punched and kicked unarmed people, and shot at people who posed no threat. Such occurrences often went unreported. None of this was new. Following instances in which several unarmed victims were fatally shot by police, a Criminal Incident Review Committee had been formed in 2013. From that point until Jackson was freed, seventy-two police officers were suspended without pay, one supervisor was fired, and two more demoted.
Michael Morton
Texas
Michael Morton celebrated his thirty-second birthday in August 1986 at a restaurant with his wife, Christine, and their three-year-old son, Eric. The celebration ended earlier than Morton had hoped. At night’s end, Christine declined his offer of sex and Morton made his disappointment known the next morning with a note on the bathroom vanity. Whatever displeasure he expressed, however, was softened at the end when he signed off with “I love you.” Then, at 5:30 a.m., he left for work as manager of a supermarket in Austin, Texas. He could not have had the slightest notion that the note he had left behind would, in short order, change his life forever.
When he returned home, he found his house encircled by yellow police tape. The police told him that Christine’s body had been found in their bed. She had been bludgeoned to death with what appeared to be a wooden object. The sheets on the bed were stained with what later was found to be semen. Morton was taken into custody on the spot. The next day, Christine’s brother, John, found a bloody bandana at a construction site not far from the Morton home and he turned it over to the authorities.
Christine’s mother told the police that Eric had been in the house at the time of the murder. She said he told her that he saw a “monster with a big mustache” hit his mother. He described the murder and the crime scene in detail and specifically said, “Daddy was not at home” at the time. Questioned by police, several of the Mortons’ neighbors said they had seen a man park a green van on the street behind the Morton house and walk off into the nearby woods. Police records also showed that Christine’s missing credit card might have been recovered in a San Antonio jewelry store and that an officer there said he could identify the woman who tried to use it. None of that evidence was shared with the defense.
Defense attorneys suspected that significant information was being withheld. That feeling was reinforced when they learned that the prosecution did not intend to call the chief investigator, Sergeant Don Woods, to testify. They informed the trial judge of their suspicions and he ordered the prosecution to turn over all of Woods’s reports. What he discovered was that all evidence regarding Eric’s eyewitness account, the green van, and Christine’s credit card was not included in the records. At trial, the prosecution offered no physical evidence and called no witnesses that linked Morton to the crime. They based their entire case on the note Morton left and surmised that he had killed his wife because she refused him sex the night before. On February 17, 1987, Morton was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.
In 2005, the Innocence Project, along with the law firm of Raley & Bowick, filed a motion requesting DNA testing of items found at the scene of the crime. The prosecution opposed the request and the court split the difference. It allowed testing of evidence found directly at the scene but excluded the bloody bandana found near the Morton home. The tests, including samples taken from the bed, were inconclusive. Five years later, in 2011, the court finally permitted tests to be performed on the bandana and hair taken from the bandana. DNA matches were found from Christine and an unknown male. The unknown male, identified through the CODIS data bank (a DNA system), turned out to be a convicted felon from California by the name of Mark Norwood. At the time of the crime, Norwood was living in Texas, where he also had a criminal record. Investigation by Morton’s attorneys in conjunction with the Travis County district attorney, implicated Norwood in a similar crime. A hair from the new suspect was found at the Travis County scene of the murder of Debra Masters Baker who, like Christine, was bludgeoned to death in her bed. Her murder took place two years after Christine’s, while Morton was being held securely in state prison.
Morton was released on October 4, 2011, after spending nearly twenty-five years in prison. He was officially exonerated two months later. Norwood was convicted of Christine’s murder. During the course of Morton’s post-conviction litigation, his attorneys filed a Public Information Act request and obtained the prosecution’s file. They found that the file contained documents indicating Morton’s innocence, which had been withheld at trial. In response to a brief filed by the Innocence Project, the Texas Supreme Court issued a rare order for a Court of Inquiry to determine whether Ken Anderson, the prosecutor who had tried the case and later became a judge, was guilty of misconduct. The Court of Inquiry concluded there was probable cause that Anderson had violated criminal laws by concealing evidence and charged him with criminal contempt. The State Bar of Texas also brought ethics charges against Anderson. In November 2013, Anderson agreed to serve a ten-day jail sentence. He resigned his position as district court judge and permanently surrendered his law license.
After his release, Morton moved in with his parents in Liberty City, Texas, then rented a house in nearby Kilgore. In March 2013, he married Cynthia May Chessman, whom he met in the church he had been attending since his exoneration.
Dewey Bozella
New York
On October 11, 2011, Dewey Bozella won his first and last professional boxing match, earning a four-round decision over Larry Hopkins in Staples Center, Los Angeles. Bozella was fifty-two years old at the time; officials believed he was the oldest fighter ever licensed to box in California. His ring career was late getting started because he had spent half his life—twenty-six years—in the legendary Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, New York. It was at Sing Sing that he learned to box. The ring was in the building that once housed the prison’s storied electric chair, and it was there that Bozella won the institution’s light-heavyweight championship. He was, at the time, serving a twenty-year-to-life sentence for a brutal murder of which he was innocent.
The murder victim was ninety-two-year-old Emma Crapser who was slain in her apartment in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1977. The elderly woman had just returned home from a church bingo game to find an intruder already present. The burglar hit her, tied her up, and stuffed linens down her throat. She died of suffocation.
The most immediate suspects were two brothers, Lamar and Stanley Smith, and Bozella, all of whom had records of petty crime and were known to hang around the area. The Smith brothers initially denied any knowledge of the crime, but they turned on Bozella when police lied to them, saying that he had accused them of committing the murder. Lamar was the first into the breach. He told the police that he had seen Bozella and another man, Wayne Mosley, on the front porch of the victim’s house trying to break in. Stanley added that he had spotted Bozella, Mosley, and a third man in a nearby park shortly before the burglary.
Bozella and Mosley denied any involvement in the crime and a grand jury declined to return an indictment. But the prosecutors continued to level their sights on Bozella. They offered Mosley immunity for testifying against him as well as for committing perjury. They sweetened the pot by agreeing to reduce the length of the jail sentence he was already serving.
In 1983, six years after the murder, a new grand jury issued an indictment, and Bozella was tried and convicted, largely on the testimony of Mosley and the Smith brothers, and was sentenced to twenty years to life. His conviction was overturned a few years later when the defense appealed on the grounds that the prosecutor had used his peremptory challenges during jury selection to exclude black jurors. But the reprieve was of short duration. Although Stanley Smith had recanted and refused to testify at a second trial, Bozella was again convicted and given the same sentence.
Over the next few years, Bozella continued to maintain his innocence. Prior to trial, he had turned down a plea bargain and during his incarceration he had refused to admit any guilt before the parole board which denied him parole on four occasions. In 2007, he contacted the Innocence Project which referred the case to Ross E. Firsenbaum, an attorney at the law firm of WilmerHale, [sic] who agreed to take the case pro bono. Firsenbaum wasted no time in getting started. He questioned a retired police lieutenant who had been the lead investigator in the case and had kept a file on the Crapser case because he had doubts about the way it was handled.
The file contained witness accounts that had not been turned over to the defense which would have raised doubts about Bozella’s guilt. One was the testimony of a neighbor who said that on the night of the murder she had heard garbage cans rustling in the alleyway, near a window of the Crapser home. Police had found a fingerprint at that spot that belonged to man named Donald Wise. Wise had been convicted of killing another elderly woman in the same manner and in the same general location. The location was significant because prosecutors said Bozella had entered the building through the front door rather than through the alleyway. Yet, police never followed up on Wise’s possible involvement. There was other evidence that police failed to pursue and some that it suppressed. In addition, by this time, Lamar Smith also had recanted on his testimony. On October 28, 2009, Supreme Court Justice James Rooney of Putnam County overturned Bozella’s conviction, based on the prosecution’s mishandling of evidence, and he was released. In January 2015, a federal civil rights suit he filed in 2010 was settled for $7.5 million.
While in prison, Bozella earned a bachelor’s degree from Mercy College and a master’s from New York Theological Seminary. When he was released, he worked with youths at a local gym in Newburgh, New York, teaching them about boxing and the dangers of joining gangs. After the gym closed, he took his message to various youth organizations.
In 2011, during a ceremony in which he accepted an award for his service, Bozella told a reporter for ESPN that he still dreamed of having at least one professional fight. It was a dream that finally came true. On the night before the fight, he received a phone call from President Obama wishing him luck. On October 12, 2011, the day after he won the decision over Larry Hopkins, Dewey Bozella retired undefeated.
Juan Rivera
Illinois
The case of Juan Rivera, convicted in three separate trials and sentenced to life in prison each time, was a study in just about every violation of civil rights that can lead to wrongful conviction. It involved eyewitness error, false confession, false accusation, and official misconduct.
On March 20, 2015, Juan Rivera was awarded $20 million by Lake County, Illinois authorities for serving twenty years in prison—$1 million for each year of incarceration—for a depraved crime he did not commit. It was the largest wrongful conviction settlement in history but not nearly sufficient under the circumstances. As Rivera said when the award was announced, “I still would prefer my twenty years back [rather than] the $20 million.”
The twenty years was part of a life sentence that Rivera received following each of three trials. The crime he was convicted of was as brutal as one can imagine. On August 17, 1992, eleven-year-old Holly Staker was raped and stabbed to death while babysitting for two young children in their Waukegan, Illinois home. Ten weeks later, police received a tip from an informant implicating Rivera, a nineteen-year-old former special education student who had been convicted of a burglary and was on electronic home monitoring at the time of the murder.
Detectives took him into custody and questioned him for four days, starting on October 26. He continued to protest his innocence until around midnight on the fourth day when the interrogation became increasingly aggressive. Finally, he was alleged to have broken down and nodded his head when asked if he had raped and murdered the young girl. At that point, the questioning picked up intensity. At around 3 a.m., investigators left to draft a statement for Rivera to sign. Minutes later, he was said to be seen beating his head against the wall in what was later termed a psychotic episode. As dawn approached, Rivera signed the typed confession that had been drawn up for him. Much of the statement turned out to be inconsistent with the details of the crime and Lake County States Attorney Michael Waller ordered the investigators to resume questioning Rivera until the inconsistencies were resolved. The interrogation resumed on October 30. It produced a second signed confession which was a credible account of the crime and matched the known facts of the case.
The trial began on November 1, 1993 and lasted slightly more than two weeks. The prosecution made its case largely on the second confession. On November 19, the jury returned a verdict of guilty. A month later, Judge Christopher C. Starck sentenced Rivera to life in prison. Three years later, the Illinois Appellate Court reversed the conviction on the basis of the cumulative effect of prosecutorial errors made at trial. The Court remanded the case for a new trial.
Rivera’s second trial began on September 16, 1998. Again, the prosecution relied primarily on the signed confession. But this time it also came up with an eyewitness who identified Rivera as the man who stabbed Staker. The witness, Taylor Englebrecht, was about as reliable as Rivera’s first confession. He was one of the two children for whom Staker was babysitting on the night she was attacked. Taylor was two years old at the time. Nonetheless, after thirty-six hours of deliberating over four days, the jury found Rivera guilty, and, for the second time, Judge Starck sentenced him to life. On December 12, 2001, the Illinois Appellate Court affirmed the conviction. But yet a third trial lay ahead for Rivera.
On May 24, 2005, DNA evidence taken from a rape kit excluded Rivera as a source of the semen recovered from the victim. Given the new evidence, Judge Starck vacated the conviction and ordered a new trial. Despite the DNA findings, Lake County State’s Attorney Michael Waller chose to retry the case. At the trial, which began on April 13, 2009, Assistant State’s Attorney Michael Mermel offered two somewhat farfetched arguments calculated to discount the DNA evidence. The first was the possibility that Staker, at age eleven, was sexually active and the DNA might have come from one of her sex partners. The second was the slightly more plausible view that the DNA actually belonged to Rivera but was mishandled by lab technicians. On May 8, the jury found Rivera guilty and Judge Starck sentenced him to life for the third time.
Rivera’s third appeal was led by Lawrence C. Marshall, a Stanford University Law Professor and co-founder of the Center on Wrongful Convictions. Other attorneys from the Center acted as co-counsel along with the law firm of Jenner & Block. The defense argued that the evidence presented by the prosecution was insufficient to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. It contended that Rivera’s confessions should have been suppressed because they were coerced and that Rivera had been denied his right to present a viable defense when Judge Starck refused to allow his attorneys to offer evidence rebutting the false claim by police that Rivera knew facts about the crime that only the perpetrator would know.
On December 9, 2011, the Illinois Appellate Court ruled that Rivera’s conviction was “unjustified and cannot stand.” This time, Waller declined to retry the case and announced that the state would dismiss the charges. “Today,” he said, “I believe the right thing to do is to bring to a conclusion the case against Rivera by electing not to appeal the reversal of his conviction.” Rivera was released from prison in January 2012. He filed his federal wrongful conviction lawsuit against Lake County law enforcement officials in October, alleging that they had framed him. Three years later, he was awarded the $20 million in settlement.
Locke Bowman, an attorney who represented Rivera through Northwestern University’s MacArthur Justice Center, called Rivera’s conviction “a stellar example of miscarriage of justice.”