An ex-detective’s overturned murder cases have cost New York $147 million

NEW YORK – A single New York City police detective accused of trying to close murder cases by concocting false witness testimony and coercing confessions has cost taxpayers US$110 million (S$147 million) in settlements to more than a dozen people whose convictions were overturned after some had spent decades in prison.

People investigated by the former detective, Mr Louis N Scarcella, have already received a total of US$73.1 million in settlements from New York City and another US$36.9 million from the state, according to the city and state comptroller offices.

The payouts are expected to rise by tens of millions more, because the men cleared in 2022 of burning a subway token clerk alive in 1995 have filed claims against the state.

The US$110 million went to 14 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 died in prison at age 37. One man, released from prison after 23 years, had a severe heart attack two days later.

Mr Scarcella has not been charged with any crimes. But no other New York Police Department officer has ever come close to costing taxpayers as much, lawyers involved in the cases say.

Experts in wrongful convictions say the sum is “staggering”, and puts Mr Scarcella in the company of 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, records show that Mr Scarcella’s cases represent about 15 per cent of the nearly US$500 million the city spent on reversed convictions between 2014 and 2022. The city often settles out of court to avoid the potential of a bigger payout at trial.

“While many police officers in New York City history have made excessive amounts of overtime, no police officer in the history of New York and quite possibly the history of policing has cost taxpayers over $100 million for his misconduct,” said Mr Ronald Kuby, a civil rights lawyer who has won settlements in three Scarcella cases. “And there’s more to come.”

Mr Scarcella, now 72, was a detective in the Brooklyn North homicide squad in the 1980s and 1990s, when the crack epidemic sent the city’s homicide rate soaring.

A cigar-smoking legend known as “the closer”, Mr Scarcella, who retired in 1999, had a reputation for solving murder cases that had stymied his colleagues. By his own count, he led at least 175 cases and helped with 175 more.

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

For years, defence lawyers, including Mr Kuby, accused him of coaching witnesses, sometimes under threat, and not just coercing false confessions but inventing them. Confessions that defendants in different cases later denied offering 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 fire publicly until 2013, after a witness came forward to say a detective told him which suspect to pick out of a police line-up for the 1990 murder of a Brooklyn rabbi.

By then, that suspect, David Ranta, had served more than 20 years in prison for the murder. The unnamed detective was widely assumed to be Mr Scarcella, who conducted the line-up. As the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office reviewed the case, every aspect unravelled.

The district attorney’s investigation found that Mr Scarcella and his partner Mr Stephen Chmil let violent criminals out of jail to smoke crack cocaine and visit prostitutes in exchange for incriminating Mr Ranta.

After Mr Ranta’s release in March 2013, an investigation by the Times showed that Mr Scarcella had repeatedly turned to a particular woman – who was addicted to crack cocaine – to testify in his murder cases.

Only then did the district attorney’s office agree to review all of the detective’s homicide cases in which he testified and there was a guilty verdict. Dozens of prisoners started filing motions for their cases to be overturned.

Mr Ranta was the first to receive a settlement: US$6.4 million from the city and another US$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.

“I couldn’t sit with my family the past 30, 40 years if I had hurt an individual,” Mr Scarcella said in a 2013 interview with the Times. “I never fudged a line-up in my life. I never, ever took a false confession.”

Eighteen people whose convictions were tied to the detective’s work have had their convictions overturned after serving a total of 268 years in prison, according to the National Exonerations Registry.

Mr Nicholas Paolucci, a spokesperson for the city Law Department, said the settlements, which come from taxpayers, offered a measure of justice.

“The city has been burdened with costly settlements stemming from the work this detective conducted in the 1980s and 1990s,” Mr Paolucci said. “The settlements provide a measure of justice to those who were wrongfully convicted and also resolve cases in the best interest of the city.”

Ms Vanessa Gathers received nearly US$4 million after serving 10 years for manslaughter in a case in which prosecutors said her confession had been “coaxed” by Mr Scarcella. Ms Gathers died this summer at 65. Her lawyer Lisa Cahill said Ms Gathers had missed the first 10 years 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 capturing the true cost of his crimes, which by definition is generational in nature.”

“Money does not magically make these scars, the bitterness, the shame and the questions disappear overnight,” she said. NYTIMES