The Brooklyn District Attorney on Friday decided to clear the names of three men who had been imprisoned for decades in the 1995 murder of a New York subway clerk, saying a rogue detective had pressured them to commit the crime. falsely confess.
The men, Vincent Ellerbe, James Irons, Thomas Malik and Vincent Ellerbe, were teenagers when they were accused of setting fire to the symbolic clerk, Harry Kaufman, in a booth at a station in the Bedford-Stuyvesant borough on November 26, 1995. .
The three were convicted of second-degree murder, based largely on confessions obtained by the case’s lead detectives, Louis Scarcella and Stephen Chmil, and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
Mr Ellerbe, 44, was released on parole in 2020; Mr Irons and Mr Malik, both 45, were still serving their sentences on Friday morning. All three were set to appear on Friday before a Brooklyn state court judge, who was expected to rule on the request to withdraw the convictions.
The work of both detectives has been scrutinized in the years since the convictions of Mr Ellerbe, Mr Irons and Mr Malik. Reviews of cases involving Mr Scarcella have resulted in more than a dozen waivers.
“The findings of an exhaustive, years-long re-examination of this case render us unable to uphold the convictions of the accused,” District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a press release.
In addition to forcing the three teens to confess to a crime they did not commit, Mr. Gonzalez said, Mr. Scarcella and Mr. Chmil have failed to identify the shaky nature of witnesses central to the case. and ignored factual inconsistencies in the evidence and statements of the suspects.
On Friday, a lawyer for Mr. Irons, David Shanies, called the pending waivers “the culmination of a years-long trial” by lawyers for the three men and by investigators at the District Attorney’s Conviction Review Unit, which has overseen the reversals of 33 convictions. since 2014.
for mr. Scarcella, who retired in 1999, the move to drop the convictions was another stain on a career leading some of the most high-profile crimes in a unit that investigates more than 500 murders a year.
His reputation began to crumble in 2013 after one of his most celebrated investigations – to the murder of a Hasidic rabbi in Williamsburg, Brooklyn neighborhood – unraveled amid defense claims that he framed a suspect. Despite the insistence of Mr. Scarcella that he had done nothing wrong, the district attorney’s office began a review of about 70 of his cases.
Attorneys for Mr. Scarcella did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Police did not respond to a similar request or to a question about whether it intended to reopen the investigation into Mr Kaufman’s murder.
The murder was shocking, even in a city then steeped in crime. A 22-year-old transit veteran, Mr. Kaufman, 50, was working at the Kingston-Throop Avenues station when two men poured gas through the coin slot of the coin machine and then lit a book of matches.
The resulting explosion destroyed the cabin. Broken glass, charred insulation and splintered wood sprayed everywhere. Mr Kaufman, who was sent to the plane, suffered severe burns over most of his body and died two weeks later.
Richard Davey, the president of New York City Transit, which operates the subway, in a statement described Mr. Kaufman’s murder as a “horrific attack” and said the Kaufman family “deserves due justice.”