“This is no longer about one or two bad apples. While more than a dozen convictions in his cases have been overturned, prosecutors have stood by scores of others. Scarcella, who retired in 2000, has denied any wrongdoing. Citywide, killings topped more than 2,200 at their 1990 peak that compares to 488 last year and a low of 295 in 2018.īut after questions piled up about Scarcella’s tactics, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office began in 2013 to review scores of cases that he had worked. “More than 25 years later, we do not have any confidence in the integrity of those convictions,” assistant District Attorney Lori Glachman told the court.Īt the time, Scarcella was a star Brooklyn homicide detective in a city reeling from crime. The same witness’ identification of Malik was also inconsistent, partly because she had earlier pointed to someone else - a man an informant had named separately, prosecutors said. Malik described the car differently from how a witness did. Ellerbe described four attackers and said he had sprayed gasoline on the tollbooth exterior, when in fact it was poured in the coin slot. Prosecutors said their review found that Scarcella and his partner fed crime scene details to Irons and Malik while shrugging off inconsistencies in their confessions.įor instance, Irons said he had been able to see his supposed accomplices jump into a getaway car, although it was parked a block away and around a corner. Scarcella testified that he cursed, pounded a table and was trying to scare the then-18-year-old Malik, but didn’t beat him.
The men maintained that they had been coerced into false confessions, with Malik saying Detective Louis Scarcella screamed at him and slammed his head into a locker. He implicated Malik and Ellerbe as the ones who had torched the tollbooth. Police eventually came to question Irons, getting a confession that he acted as a lookout. Authorities gave mixed signals over the years about whether they believed the film had inspired the killing. The attack bore some resemblance to a scene in “Money Train,” a comparison that prompted then-Senate Majority Leader and Republican presidential hopeful Bob Dole to call for a boycott of the movie. The booth exploded, and the 50-year-old Kaufman ran from it in flames. The attackers first tried to rob him, then squirted gasoline through the tollbooth coin slot and ignited the fuel with matches, authorities said at the time. 26, 1995, while working an overnight shift on overtime to put away extra money for his son’s future college tuition. While there were other potential suspects early in the investigation, it’s unclear whether police or prosecutors plan to - or can - pursue any further investigation decades later. In fact, Irons was home with his mother, around the corner from the subway station, when he heard the explosion and called 911 - a call that was never played for jurors, said his lawyer, David Shanies.
The men have long said they were pressured into falsely confessing in the case, which involved detectives who later were repeatedly accused of forcing confessions and framing suspects. “I just was happy that I was able to stand strong to endure this journey,” Malik continued. Irons, leaving court, said only that he felt “great.” Malik said the dismissal was “definitely too little, too late, but everything takes time.” “They break you, or they turn you into a monster.” “What happened to us can never be fixed,” Ellerbe told the court as he quietly described the ordeal of prison.
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