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Dec. 4th, 2013 07:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyFor 22 Years, Caught in a Murder Case’s Tangled Web
http://nyti.ms/18lBzyS
The streetlights were bright at the Kingsborough Houses, so even though it was about 4 a.m., one of the two off-duty correction officers sitting in the parked Volvo said he got a good look at the two men who rode up on bicycles.
It was the summer of 1991 in Crown Heights, and the officers, Robert E. Crosson and Rolando Neischer, friends since their teens, were chatting in the predawn solitude.
The men on bicycles were armed. They ordered Mr. Crosson and Mr. Neischer out. But Mr. Neischer grabbed his own weapon, and a wild firefight ensued. The police believed at least one of the carjackers was wounded, records show. Mr. Neischer was shot five times — in the chest, back, abdomen, thigh and ankle — and died four days later. Mr. Crosson was shot through his hand.
Two teenagers were arrested. They were quickly convicted.
It was an open-and-shut case.
But it was fraught with problems.
The suspects were arrested by Detective Louis Scarcella and his partner, Stephen W. Chmil. The case is now among 46 that Detective Scarcella handled that are under review by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. Mr. Scarcella, one of the most successful and aggressive detectives in New York City history, came under scrutiny after accusations that he once framed an innocent man. He has been accused of roughing up suspects; inventing confessions; relying on the testimony of the same crack addict in multiple cases; and even pulling jailhouse informers, often dangerous criminals, out of prison to smoke crack and visit prostitutes or girlfriends.
But the involvement of Mr. Scarcella, who is retired, and Mr. Chmil was only the start of trouble for the two teenagers arrested in the case. Public records, court transcripts and interviews with both convicted men and their lawyers, as well as other law enforcement officials, reveal that if the detectives took shortcuts, they were the first in a series of missteps, errors and questionable decisions made by players at every level of the criminal justice system who touched this case, from the police to defense lawyers to prosecutors to the judge who heard it.
The teenagers’ experience demonstrates how poor work by detectives at the initial stages can start a sequence of events that snowballs through the system, seemingly unstoppably, until two possibly innocent men have spent decades in prison.
Among the many troubling aspects of the case:
■ Mr. Crosson described light-skinned black men in their early 20s — and a bloodstain suggested at least one was wounded — but the detectives arrested dark-skinned juvenile delinquents with no injuries, one of whom was just 14. By the detectives’ telling, Mr. Crosson identified one of the suspects’ photos after a detective casually reached into a drawer stuffed with hundreds of mug shots and pulled out a random handful. “The perfect patsies,” a defense lawyer, Robert Massi, said at the time.
■ There is no evidence that the police lab ever tested blood samples found at the crime scene. Neither the detectives nor the prosecutor in the case made any effort to push for the results, which could have been crucial for the defense.
■ Fingerprints at the crime scene did not match those of either defendant. Yet prosecutors forged ahead, even relying on only one eyewitness, Mr. Crosson, a practice experts say is the leading cause of wrongful convictions.
■ In court, a detective submitted photographs of a lineup from the wrong case. The judge allowed the mistake and simply let the case move forward; the right pictures were never submitted.
■ Forensic evidence — including the blood samples — that could have been vital to exonerating the convicted men vanished years later, destroying hopes of an appeal. No one can explain why.
Mr. Scarcella has said he never framed anyone and is proud of his work for the city. He referred questions about this case to a lawyer, Alan Abramson, who declined to comment.
The district attorney’s review has invigorated a quest lasting years by several lawyers. They were appalled at the lack of evidence that led to the conviction of the two teenagers — Rosean S. Hargrave and John Dwayne Bunn.
“I don’t want to get my hopes up; that just stresses me out,” Mr. Hargrave said in an interview at Southport Correctional Facility in western New York, where he meets visitors behind a thick pane of glass that leaves just enough room at the bottom for an inmate to hold a loved one’s hands. “I’m mad every single day. It’s been 22 years.”
Young Men on Bicycles
Mr. Neischer, 31, and Mr. Crosson, who was 30, were both correction officers assigned to Rikers Island. Mr. Crosson said they were out late the night of Aug. 12, 1991, because Mr. Neischer’s son had been hurt at a playground and wound up in the emergency room. After the boy was treated for a broken arm and taken home, the two men sat chatting in the car into the early morning of the 13th. Mr. Neischer wore a bright peach-colored shirt. They were parked in front of a fire hydrant at the public housing development where they both lived.
That was when two young men on bicycles neared the Volvo with guns pointed downward. They stood on opposite sides and ordered the two men out, Mr. Crosson testified. “My first feeling was, I don’t believe this is happening,” Mr. Crosson said, according to a transcript of the trial. “Rolando looked at me and said, ‘Hold on, my man.’ He opens up the door of the car.”
Mr. Crosson said the man on the passenger side pointed a blue steel gun at him and ordered him out, too.
“I put my hands up to my face, because the gun was pointed right at my face,” Mr. Crosson testified. “The gun went off.”
Shot in the hand and with blood running down his face, Mr. Crosson got out of the car, crouched on the ground, and then sprinted as fast as he could, he said. He heard lots of shots, he added. The carjackers dumped the bikes, hopped in the Volvo and roared off.
Mr. Crosson covered about 50 feet, he later testified, before realizing that he had left his friend behind. He turned back, but he said the Volvo and Mr. Neischer were gone.
The police arrived moments later. Mr. Neischer was discovered 192 feet away. He had fired six rounds at the carjackers and was reloading his Smith & Wesson revolver. Mr. Neischer told his friend, “I’m going to make it.”
Detectives from the 77th Precinct started a manhunt. Blood was spattered on one of the bicycles, so detectives, assuming the suspect was wounded, checked hospitals in all five boroughs. Mr. Crosson described the gunmen as light-skinned black men in their late teens or early 20s, who were about 5 feet 9 or 10 inches tall. He remembered one of them wearing a black leisure suit and a baseball cap. At the same time, he said he was mostly concentrating on that gun on his face.
Records show the detectives initially suspected four people: Mr. Hargrave, Mr. Bunn and two others, including a member of a notorious family of criminal brothers in Crown Heights.
Mr. Neischer underwent surgery the next day at Kings County Hospital. Mr. Crosson, that same day, told the police he was too traumatized to offer a more detailed description of the gunmen. He said he would rest and then go to the police station and look at mug shots.
The case was assigned to John Barba, a detective at the 77th Precinct, and to Mr. Scarcella, a Brooklyn North detective who served as a roving investigator for Crown Heights and several other neighborhoods. A handsome cigar-smoker with a keen street sense and a gift for conversation, Detective Scarcella was best known for getting suspects to admit crimes. With him came his regular partner, Detective Chmil.
Mr. Crosson met them the day after the shooting at the 77th Precinct station house. Detective Chmil testified that he and Detective Scarcella reached into a drawer with roughly 600 mug shot photos and pulled out six at random to show the wounded survivor. Mr. Crosson said he recognized Mr. Hargrave in one of the pictures, saying he was “90 percent sure” that that was the man who shot him, but that he would need to see him in person.
Detectives reported that an anonymous call the day after the shooting led to the Volvo, which was found a few miles away with a bullet in the left front tire and dried blood on the driver’s door sill.
‘On a Collision Course’
Rosean (pronounced ro-SHAWN) Hargrave was a 17-year-old 10th-grade dropout known as Cotti, who lived in the Kingsborough complex with his mother, grandmother and sisters. He liked stealing cars for joy rides while his mother, then a janitor at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, struggled with single parenthood.
Court records show that Mr. Hargrave had been repeatedly arrested over the previous year, with each arrest growing increasingly violent. A probation report described him as a young man “on a collision course.”
At the time of the shooting, he had just come home from a stint at Rikers, where he was held for a series of armed robberies. He soon got a surprise.
“My mother said, ‘The police came looking for you,’ ” Mr. Hargrave said in a recent interview. “I said, ‘For what?’ ”
Detective Scarcella found Mr. Hargrave outside his sister’s apartment. The detective said he did not need an arrest warrant: He said he “got lucky” because Mr. Hargrave was in the hallway, not inside. The 17-year-old was interrogated at the station and put in a lineup with five “fillers,” extras hired to stand in as suspects.
“They put me in a lineup with a bunch of dudes that looked like they smoked crack,” Mr. Hargrave recalled. “They were out of place, like they should have been in a shelter.”
Mr. Crosson came in and looked at the lineup. He selected Mr. Hargrave. He told the detectives: “He had the gun. He shot me, and that man is a criminal. That’s him.”
The detectives’ reports do not indicate how they came to identify Mr. Bunn as the second suspect. Mr. Bunn, who was released on parole in 2006, said in a recent interview that he figured his name came up during the interviews with Mr. Hargrave. “He must have been like, ‘I was with Dwayne,’ ” Mr. Bunn said.
Mr. Bunn was 14 and 5-foot-6 when arrested. He was a car thief who used screwdrivers to steal parked vehicles. He had been arrested once before in a jewelry snatching.
Like Mr. Hargrave, Mr. Bunn was being raised by a single mother; both women had drinking problems. And like Mr. Hargrave, Mr. Bunn swears he was home in bed the night of the shooting. But still, a few hours after Mr. Hargrave’s lineup, Mr. Bunn’s basketball coach in the Police Athletic League, an officer at the 77th Precinct, got him out of his house. “They put me in a lineup with grown men,” he said. “It was a joke.”
Mr. Crosson pointed at Mr. Bunn and said he was the killer.
Both defendants said investigators — it was unclear who — approached them in custody a few days after their arrests to take pictures of them naked. The detectives were looking for bullet wounds, and seemed alarmed not to find any.
“He was saying: ‘Turn around. Lift your arms,’ ” Mr. Hargrave recalled. “He’s like: ‘Wait a second. These guys didn’t get shot.’ ”
Both teenagers were charged, one day after the killing, with attempted murder and robbery. Then on Aug. 17, four days after the shootout, Mr. Neischer died. With his death, the charges were upgraded to murder and the investigation was officially closed.
Wrong Lineup Photos
The case was assigned to Edward Boyar, a veteran prosecutor whom District Attorney Charles J. Hynes had chosen four years earlier to be the lead trial lawyer in the Howard Beach racial killing case. In his 1990 memoir about that case, Mr. Hynes called Mr. Boyar an eternal optimist, one of the “best prosecuting trial attorneys in the city,” and a “rock-ribbed conservative” whose political theories were to “the right of a Russian czar.”
Mr. Boyar was known in Brooklyn legal circles as a gifted trial lawyer. But he had troubles, too. He was once suspended for three months after drunkenly shouting racial slurs in a Brooklyn bar, according to The Daily News.
Early missteps by the prosecution were allowed to stand. At a hearing before trial, the defense learned there were problems when a detective presented the court with photos of the “fillers” — the men who lined up with Mr. Hargrave. Three of the people in the photos did not match the men shown in the lineup, transcripts show. The detective had accidentally turned in close-ups from a different case, and the prosecutor apparently did not notice. The correct ones had been misplaced.
The judge, Justice Gloria Goldstein, allowed the photo evidence and witness ID anyway.
The trial began in November 1992 at the old State Supreme Court building on Adams Street in Downtown Brooklyn. Both defendants wore new clothes their mothers had bought in the hopes of making a good impression on the judge and jury.
The families were surprised at how quickly it was all over. Both sides presented their cases in a single day. Neither defense lawyer made an opening statement, and the prosecution had little evidence beyond Mr. Crosson’s word. Only four people testified: the first police officer at the scene, the medical examiner, Mr. Crosson and Mr. Barba, the precinct detective.
The medical examiner said the autopsy showed that Mr. Neischer had been shot with two different guns. One gun was fired by someone who shot from the left front of the victim and another gun from behind, the medical examiner said.
Yet even with so few witnesses, there were contradictions.
Detective Barba took the stand and revealed that the fingerprints found on the bicycles and the Volvo did not match either suspect. And nobody in the Police Department ever asked Mr. Crosson for his prints, the precinct detective testified.
Nobody ever mentioned that, in addition to Mr. Hargrave and Mr. Bunn, the police initially had known of two other suspects, one of them a member of a criminal family, who were noted in the detectives’ paperwork.
When his turn came, Mr. Massi, Mr. Hargrave’s defense lawyer, tried to show that the blood in the car and on the bicycles belonged to the carjackers and not Mr. Neischer, who was outside the car when he was shot. And if the carjackers were shot, he argued, then the two teenagers must be innocent, because neither was wounded.
But the blood-test results were never received, a detective testified. There was even confusion as to whether the testing had ever been done.
“Did you request a serology comparison as to those blood samples?” Mr. Massi asked Detective Barba.
“I didn’t,” the detective replied. “But a request was submitted, as I see here.”
The result?
“I haven’t received that as of yet,” Detective Barba testified.
Mr. Boyar said the test was not important because the blood in the car was probably Mr. Neischer’s.
Ballistics testing was also requested, but the records do not show that that was done either. The bullet from Mr. Crosson’s hand had been tossed out at the hospital.
Mr. Massi tried a new tack in his closing argument, one with the potential to upend the case. He suggested that Mr. Crosson was trying to cover something up, that he had been deliberately targeted and that this was no random carjacking. He said it made no sense that Mr. Crosson initially could not find his wounded friend — after all, he was wearing a peach-colored shirt and was lying beneath a bright streetlight. How, Mr. Massi asked, did the victim manage to make it so far up the block with bullets in his ankle and leg? Why was there no trail of blood leading to his body? How did the bicycles wind up so many feet away from the crime scene?
Mr. Massi tried to portray Mr. Crosson as a crooked officer by citing an account that he had peddled stolen clothing in the past, the court transcript shows. But Mr. Massi was armed only with hearsay and rumors, and Justice Goldstein did not let him ask Mr. Crosson any questions about stolen clothing.
The judge also refused a request by Mr. Massi that she instruct the jury that they could presume that if the blood had been tested, the results would have been favorable to the defense.
Mr. Bunn’s court-appointed lawyer, Harold Venokur, hardly spoke at all. Mr. Bunn said in an interview this year that although both he and Mr. Hargrave had alibi witnesses, the defense lawyers told the two that the witnesses contradicted each other, so they decided not to put them on the stand. Mr. Venokur, who has since died, was 79 years old and had a poor reputation. One former prosecutor recalled the often-retold legend of the time he got up to give a closing argument but gave details for the wrong case.
At least one person in the courtroom, however, said that the young men did not help themselves with their demeanors. Mr. Neischer’s daughter, Nakeea, who was 12 at the time of the trial, remembered of Mr. Bunn: “When they brought up the charges, he was laughing. I don’t know if he thought it was a joke, but as they read the charges and said ‘murder’ it went from giggles to not giggles. I remember thinking, ‘If you didn’t do it, why would you be laughing?’ ”
Mr. Hargrave, she said, acted arrogantly. She said one of the defendants’ mothers arrived intoxicated.
The closing arguments, jury deliberation and verdict all took place the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.
At 11:05 p.m. the day after the trial began, the jury voted to convict.
Mr. Hargrave was sentenced to 30 years to life. Justice Goldstein sentenced Mr. Bunn to 20 years to life, but was later forced to change the penalty to nine years to life when lawyers proved she had illegally sentenced him as an adult. “When they said, ‘Life,’ they had to rush me to the hospital,” said Mr. Bunn’s mother, Maureen Bunn, who still lives in the same apartment on St. Marks Place in Crown Heights, decorated with plants and pictures of her children taped to the walls.
Both defendants filed appeals, saying Justice Goldstein deprived them of their constitutional rights when she denied requests to cross-examine Mr. Crosson about his past and would not instruct the jury about what it could presume from the missing blood exams.
The appeals were denied.
Mr. Barba has since died. Mr. Boyar, the prosecutor, is now retired and lives upstate. He suggested he did everything right. “Those kids were guilty,” Mr. Boyar said in a telephone interview, his thick Brooklyn accent still audible. “I see that as a clean case.”
Mr. Boyar insisted that Mr. Crosson’s law enforcement training made him a strong witness. Unable to recall every detail of a decades-old case on the spur of the moment, he said he must have complemented that testimony with ballistics, forensic evidence or perhaps a weapon.
Reminded that he had not, and that the trial lasted a day and a half, Mr. Boyar paused. “I had a homicide trial that lasted a day and a half?” he said. “If there is something amiss here, it should be set right, and that’s it.”
He later read the transcript, however, and said the lack of forensic evidence like matching fingerprints or a blood trail were common anomalies.
Evidence Destroyed
Ten years later, lawyers working together to file a new appeal for the men were dumbstruck when they encountered an apparently insurmountable, and unexplainable, roadblock.
Crucial evidence had been destroyed.
“We wanted the bicycles. We wanted the blood,” said William E. Hellerstein, who had been involved in the new appeal. But the evidence was gone. “There was some kind of order in the D.A.’s file to release the evidence.”
“Release” meant dispose of. Records shed no light on the reasons. A handwritten notation in the Legal Aid Society file said that a high-ranking representative of the Police Department told lawyers that someone had issued an order to destroy the evidence in 1993. It is unclear who made the order before the case was even appealed. The order itself has not been found.
“We were convinced this was a fishy case,” said Daniel S. Medwed, a Northeastern University professor who was also involved. “We just didn’t have a legal hook.”
Mr. Bunn was turned down for parole three times and was released in 2006. However, he failed to report in properly, violating his parole, and was sent back upstate for a year. He was released a second time in 2009.
He is bald with sad eyes now, and a small frame. He drove a reporter around his neighborhood in a borrowed Jaguar and stopped at the crime scene. He pointed out the nearby Granville T. Woods Elementary School in Crown Heights, which he and Mr. Hargrave had attended, though three years apart. He described how Mr. Hargrave would protect his smaller friend from bullies but gave him the occasional wedgie, too.
Mr. Bunn is still angry with his lawyers. He struggles with anxiety and finds he actually misses the structure of life behind bars. It was there that he learned to read. He works as an assistant to a rap group, and when the group he works for went on tour to Japan this summer, his parole prevented him from going.
“They pulled the rug out from under us by destroying the DNA that would have proved we were innocent,” he said, making no effort to stop the tears running down his cheeks as he sat at an Applebee’s in Downtown Brooklyn. “Then everybody gave up on us.”
The Exoneration Initiative, a nonprofit organization in Manhattan that has been investigating the case for two years, now represents Mr. Bunn. “This smacks of a cover-up, and it’s really troubling,” said Mr. Bunn’s lawyer, Glenn A. Garber.
One Man’s Word
Mr. Hargrave recently hired Pierre Sussman, a civil rights lawyer in the Bronx. Mr. Sussman represents several murder defendants who were investigated by Mr. Scarcella; one of them was released from prison this year, largely because of flaws in Mr. Scarcella’s work. The lawyer is deeply skeptical of the retired investigator.
“There are too many questionable evidentiary pieces to this conviction that rely on Scarcella and Chmil’s work,” Mr. Sussman said after an interview at his Bronx storefront law office across the street from the courthouse.
Mr. Sussman said he was chasing a tip that Mr. Crosson had been the victim of a previous shooting. If proved, it would suggest that he was the intended target of the men on bicycles back in 1991 — and had reasons to cover up their identities.
The lawyers are still waiting to find out whether the palm prints from the bicycles have yet been checked against those of the two other suspects in addition to Mr. Hargrave and Mr. Bunn who were mentioned in detectives’ records, one of whom is in prison. The police reports do not explain why those two men were suspects, or what investigative steps were taken to exclude them.
Peter J. Tartaglia, a former 77th Precinct lieutenant who supervised the investigation, and who has been a steady supporter of Mr. Scarcella, defended the work done on the case. He said that many questionable details, like the absence of defendants’ prints at the crime scene, could easily be explained: “If I went into your car, I might not find your prints in your car. Maybe we’d find your mechanic’s prints.”
On that, Mr. Tartaglia was right: Mr. Neischer’s prints were not found in his own car, either.
Through his wife, a New York City police officer, Mr. Crosson declined repeated requests to comment for this article. When a team of lawyers representing Mr. Hargrave went to his home in a Suffolk County cul-de-sac during the summer, the lights went out and no one came to the door. Bankruptcy court records show Mr. Crosson left the city’s Department of Correction in 2010 and was employed last year as a bus driver.
Mr. Neischer’s family said that although they never had a reason to doubt the convictions, if the men were to be exonerated or a judge ordered a new trial, they would not object.
Citing the open investigation, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office also declined to comment. Justice Goldstein, who now works for an arbitration company, did not respond to phone and email messages left at her company.
Mr. Massi, the trial lawyer, who left Legal Aid in 1995, is now retired and living upstate. He is still haunted: “I was genuinely moved by that case.”
Mr. Scarcella and his lawyer would not comment on this case. Mr. Scarcella’s partner, Mr. Chmil, vaguely recalled the investigation, although he forgot that Mr. Neischer had died.
“There are so many things that come together in a case — witnesses, forensics, the grand jury — when things go wrong, who are they pointing the finger at? The detective,” Mr. Chmil said by phone from Virginia, where he became a police officer again and later retired. “I didn’t have a good career; I had an exemplary one. And so did Scarcella. Now we look like the two worst guys in the world.”
Mr. Hargrave remains at Southport, a maximum-security prison reserved for inmates with severe behavior problems. His discipline record stretches for more than five pages, and his face bears a scar from a fight with another inmate.
“It’s like being in a jungle with a bunch of lions,” he explained. “If I got a spear, I got to protect myself.” He is not eligible for parole for eight years.
Review of 50 Brooklyn Murder Cases Ordered
http://nyti.ms/190rg7m
May 11, 2013
Review of 50 Brooklyn Murder Cases Ordered
By FRANCES ROBLES and N. R. KLEINFIELD
The Brooklyn district attorney’s office has ordered a review of some 50 murder cases assigned to an acclaimed homicide detective, an acknowledgment of mounting questions about the officer’s tactics and the legitimacy of the convictions.
The office’s Conviction Integrity Unit will reopen every murder case that resulted in a guilty verdict after being investigated by Detective Louis Scarcella, a flashy officer who handled some of Brooklyn’s most notorious crimes during the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s.
The development comes after The New York Times examined a dozen cases involving Mr. Scarcella and found disturbing patterns, including the detective’s reliance on the same eyewitness, a crack-addicted prostitute, for multiple murder prosecutions and his delivery of confessions from suspects who later said they had told him nothing. At the same time, defense lawyers, inmates and prisoner advocacy organizations have contacted the district attorney’s office to share their own suspicions about Mr. Scarcella.
The review by the office of District Attorney Charles J. Hynes will give special scrutiny to those cases that appear weakest — because they rely on either a single eyewitness or confession, officials said. The staff will re-interview available witnesses, and study any new evidence. If they feel a conviction was unjust, prosecutors could seek for it to be dismissed.
“People will look for blame,” said John O’Mara, who leads the Conviction Integrity Unit. “Our goal isn’t to look for blame. Our goal is to correct injustice.”
Mr. Scarcella’s name surfaced in March after a judge freed David Ranta, who had spent 23 years in prison after being convicted of murdering a rabbi. Prosecutors determined that Mr. Ranta’s conviction resulted in large part from flawed police work by Mr. Scarcella and a partner, including failing to pursue a more logical suspect. An investigation found they removed violent criminals from jail to let them smoke crack cocaine and visit prostitutes in exchange for incriminating Mr. Ranta. A witness also said Mr. Scarcella told him who to choose in a lineup.
Mr. Scarcella, 61, who retired from the police force in 1999, said he was surprised to learn of the review.
“Are you kidding me?,” he said Saturday in an interview.“Wow. This is quite a bit of a shock. Let them look at my convictions. I will help them if they need me. I don’t know what else to say. I expect he will find nothing,” he said.
He has maintained that he did nothing wrong.
“I couldn’t sit with my family the past 30, 40 years if I had hurt an individual,” he said in a previous interview. “I never fudged a lineup in my life. I never, ever took a false confession.”
He suggested that, following the Ranta news, those he put away believe that “Scarcella is the get-out-of-jail-free key.”
Pressed about specific cases, he said he could not recall many details and that he was being unfairly singled out.
“I have to be a pretty smart guy to lock someone up, get it through the D.A.’s office, get it through a trial and jury, and convict a guy,” he said. “I’m not that smart. It’s not a Louie Scarcella show.”
The questions about Mr. Scarcella stem from the sordid decades when the city saw as many as six homicides a day, and the police and the district attorney struggled to keep up.
Interviews with dozens of lawyers, prosecutors, witnesses and suspects, as well as a review of legal documents, suggest a detective who followed his own rules.
The new developments have proved embarrassing for Mr. Hynes, who is seeking re-election to his seventh term this fall. Although many of Mr. Scarcella’s cases date back to Mr. Hynes’s predecessor, Elizabeth Holtzman, his office has for years aggressively fended off appeals and denied public records requests from inmates who believe they were wrongly targeted by Mr. Scarcella.
Ms. Holtzman said Saturday, “I support a review of these cases.”
A Common Eyewitness
Teresa Gomez, a drug addict born in Trinidad who spent her nights on the streets of Crown Heights, seemed to have a knack for witnessing homicides Mr. Scarcella was assigned to, prompting lawyers to call her “Louie’s go-to witness.”
In the late 1980s, Ms. Gomez testified that she saw a drug dealer, Robert Hill, commit two separate murders. Both times, she was the only eyewitness.
In the first trial, she said she was hiding in a closet in a crack den, watching through a keyhole in the door, and saw Mr. Hill put a pillow over a man’s head and shoot him. Mr. Hill’s cousin said the family later hired an investigator and found no keyhole in the closet door.
Mr. Hill was acquitted.
In the second trial, Mr. Hill was accused of shooting a man on a Crown Heights street corner and then, curiously, putting the dying man inside a livery cab and ordering the driver to take him to the hospital.
Ms. Gomez’s testimony was so belligerent that the judge threatened to strike it in its entirety. She contradicted the evidence in several ways, including the direction the shot was fired and the color of the cab. She even admitted she lied during the first trial.
Yet Mr. Hill was convicted.
“I was kind of no good, but I wasn’t a killer,” Mr. Hill, now 52, said in an interview at the Fishkill Correctional Facility.
Mr. Hill and his family say they are convinced he had been railroaded by Mr. Scarcella, and believe the detective coached Ms. Gomez on her testimony.
They said in interviews that they were startled when Ms. Gomez surfaced again, this time at the trial of Mr. Hill’s stepbrothers, Darryl Austin and Alvena Jennette, who were accused of killing a man for his money.
Transcripts show Ms. Gomez, who claimed to see the killing from a nearby street corner and decided to follow the killers home because she was “nosy,” gave muddled answers that contradicted the other eyewitness.
Jurors were deadlocked and leaning toward acquittal, according to court records. They complained of moldy sandwiches, and the judge pressed them to try harder. Three hours later, they returned with a conviction. Mr. Austin died in prison of lung disease, while Mr. Jennette, 49, was released in 2007 after serving 21 years. “The whole neighborhood knows we didn’t kill that guy,” he said.
As for Ms. Gomez, he said, “I don’t know anyone who ever witnessed three, four or five homicides, unless you were doing them.”
The Legal Aid Society said recently that Ms. Gomez’s repeated role is so troubling that it plans to review homicide appeals of that era to see how many mention her.
Mr. Scarcella said she testified in at least six cases and had nothing but praise for her.
“God bless her,” he said. Though he said he did not recall many specifics of the cases that involved her, he “stood by her 100 percent.” She died years ago, in what acquaintances said was a hit-and-run accident.
Witnesses back then were elusive. Yet Mr. Scarcella could not explain Ms. Gomez’s verbosity and ubiquity. He said he would give her cigarettes and some food money, but that was it.
George Duke, a former supervisor of Mr. Scarcella’s who speaks highly of him, said he thinks Ms. Gomez was among several prostitutes whom the police paid $100 per murder for information. But when they were obviously lying, Mr. Duke said, he would not use them in that case.
A prosecutor’s view of Ms. Gomez is available in an Internet posting on a cigar-smokers forum. Neil Ross, a former assistant district attorney who is now a Manhattan criminal court judge, prosecuted the two Hill cases. In a 2000 posting, he reminisced about a cigar he received from the “legendary detective” Louis Scarcella as they celebrated in a bar after the Hill conviction.
In the post, Mr. Ross said that the evidence backed up Ms. Gomez but acknowledged, “It was near folly to even think that anyone would believe Gomez about anything, let alone the fact that she witnessed the same guy kill two different people.”
Mr. Ross declined to comment, citing judicial ethics rules. “That is horrible,” Mr. Scarcella said about the post. “I don’t know what else to say.”
His Own Way
Mr. Scarcella grew up in Bensonhurst and his father, Domenick, was a police officer. The young Scarcella served six years in the Navy, and joined the police force in 1973. He became a detective in 1981, and in 1987 transferred to the Brooklyn North homicide squad. During off hours, he moonlighted as a Coney Island carnival barker.
His day job was nonstop. All told, Mr. Scarcella estimates he was the lead investigator on around 175 homicides and had a role in at least another 175. After he left the police force, he served as a schools investigator and a dock builder.
Some lawyers who crossed paths with Mr. Scarcella said they thought he imagined himself a crusader who created his own rules.
“He had a gregarious, funny, wonderful personality,” said Martin Marshak, a defense lawyer who represented clients in several cases in which, he said, Mr. Scarcella threatened witnesses. “N.Y.P.D. and prosecutors thought he was one of the best homicide detectives. The only problem was he never followed the rules.”
He added, “I don’t want to say he manufactured witnesses, but he got people to say what he wanted them to say.”
The Police Department would not comment on Mr. Scarcella or make his personnel record available.
Jay Saltpeter, a former detective who worked with Mr. Scarcella and is now a private investigator, says Mr. Scarcella is being unfairly scapegoated. He said detectives back then often assembled sloppy cases that prosecutors accepted. But he also said people did harbor doubts about Mr. Scarcella. “All the questions and rumors we heard then are coming out now,” he said.
In the 1987 murder trial of James Jenkins, who was convicted, Judge Francis X. Egitto said that the witness identification procedures used by Mr. Scarcella were “a classic illustration of what not to do.” Witnesses were shown one photo rather than a gallery, the court records show. They were allowed to mingle together while making an identification of Mr. Jenkins, and Mr. Scarcella told them, “We have the guy who committed the murder.”
“That was wrong if I did that,” Mr. Scarcella said. “But I don’t remember.”
Questionable Tactics
When Shabaka Shakur was interrogated by Mr. Scarcella back in 1989, he said he told the detective nothing of consequence.
But when Mr. Shakur showed up in court for his double murder trial, he was confronted by an incriminating statement that Mr. Scarcella swore he had taken from him. Mr. Scarcella’s underlying interrogation notes were missing, a lapse that shows up in other Scarcella cases.
Mr. Shakur was convicted in what was characterized by prosecutors as a squabble over car payments. The key evidence was an eyewitness and the incriminating statement.
Mr. Shakur, 48, is at Auburn Correctional Facility, in his 26th year of a 40-year-to-life sentence. In a telephone interview, he said Mr. Scarcella fabricated the statement and “they ignored the evidence that shows I wasn’t the guy.”
Ronald Kuby, his current lawyer, said he believes further investigation will show that a vicious drug gang was responsible.
Mr. Scarcella said he did not recall the case.
He does readily acknowledge that he obtained confessions and witnesses that fellow detectives could not. But he ascribes it to his beguiling manner.
“You’re right,” Mr. Scarcella said, “there were cases where suspects talked to one detective and they got nothing, and they called me and I got statements. A lot of guys don’t know how to talk to people.”
At times, he would bang tables and belittle suspects, but he said he favored more delicate approaches.
“Sometimes I would cry with them. Sometimes I would pray with them. Sometimes I would sit with them for hours and hours and hours,” he said, adding, “One young man, after advising him of his rights, said I was the father he never had. He felt so good. Unfortunately, he killed his roommate.”
In 2007, Mr. Scarcella appeared on the Dr. Phil show as an interrogation expert to discuss false confessions. At one point, he said: “Are there rules when it comes to homicide? No. No, there are none. I lie to them. I will use deception. The bad guys don’t play by the rules when they kill Ma and Pop, shoot them in the head, ruin the lives of their family. I don’t play by the rules.”
He went on: “I would use a lie. I had a case, and I said: ‘I have your prints. You were there, and that’s it.’ He said: ‘No. No way. I wasn’t there.’ It’s like 4 in the morning. I take him into the bathroom, and he says to me, ‘Louis, you were right. I was there, but he kicked me, and I shot him by accident.’ I said, ‘Don’t you feel better now?’ And he’s now doing 37 ½ years to life.”
Few individuals feel as wronged by Mr. Scarcella as Derrick Hamilton. He spent nearly 21 years in prison for a 1991 murder, before being paroled in 2011. Now a paralegal, he continues to try to prove he was set up by Mr. Scarcella.
Prosecutors defend the conviction, but Mr. Hamilton has affidavits from four witnesses, including a former police officer, who put him in New Haven, Conn., when the murder occurred. None had originally testified. The sole eyewitness who testified said Mr. Scarcella coached her on what to say, and has since recanted.
Mr. Hamilton, 47, had earlier served seven years for manslaughter. When Mr. Scarcella came to arrest him at a beauty parlor, Mr. Hamilton said, the detective gave him a smart-alecky kiss, and then at the precinct “looked me straight in the eye and said he knew for a fact I didn’t do it, but said I didn’t do enough time on a prior case.”
Asked about that, Mr. Scarcella said: “He can drop dead. The man is an out-and-out liar.”
Accusations of Intimidation
Witnesses as well as suspects accused Mr. Scarcella of coercing false testimony from them.
In 1992, Ronald Pondexter was accused of murdering a man during a middle-of-the-night robbery in the vestibule of an apartment building. The victim was with another man, who survived. After first offering a description that did not match Mr. Pondexter, the survivor said Mr. Pondexter was the killer, though his consumption of 12 drinks undercut his reliability as a witness.
Mr. Scarcella, the arresting officer, produced one other witness, a 19-year-old girl.
Her testimony of what she saw outside her window implicated Mr. Pondexter. Her mother, however, swore her daughter was asleep. In court papers, it was suggested that the mother might have been intimidated by associates of Mr. Pondexter.
During the trial, Michael Baum, Mr. Pondexter’s defense lawyer, said the daughter told him that she had lied because Mr. Scarcella had threatened her.
The judge did not allow her to take the stand again or strike her testimony. Mr. Pondexter was convicted. In 1996, the Court of Appeals ordered a new trial. The girl did not appear, and Mr. Pondexter was acquitted.
Mr. Scarcella called it “ridiculous” that he would intimidate a person to testify.
“I have no recollection of that whatsoever,” he said.
New Strides in Spaying and Neutering
http://nyti.ms/IDWeYd
Todd Bruce, a herd manager on a farm in Oregon City, Ore., had long resisted neutering his 5-year-old Australian cattle dog, Cody, for fear of losing the extra set (or two) of legs in the field.
“I just wanted him to maintain his working abilities,” said Mr. Bruce, 28. “I’ve had other dogs neutered that have had a lot of weight gain, and their bodies go through huge changes, and I didn’t want that to happen with my dog this time.”
Then Mr. Bruce’s sister, a veterinary student, told him about Zeuterin, a drug that sterilizes male dogs without the removal of the testicles, thus preserving some testosterone production. In June, Mr. Bruce volunteered Cody for the procedure, performed by veterinarians as part of a training program at a clinic in Portland. The next day, Cody was back at work, enthusiastically rounding up livestock.
“It was quick, painless and super uninvasive,” Mr. Bruce said. “He’s mellowed out a bit, but I haven’t had the problems I had before.”
The 40-year movement to convince Americans that they should spay or neuter their pets has been nothing short of a triumph: 83 percent of owned dogs and 91 percent of owned cats are now spayed or neutered in the United States, compared with only about 10 percent in the 1970s. But surgically removing the reproductive organs of every pet is still time-consuming for veterinarians, unpopular among a subset of pet owners and ethically troubling to animal welfare advocates.
It is also an impractical solution to sterilizing stray animals, which constitute the bulk of America’s nuisance animal problem. “Surgery is definitely a bottleneck for humane animal control,” said Dr. Julie K. Levy, a veterinarian at the University of Florida who has researched the problem.
Now, a handful of nonsurgical sterilization treatments are emerging — led by Zeuterin, which could be commercially available in the United States by the end of this year — that could reduce or even eliminate the need for traditional neutering.
“The truth is, we may have maximized what we can do with surgical spay-neuter,” said Joyce Briggs, the president of the Alliance for Contraception in Cats and Dogs, a group advocating alternative approaches. “Nonsurgical sterilants could be a game-changer for animal welfare across the world.”
The problem, she added, is persuading enough veterinarians, pet owners and pharmaceutical companies to embrace the new technology.
The remedy nearest to market is Zeuterin, a mix of zinc gluconate and arginine that is injected directly into a dog’s testicles, killing the sperm and then shutting down the passageway through which it would normally travel. The results are permanent, and the process takes only a few hours, poses little risk compared with surgery and works in 99.6 percent of dogs, according to research trials.
“I think it’s an outstanding product,” said Dr. Levy, who used the drug nearly a decade ago to sterilize wild dogs in the Galápagos. She is eager for Americans to see what Zeuterin can accomplish.
“There’s just a communication issue,” she added.
The drug now called Zeuterin has been on the market before and failed. Introduced as Neutersol in 2003, the drug, which needs to be injected very precisely and delicately, was sold to veterinarians without much training or support. As a result, too many dogs had adverse reactions (inflamed testicles, mostly), and the drug earned a bad reputation. By 2005, both it and the company behind it had disappeared.
“This product isn’t a product,” said Joe Tosini, the founder and chief executive of Ark Sciences, which bought the rights to the drug and renamed it. “It’s really a procedure that has to be taught.” The company is waiting for the Food and Drug Administration to approve its manufacturing facilities so it can sell the drug in the United States. Approval may come as early as this month.
Mr. Tosini, a former minister who was an original investor in Neutersol, said Ark Sciences had learned from the mistakes of its predecessor. To provide Zeuterin, veterinarians will have to complete a five-hour course that includes injecting the drug into several dogs.
The idea that surgical castration causes weight gain or even behavioral changes in dogs is still a matter of debate among veterinarians. Nonetheless, the procedure remains unpopular among some pet owners who rely on their dogs for hunting, sports or protection, who fear that castration could affect their pets’ performance.
Some owners simply cannot afford the procedure, which can cost upward of $400 depending on the region (Ark Sciences plans to make Zeuterin available at clinics for as little as $15). Other owners, particularly those with male dogs, make a conscious choice not to sterilize.
“In certain cultures, and Latin cultures are among them, castration is really viewed as very emasculating, and I think people identify with their dogs,” Dr. Levy said.
Few other companies have shown much enthusiasm for walking the long, expensive regulatory path required to get approval for nonsurgical sterilization drugs — a process that takes five to seven years and can cost more than $10 million.
The perception, some researchers say, is that surgical spaying and neutering are now just too deeply ingrained in veterinary practices.
“What I often hear from the big animal health company executives is, ‘Well, vets just like to spay and neuter dogs and cats, so there’s no market for this,’ ” said Dr. Linda Rhodes, the chief scientific officer of Aratana Therapeutics, a company that licenses the rights to use drugs developed for humans in animals.
Although most veterinarians lose money on spaying and neutering, they prefer to stick with the technique they know rather than try something they consider experimental, said Dr. Mark Russak, the immediate past president of the American Animal Hospital Association. “We wonder, ‘What’s going to happen in 10 years? Are these dogs going to get cancer?’ We’d rather let the guy up the street try it first.”
Elsewhere, nonsurgical sterilizers are starting to catch on. In recent years, castration-resistant owners in Australia, New Zealand and parts of Europe have been turning to Suprelorin, an implant that sterilizes male dogs for six or 12 months by neutralizing the production of reproductive hormones.
Though an implant that must regularly be replaced like Suprelorin is not practical for strays, a vaccine known as GonaCon and developed by the Department of Agriculture to sterilize deer and wild horses may be a viable alternative, Dr. Levy said. Studies have shown that a single injection of GonaCon will sterilize most cats and dogs for up to four years — about the life span of a stray animal. And because it blocks reproductive hormones, GonaCon eliminates many of the nuisance behaviors, like fighting and spraying, associated with strays.
But GonaCon would need to be approved by the F.D.A. for use in dogs and cats, and there is hardly enough money to be made in treating stray animals to justify that cost for a for-profit company.
“We’re kind of looking at a charity population,” Dr. Levy said. “It’s like developing drugs to treat disease that only occur in impoverished countries.” One charitable organization, The Found Animals Foundation, is offering a $25 million award to the inventor of the first single-shot, nonsurgical sterilant that works in both dogs and cats. But no one has been able to claim the prize.
With a successful Zeuterin debut, other companies might choose to invest in similar treatments. But for now Ark Sciences, aware of the resistance to change, is focusing its marketing efforts on early adopters, veterinarians like Dr. Levy who already know the virtues of nonsurgical sterilants.
For many of them, the switch to a new neutering strategy will be like “giving an airplane to people who are used to traveling by covered wagon,” Mr. Tosini said.
Seeing the Toll, Schools Revise Zero Tolerance
http://nyti.ms/1g3Hh0i
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Faced with mounting evidence that get-tough policies in schools are leading to arrest records, low academic achievement and high dropout rates that especially affect minority students, cities and school districts around the country are rethinking their approach to minor offenses.
Perhaps nowhere has the shift been more pronounced than in Broward County’s public schools. Two years ago, the school district achieved an ignominious Florida record: More students were arrested on school campuses here than in any other state district, the vast majority for misdemeanors like possessing marijuana or spraying graffiti.
The Florida district, the sixth largest in the nation, was far from an outlier. In the past two decades, schools around the country have seen suspensions, expulsions and arrests for minor nonviolent offenses climb together with the number of police officers stationed at schools. The policy, called zero tolerance, first grew out of the war on drugs in the 1990s and became more aggressive in the wake of school shootings like the one at Columbine High School in Colorado.
But in November, Broward veered in a different direction, joining other large school districts, including Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and Denver, in backing away from the get-tough approach.
Rather than push children out of school, districts like Broward are now doing the opposite: choosing to keep lawbreaking students in school, away from trouble on the streets, and offering them counseling and other assistance aimed at changing behavior.
These alternative efforts are increasingly supported, sometimes even led, by state juvenile justice directors, judges and police officers.
In Broward, which had more than 1,000 arrests in the 2011 school year, the school district entered into a wide-ranging agreement last month with local law enforcement, the juvenile justice department and civil rights groups like the N.A.A.C.P. to overhaul its disciplinary policies and de-emphasize punishment.
Some states, prodded by parents and student groups, are similarly moving to change the laws; in 2009, Florida amended its laws to allow school administrators greater discretion in disciplining students.
“A knee-jerk reaction for minor offenses, suspending and expelling students, this is not the business we should be in,” said Robert W. Runcie, the Broward County Schools superintendent, who took the job in late 2011. “We are not accepting that we need to have hundreds of students getting arrested and getting records that impact their lifelong chances to get a job, go into the military, get financial aid.”
Nationwide, more than 70 percent of students involved in arrests or referrals to court are black or Hispanic, according to federal data.
“What you see is the beginning of a national trend here,” said Michael Thompson, the director of the Council of State Governments Justice Center. “Everybody recognizes right now that if we want to really find ways to close the achievement gap, we are really going to need to look at the huge number of kids being removed from school campuses who are not receiving any classroom time.”
Pressure to change has come from the Obama administration, too. Beginning in 2009, the Department of Justice and the Department of Education aggressively began to encourage schools to think twice before arresting and pushing children out of school. In some cases, as in Meridian, Miss., the federal government has sued to force change in schools.
Some view the shift as politically driven and worry that the pendulum may swing too far in the other direction. Ken Trump, a school security consultant, said that while existing policies are at times misused by school staffs and officers, the policies mostly work well, offering schools the right amount of discretion.
“It’s a political movement by civil rights organizations that have targeted school police,” Mr. Trump said. “If you politicize this on either side, it’s not going to help on the front lines.”
Supporters, though, emphasize the flexibility in these new policies and stress that they do not apply to students who commit felonies or pose a danger.
“We are not taking these tools out of the toolbox,” said Russell Skiba, a school psychology professor at Indiana University who promotes disciplinary changes. “We are saying these should be tools of last resort.”
In Broward County, the shift has shown immediate results, although it is too early to predict overall success. School-based arrests have dropped by 41 percent, and suspensions, which in 2011 added up to 87,000 out of 258,000 students, are down 66 percent from the same period in 2012, school data shows.
Under the new agreement, students caught for the first time committing any of 11 nonviolent misdemeanors are no longer arrested and sent to court. Rather, they attend counseling and perform community service.
Nor do students face suspension for minor infractions. Instead, they also attend a program called Promise for three days or more. Repeat offenders get several chances to change their behavior before more punitive measures kick in.
One recent afternoon, an 18-year-old senior sat in the cafeteria at the Pine Ridge Alternative Center, where students are sent in lieu of a suspension, and spoke with a psychology graduate student on a counseling team. The girl had been caught with a small amount of marijuana in her car on her high school campus, a misdemeanor that would have led to a suspension or arrest in the past. It was the first time she had gotten in trouble at school.
“I was freaking out,” she said. Her first fear was that she would be barred from prom. Here, though, she saw the larger picture and came to view the incident as “her second chance.”
She learned about bullying and drugs and alcohol. “It was a slap in the face,” she said. “I don’t even want to smoke anymore.”
Other students here learn to manage their anger, if that is their issue. Parents are involved in the process. And counselors have helped identify problems at home including abusive situations, something that administrators said underscores how invaluable the counseling component has been for the Promise program, said Belinda Hope, the principal at Pine Ridge.
Mr. Runcie and others said the more punitive measures tended to make a bad situation worse. Suspended and expelled children would be home alone or on the street, falling behind academically. Those arrested could be stigmatized by criminal records.
“The data showed an increase in the harshness of the disciplinary practices in schools — what was once a trip to the principal’s office is now a trip to the jail cell,” said Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil-rights group involved in the effort.
Juvenile judges were among the first to express alarm over the jump in the number of students appearing in court on misdemeanors, an increase they said is tied to the proliferation of school police officers.
“We started to see the officers as a disciplinary tool,” said Judge Elijah H. Williams of Broward County Circuit Court, a juvenile judge who said he was “no flaming liberal” but saw the need for change. “Somebody writes graffiti in a stall, O.K., you’re under arrest. A person gets caught with a marijuana cigarette, you’re under arrest.”
http://nyti.ms/18lBzyS
The streetlights were bright at the Kingsborough Houses, so even though it was about 4 a.m., one of the two off-duty correction officers sitting in the parked Volvo said he got a good look at the two men who rode up on bicycles.
It was the summer of 1991 in Crown Heights, and the officers, Robert E. Crosson and Rolando Neischer, friends since their teens, were chatting in the predawn solitude.
The men on bicycles were armed. They ordered Mr. Crosson and Mr. Neischer out. But Mr. Neischer grabbed his own weapon, and a wild firefight ensued. The police believed at least one of the carjackers was wounded, records show. Mr. Neischer was shot five times — in the chest, back, abdomen, thigh and ankle — and died four days later. Mr. Crosson was shot through his hand.
Two teenagers were arrested. They were quickly convicted.
It was an open-and-shut case.
But it was fraught with problems.
The suspects were arrested by Detective Louis Scarcella and his partner, Stephen W. Chmil. The case is now among 46 that Detective Scarcella handled that are under review by the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. Mr. Scarcella, one of the most successful and aggressive detectives in New York City history, came under scrutiny after accusations that he once framed an innocent man. He has been accused of roughing up suspects; inventing confessions; relying on the testimony of the same crack addict in multiple cases; and even pulling jailhouse informers, often dangerous criminals, out of prison to smoke crack and visit prostitutes or girlfriends.
But the involvement of Mr. Scarcella, who is retired, and Mr. Chmil was only the start of trouble for the two teenagers arrested in the case. Public records, court transcripts and interviews with both convicted men and their lawyers, as well as other law enforcement officials, reveal that if the detectives took shortcuts, they were the first in a series of missteps, errors and questionable decisions made by players at every level of the criminal justice system who touched this case, from the police to defense lawyers to prosecutors to the judge who heard it.
The teenagers’ experience demonstrates how poor work by detectives at the initial stages can start a sequence of events that snowballs through the system, seemingly unstoppably, until two possibly innocent men have spent decades in prison.
Among the many troubling aspects of the case:
■ Mr. Crosson described light-skinned black men in their early 20s — and a bloodstain suggested at least one was wounded — but the detectives arrested dark-skinned juvenile delinquents with no injuries, one of whom was just 14. By the detectives’ telling, Mr. Crosson identified one of the suspects’ photos after a detective casually reached into a drawer stuffed with hundreds of mug shots and pulled out a random handful. “The perfect patsies,” a defense lawyer, Robert Massi, said at the time.
■ There is no evidence that the police lab ever tested blood samples found at the crime scene. Neither the detectives nor the prosecutor in the case made any effort to push for the results, which could have been crucial for the defense.
■ Fingerprints at the crime scene did not match those of either defendant. Yet prosecutors forged ahead, even relying on only one eyewitness, Mr. Crosson, a practice experts say is the leading cause of wrongful convictions.
■ In court, a detective submitted photographs of a lineup from the wrong case. The judge allowed the mistake and simply let the case move forward; the right pictures were never submitted.
■ Forensic evidence — including the blood samples — that could have been vital to exonerating the convicted men vanished years later, destroying hopes of an appeal. No one can explain why.
Mr. Scarcella has said he never framed anyone and is proud of his work for the city. He referred questions about this case to a lawyer, Alan Abramson, who declined to comment.
The district attorney’s review has invigorated a quest lasting years by several lawyers. They were appalled at the lack of evidence that led to the conviction of the two teenagers — Rosean S. Hargrave and John Dwayne Bunn.
“I don’t want to get my hopes up; that just stresses me out,” Mr. Hargrave said in an interview at Southport Correctional Facility in western New York, where he meets visitors behind a thick pane of glass that leaves just enough room at the bottom for an inmate to hold a loved one’s hands. “I’m mad every single day. It’s been 22 years.”
Young Men on Bicycles
Mr. Neischer, 31, and Mr. Crosson, who was 30, were both correction officers assigned to Rikers Island. Mr. Crosson said they were out late the night of Aug. 12, 1991, because Mr. Neischer’s son had been hurt at a playground and wound up in the emergency room. After the boy was treated for a broken arm and taken home, the two men sat chatting in the car into the early morning of the 13th. Mr. Neischer wore a bright peach-colored shirt. They were parked in front of a fire hydrant at the public housing development where they both lived.
That was when two young men on bicycles neared the Volvo with guns pointed downward. They stood on opposite sides and ordered the two men out, Mr. Crosson testified. “My first feeling was, I don’t believe this is happening,” Mr. Crosson said, according to a transcript of the trial. “Rolando looked at me and said, ‘Hold on, my man.’ He opens up the door of the car.”
Mr. Crosson said the man on the passenger side pointed a blue steel gun at him and ordered him out, too.
“I put my hands up to my face, because the gun was pointed right at my face,” Mr. Crosson testified. “The gun went off.”
Shot in the hand and with blood running down his face, Mr. Crosson got out of the car, crouched on the ground, and then sprinted as fast as he could, he said. He heard lots of shots, he added. The carjackers dumped the bikes, hopped in the Volvo and roared off.
Mr. Crosson covered about 50 feet, he later testified, before realizing that he had left his friend behind. He turned back, but he said the Volvo and Mr. Neischer were gone.
The police arrived moments later. Mr. Neischer was discovered 192 feet away. He had fired six rounds at the carjackers and was reloading his Smith & Wesson revolver. Mr. Neischer told his friend, “I’m going to make it.”
Detectives from the 77th Precinct started a manhunt. Blood was spattered on one of the bicycles, so detectives, assuming the suspect was wounded, checked hospitals in all five boroughs. Mr. Crosson described the gunmen as light-skinned black men in their late teens or early 20s, who were about 5 feet 9 or 10 inches tall. He remembered one of them wearing a black leisure suit and a baseball cap. At the same time, he said he was mostly concentrating on that gun on his face.
Records show the detectives initially suspected four people: Mr. Hargrave, Mr. Bunn and two others, including a member of a notorious family of criminal brothers in Crown Heights.
Mr. Neischer underwent surgery the next day at Kings County Hospital. Mr. Crosson, that same day, told the police he was too traumatized to offer a more detailed description of the gunmen. He said he would rest and then go to the police station and look at mug shots.
The case was assigned to John Barba, a detective at the 77th Precinct, and to Mr. Scarcella, a Brooklyn North detective who served as a roving investigator for Crown Heights and several other neighborhoods. A handsome cigar-smoker with a keen street sense and a gift for conversation, Detective Scarcella was best known for getting suspects to admit crimes. With him came his regular partner, Detective Chmil.
Mr. Crosson met them the day after the shooting at the 77th Precinct station house. Detective Chmil testified that he and Detective Scarcella reached into a drawer with roughly 600 mug shot photos and pulled out six at random to show the wounded survivor. Mr. Crosson said he recognized Mr. Hargrave in one of the pictures, saying he was “90 percent sure” that that was the man who shot him, but that he would need to see him in person.
Detectives reported that an anonymous call the day after the shooting led to the Volvo, which was found a few miles away with a bullet in the left front tire and dried blood on the driver’s door sill.
‘On a Collision Course’
Rosean (pronounced ro-SHAWN) Hargrave was a 17-year-old 10th-grade dropout known as Cotti, who lived in the Kingsborough complex with his mother, grandmother and sisters. He liked stealing cars for joy rides while his mother, then a janitor at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, struggled with single parenthood.
Court records show that Mr. Hargrave had been repeatedly arrested over the previous year, with each arrest growing increasingly violent. A probation report described him as a young man “on a collision course.”
At the time of the shooting, he had just come home from a stint at Rikers, where he was held for a series of armed robberies. He soon got a surprise.
“My mother said, ‘The police came looking for you,’ ” Mr. Hargrave said in a recent interview. “I said, ‘For what?’ ”
Detective Scarcella found Mr. Hargrave outside his sister’s apartment. The detective said he did not need an arrest warrant: He said he “got lucky” because Mr. Hargrave was in the hallway, not inside. The 17-year-old was interrogated at the station and put in a lineup with five “fillers,” extras hired to stand in as suspects.
“They put me in a lineup with a bunch of dudes that looked like they smoked crack,” Mr. Hargrave recalled. “They were out of place, like they should have been in a shelter.”
Mr. Crosson came in and looked at the lineup. He selected Mr. Hargrave. He told the detectives: “He had the gun. He shot me, and that man is a criminal. That’s him.”
The detectives’ reports do not indicate how they came to identify Mr. Bunn as the second suspect. Mr. Bunn, who was released on parole in 2006, said in a recent interview that he figured his name came up during the interviews with Mr. Hargrave. “He must have been like, ‘I was with Dwayne,’ ” Mr. Bunn said.
Mr. Bunn was 14 and 5-foot-6 when arrested. He was a car thief who used screwdrivers to steal parked vehicles. He had been arrested once before in a jewelry snatching.
Like Mr. Hargrave, Mr. Bunn was being raised by a single mother; both women had drinking problems. And like Mr. Hargrave, Mr. Bunn swears he was home in bed the night of the shooting. But still, a few hours after Mr. Hargrave’s lineup, Mr. Bunn’s basketball coach in the Police Athletic League, an officer at the 77th Precinct, got him out of his house. “They put me in a lineup with grown men,” he said. “It was a joke.”
Mr. Crosson pointed at Mr. Bunn and said he was the killer.
Both defendants said investigators — it was unclear who — approached them in custody a few days after their arrests to take pictures of them naked. The detectives were looking for bullet wounds, and seemed alarmed not to find any.
“He was saying: ‘Turn around. Lift your arms,’ ” Mr. Hargrave recalled. “He’s like: ‘Wait a second. These guys didn’t get shot.’ ”
Both teenagers were charged, one day after the killing, with attempted murder and robbery. Then on Aug. 17, four days after the shootout, Mr. Neischer died. With his death, the charges were upgraded to murder and the investigation was officially closed.
Wrong Lineup Photos
The case was assigned to Edward Boyar, a veteran prosecutor whom District Attorney Charles J. Hynes had chosen four years earlier to be the lead trial lawyer in the Howard Beach racial killing case. In his 1990 memoir about that case, Mr. Hynes called Mr. Boyar an eternal optimist, one of the “best prosecuting trial attorneys in the city,” and a “rock-ribbed conservative” whose political theories were to “the right of a Russian czar.”
Mr. Boyar was known in Brooklyn legal circles as a gifted trial lawyer. But he had troubles, too. He was once suspended for three months after drunkenly shouting racial slurs in a Brooklyn bar, according to The Daily News.
Early missteps by the prosecution were allowed to stand. At a hearing before trial, the defense learned there were problems when a detective presented the court with photos of the “fillers” — the men who lined up with Mr. Hargrave. Three of the people in the photos did not match the men shown in the lineup, transcripts show. The detective had accidentally turned in close-ups from a different case, and the prosecutor apparently did not notice. The correct ones had been misplaced.
The judge, Justice Gloria Goldstein, allowed the photo evidence and witness ID anyway.
The trial began in November 1992 at the old State Supreme Court building on Adams Street in Downtown Brooklyn. Both defendants wore new clothes their mothers had bought in the hopes of making a good impression on the judge and jury.
The families were surprised at how quickly it was all over. Both sides presented their cases in a single day. Neither defense lawyer made an opening statement, and the prosecution had little evidence beyond Mr. Crosson’s word. Only four people testified: the first police officer at the scene, the medical examiner, Mr. Crosson and Mr. Barba, the precinct detective.
The medical examiner said the autopsy showed that Mr. Neischer had been shot with two different guns. One gun was fired by someone who shot from the left front of the victim and another gun from behind, the medical examiner said.
Yet even with so few witnesses, there were contradictions.
Detective Barba took the stand and revealed that the fingerprints found on the bicycles and the Volvo did not match either suspect. And nobody in the Police Department ever asked Mr. Crosson for his prints, the precinct detective testified.
Nobody ever mentioned that, in addition to Mr. Hargrave and Mr. Bunn, the police initially had known of two other suspects, one of them a member of a criminal family, who were noted in the detectives’ paperwork.
When his turn came, Mr. Massi, Mr. Hargrave’s defense lawyer, tried to show that the blood in the car and on the bicycles belonged to the carjackers and not Mr. Neischer, who was outside the car when he was shot. And if the carjackers were shot, he argued, then the two teenagers must be innocent, because neither was wounded.
But the blood-test results were never received, a detective testified. There was even confusion as to whether the testing had ever been done.
“Did you request a serology comparison as to those blood samples?” Mr. Massi asked Detective Barba.
“I didn’t,” the detective replied. “But a request was submitted, as I see here.”
The result?
“I haven’t received that as of yet,” Detective Barba testified.
Mr. Boyar said the test was not important because the blood in the car was probably Mr. Neischer’s.
Ballistics testing was also requested, but the records do not show that that was done either. The bullet from Mr. Crosson’s hand had been tossed out at the hospital.
Mr. Massi tried a new tack in his closing argument, one with the potential to upend the case. He suggested that Mr. Crosson was trying to cover something up, that he had been deliberately targeted and that this was no random carjacking. He said it made no sense that Mr. Crosson initially could not find his wounded friend — after all, he was wearing a peach-colored shirt and was lying beneath a bright streetlight. How, Mr. Massi asked, did the victim manage to make it so far up the block with bullets in his ankle and leg? Why was there no trail of blood leading to his body? How did the bicycles wind up so many feet away from the crime scene?
Mr. Massi tried to portray Mr. Crosson as a crooked officer by citing an account that he had peddled stolen clothing in the past, the court transcript shows. But Mr. Massi was armed only with hearsay and rumors, and Justice Goldstein did not let him ask Mr. Crosson any questions about stolen clothing.
The judge also refused a request by Mr. Massi that she instruct the jury that they could presume that if the blood had been tested, the results would have been favorable to the defense.
Mr. Bunn’s court-appointed lawyer, Harold Venokur, hardly spoke at all. Mr. Bunn said in an interview this year that although both he and Mr. Hargrave had alibi witnesses, the defense lawyers told the two that the witnesses contradicted each other, so they decided not to put them on the stand. Mr. Venokur, who has since died, was 79 years old and had a poor reputation. One former prosecutor recalled the often-retold legend of the time he got up to give a closing argument but gave details for the wrong case.
At least one person in the courtroom, however, said that the young men did not help themselves with their demeanors. Mr. Neischer’s daughter, Nakeea, who was 12 at the time of the trial, remembered of Mr. Bunn: “When they brought up the charges, he was laughing. I don’t know if he thought it was a joke, but as they read the charges and said ‘murder’ it went from giggles to not giggles. I remember thinking, ‘If you didn’t do it, why would you be laughing?’ ”
Mr. Hargrave, she said, acted arrogantly. She said one of the defendants’ mothers arrived intoxicated.
The closing arguments, jury deliberation and verdict all took place the Tuesday before Thanksgiving.
At 11:05 p.m. the day after the trial began, the jury voted to convict.
Mr. Hargrave was sentenced to 30 years to life. Justice Goldstein sentenced Mr. Bunn to 20 years to life, but was later forced to change the penalty to nine years to life when lawyers proved she had illegally sentenced him as an adult. “When they said, ‘Life,’ they had to rush me to the hospital,” said Mr. Bunn’s mother, Maureen Bunn, who still lives in the same apartment on St. Marks Place in Crown Heights, decorated with plants and pictures of her children taped to the walls.
Both defendants filed appeals, saying Justice Goldstein deprived them of their constitutional rights when she denied requests to cross-examine Mr. Crosson about his past and would not instruct the jury about what it could presume from the missing blood exams.
The appeals were denied.
Mr. Barba has since died. Mr. Boyar, the prosecutor, is now retired and lives upstate. He suggested he did everything right. “Those kids were guilty,” Mr. Boyar said in a telephone interview, his thick Brooklyn accent still audible. “I see that as a clean case.”
Mr. Boyar insisted that Mr. Crosson’s law enforcement training made him a strong witness. Unable to recall every detail of a decades-old case on the spur of the moment, he said he must have complemented that testimony with ballistics, forensic evidence or perhaps a weapon.
Reminded that he had not, and that the trial lasted a day and a half, Mr. Boyar paused. “I had a homicide trial that lasted a day and a half?” he said. “If there is something amiss here, it should be set right, and that’s it.”
He later read the transcript, however, and said the lack of forensic evidence like matching fingerprints or a blood trail were common anomalies.
Evidence Destroyed
Ten years later, lawyers working together to file a new appeal for the men were dumbstruck when they encountered an apparently insurmountable, and unexplainable, roadblock.
Crucial evidence had been destroyed.
“We wanted the bicycles. We wanted the blood,” said William E. Hellerstein, who had been involved in the new appeal. But the evidence was gone. “There was some kind of order in the D.A.’s file to release the evidence.”
“Release” meant dispose of. Records shed no light on the reasons. A handwritten notation in the Legal Aid Society file said that a high-ranking representative of the Police Department told lawyers that someone had issued an order to destroy the evidence in 1993. It is unclear who made the order before the case was even appealed. The order itself has not been found.
“We were convinced this was a fishy case,” said Daniel S. Medwed, a Northeastern University professor who was also involved. “We just didn’t have a legal hook.”
Mr. Bunn was turned down for parole three times and was released in 2006. However, he failed to report in properly, violating his parole, and was sent back upstate for a year. He was released a second time in 2009.
He is bald with sad eyes now, and a small frame. He drove a reporter around his neighborhood in a borrowed Jaguar and stopped at the crime scene. He pointed out the nearby Granville T. Woods Elementary School in Crown Heights, which he and Mr. Hargrave had attended, though three years apart. He described how Mr. Hargrave would protect his smaller friend from bullies but gave him the occasional wedgie, too.
Mr. Bunn is still angry with his lawyers. He struggles with anxiety and finds he actually misses the structure of life behind bars. It was there that he learned to read. He works as an assistant to a rap group, and when the group he works for went on tour to Japan this summer, his parole prevented him from going.
“They pulled the rug out from under us by destroying the DNA that would have proved we were innocent,” he said, making no effort to stop the tears running down his cheeks as he sat at an Applebee’s in Downtown Brooklyn. “Then everybody gave up on us.”
The Exoneration Initiative, a nonprofit organization in Manhattan that has been investigating the case for two years, now represents Mr. Bunn. “This smacks of a cover-up, and it’s really troubling,” said Mr. Bunn’s lawyer, Glenn A. Garber.
One Man’s Word
Mr. Hargrave recently hired Pierre Sussman, a civil rights lawyer in the Bronx. Mr. Sussman represents several murder defendants who were investigated by Mr. Scarcella; one of them was released from prison this year, largely because of flaws in Mr. Scarcella’s work. The lawyer is deeply skeptical of the retired investigator.
“There are too many questionable evidentiary pieces to this conviction that rely on Scarcella and Chmil’s work,” Mr. Sussman said after an interview at his Bronx storefront law office across the street from the courthouse.
Mr. Sussman said he was chasing a tip that Mr. Crosson had been the victim of a previous shooting. If proved, it would suggest that he was the intended target of the men on bicycles back in 1991 — and had reasons to cover up their identities.
The lawyers are still waiting to find out whether the palm prints from the bicycles have yet been checked against those of the two other suspects in addition to Mr. Hargrave and Mr. Bunn who were mentioned in detectives’ records, one of whom is in prison. The police reports do not explain why those two men were suspects, or what investigative steps were taken to exclude them.
Peter J. Tartaglia, a former 77th Precinct lieutenant who supervised the investigation, and who has been a steady supporter of Mr. Scarcella, defended the work done on the case. He said that many questionable details, like the absence of defendants’ prints at the crime scene, could easily be explained: “If I went into your car, I might not find your prints in your car. Maybe we’d find your mechanic’s prints.”
On that, Mr. Tartaglia was right: Mr. Neischer’s prints were not found in his own car, either.
Through his wife, a New York City police officer, Mr. Crosson declined repeated requests to comment for this article. When a team of lawyers representing Mr. Hargrave went to his home in a Suffolk County cul-de-sac during the summer, the lights went out and no one came to the door. Bankruptcy court records show Mr. Crosson left the city’s Department of Correction in 2010 and was employed last year as a bus driver.
Mr. Neischer’s family said that although they never had a reason to doubt the convictions, if the men were to be exonerated or a judge ordered a new trial, they would not object.
Citing the open investigation, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office also declined to comment. Justice Goldstein, who now works for an arbitration company, did not respond to phone and email messages left at her company.
Mr. Massi, the trial lawyer, who left Legal Aid in 1995, is now retired and living upstate. He is still haunted: “I was genuinely moved by that case.”
Mr. Scarcella and his lawyer would not comment on this case. Mr. Scarcella’s partner, Mr. Chmil, vaguely recalled the investigation, although he forgot that Mr. Neischer had died.
“There are so many things that come together in a case — witnesses, forensics, the grand jury — when things go wrong, who are they pointing the finger at? The detective,” Mr. Chmil said by phone from Virginia, where he became a police officer again and later retired. “I didn’t have a good career; I had an exemplary one. And so did Scarcella. Now we look like the two worst guys in the world.”
Mr. Hargrave remains at Southport, a maximum-security prison reserved for inmates with severe behavior problems. His discipline record stretches for more than five pages, and his face bears a scar from a fight with another inmate.
“It’s like being in a jungle with a bunch of lions,” he explained. “If I got a spear, I got to protect myself.” He is not eligible for parole for eight years.
Review of 50 Brooklyn Murder Cases Ordered
http://nyti.ms/190rg7m
May 11, 2013
Review of 50 Brooklyn Murder Cases Ordered
By FRANCES ROBLES and N. R. KLEINFIELD
The Brooklyn district attorney’s office has ordered a review of some 50 murder cases assigned to an acclaimed homicide detective, an acknowledgment of mounting questions about the officer’s tactics and the legitimacy of the convictions.
The office’s Conviction Integrity Unit will reopen every murder case that resulted in a guilty verdict after being investigated by Detective Louis Scarcella, a flashy officer who handled some of Brooklyn’s most notorious crimes during the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s.
The development comes after The New York Times examined a dozen cases involving Mr. Scarcella and found disturbing patterns, including the detective’s reliance on the same eyewitness, a crack-addicted prostitute, for multiple murder prosecutions and his delivery of confessions from suspects who later said they had told him nothing. At the same time, defense lawyers, inmates and prisoner advocacy organizations have contacted the district attorney’s office to share their own suspicions about Mr. Scarcella.
The review by the office of District Attorney Charles J. Hynes will give special scrutiny to those cases that appear weakest — because they rely on either a single eyewitness or confession, officials said. The staff will re-interview available witnesses, and study any new evidence. If they feel a conviction was unjust, prosecutors could seek for it to be dismissed.
“People will look for blame,” said John O’Mara, who leads the Conviction Integrity Unit. “Our goal isn’t to look for blame. Our goal is to correct injustice.”
Mr. Scarcella’s name surfaced in March after a judge freed David Ranta, who had spent 23 years in prison after being convicted of murdering a rabbi. Prosecutors determined that Mr. Ranta’s conviction resulted in large part from flawed police work by Mr. Scarcella and a partner, including failing to pursue a more logical suspect. An investigation found they removed violent criminals from jail to let them smoke crack cocaine and visit prostitutes in exchange for incriminating Mr. Ranta. A witness also said Mr. Scarcella told him who to choose in a lineup.
Mr. Scarcella, 61, who retired from the police force in 1999, said he was surprised to learn of the review.
“Are you kidding me?,” he said Saturday in an interview.“Wow. This is quite a bit of a shock. Let them look at my convictions. I will help them if they need me. I don’t know what else to say. I expect he will find nothing,” he said.
He has maintained that he did nothing wrong.
“I couldn’t sit with my family the past 30, 40 years if I had hurt an individual,” he said in a previous interview. “I never fudged a lineup in my life. I never, ever took a false confession.”
He suggested that, following the Ranta news, those he put away believe that “Scarcella is the get-out-of-jail-free key.”
Pressed about specific cases, he said he could not recall many details and that he was being unfairly singled out.
“I have to be a pretty smart guy to lock someone up, get it through the D.A.’s office, get it through a trial and jury, and convict a guy,” he said. “I’m not that smart. It’s not a Louie Scarcella show.”
The questions about Mr. Scarcella stem from the sordid decades when the city saw as many as six homicides a day, and the police and the district attorney struggled to keep up.
Interviews with dozens of lawyers, prosecutors, witnesses and suspects, as well as a review of legal documents, suggest a detective who followed his own rules.
The new developments have proved embarrassing for Mr. Hynes, who is seeking re-election to his seventh term this fall. Although many of Mr. Scarcella’s cases date back to Mr. Hynes’s predecessor, Elizabeth Holtzman, his office has for years aggressively fended off appeals and denied public records requests from inmates who believe they were wrongly targeted by Mr. Scarcella.
Ms. Holtzman said Saturday, “I support a review of these cases.”
A Common Eyewitness
Teresa Gomez, a drug addict born in Trinidad who spent her nights on the streets of Crown Heights, seemed to have a knack for witnessing homicides Mr. Scarcella was assigned to, prompting lawyers to call her “Louie’s go-to witness.”
In the late 1980s, Ms. Gomez testified that she saw a drug dealer, Robert Hill, commit two separate murders. Both times, she was the only eyewitness.
In the first trial, she said she was hiding in a closet in a crack den, watching through a keyhole in the door, and saw Mr. Hill put a pillow over a man’s head and shoot him. Mr. Hill’s cousin said the family later hired an investigator and found no keyhole in the closet door.
Mr. Hill was acquitted.
In the second trial, Mr. Hill was accused of shooting a man on a Crown Heights street corner and then, curiously, putting the dying man inside a livery cab and ordering the driver to take him to the hospital.
Ms. Gomez’s testimony was so belligerent that the judge threatened to strike it in its entirety. She contradicted the evidence in several ways, including the direction the shot was fired and the color of the cab. She even admitted she lied during the first trial.
Yet Mr. Hill was convicted.
“I was kind of no good, but I wasn’t a killer,” Mr. Hill, now 52, said in an interview at the Fishkill Correctional Facility.
Mr. Hill and his family say they are convinced he had been railroaded by Mr. Scarcella, and believe the detective coached Ms. Gomez on her testimony.
They said in interviews that they were startled when Ms. Gomez surfaced again, this time at the trial of Mr. Hill’s stepbrothers, Darryl Austin and Alvena Jennette, who were accused of killing a man for his money.
Transcripts show Ms. Gomez, who claimed to see the killing from a nearby street corner and decided to follow the killers home because she was “nosy,” gave muddled answers that contradicted the other eyewitness.
Jurors were deadlocked and leaning toward acquittal, according to court records. They complained of moldy sandwiches, and the judge pressed them to try harder. Three hours later, they returned with a conviction. Mr. Austin died in prison of lung disease, while Mr. Jennette, 49, was released in 2007 after serving 21 years. “The whole neighborhood knows we didn’t kill that guy,” he said.
As for Ms. Gomez, he said, “I don’t know anyone who ever witnessed three, four or five homicides, unless you were doing them.”
The Legal Aid Society said recently that Ms. Gomez’s repeated role is so troubling that it plans to review homicide appeals of that era to see how many mention her.
Mr. Scarcella said she testified in at least six cases and had nothing but praise for her.
“God bless her,” he said. Though he said he did not recall many specifics of the cases that involved her, he “stood by her 100 percent.” She died years ago, in what acquaintances said was a hit-and-run accident.
Witnesses back then were elusive. Yet Mr. Scarcella could not explain Ms. Gomez’s verbosity and ubiquity. He said he would give her cigarettes and some food money, but that was it.
George Duke, a former supervisor of Mr. Scarcella’s who speaks highly of him, said he thinks Ms. Gomez was among several prostitutes whom the police paid $100 per murder for information. But when they were obviously lying, Mr. Duke said, he would not use them in that case.
A prosecutor’s view of Ms. Gomez is available in an Internet posting on a cigar-smokers forum. Neil Ross, a former assistant district attorney who is now a Manhattan criminal court judge, prosecuted the two Hill cases. In a 2000 posting, he reminisced about a cigar he received from the “legendary detective” Louis Scarcella as they celebrated in a bar after the Hill conviction.
In the post, Mr. Ross said that the evidence backed up Ms. Gomez but acknowledged, “It was near folly to even think that anyone would believe Gomez about anything, let alone the fact that she witnessed the same guy kill two different people.”
Mr. Ross declined to comment, citing judicial ethics rules. “That is horrible,” Mr. Scarcella said about the post. “I don’t know what else to say.”
His Own Way
Mr. Scarcella grew up in Bensonhurst and his father, Domenick, was a police officer. The young Scarcella served six years in the Navy, and joined the police force in 1973. He became a detective in 1981, and in 1987 transferred to the Brooklyn North homicide squad. During off hours, he moonlighted as a Coney Island carnival barker.
His day job was nonstop. All told, Mr. Scarcella estimates he was the lead investigator on around 175 homicides and had a role in at least another 175. After he left the police force, he served as a schools investigator and a dock builder.
Some lawyers who crossed paths with Mr. Scarcella said they thought he imagined himself a crusader who created his own rules.
“He had a gregarious, funny, wonderful personality,” said Martin Marshak, a defense lawyer who represented clients in several cases in which, he said, Mr. Scarcella threatened witnesses. “N.Y.P.D. and prosecutors thought he was one of the best homicide detectives. The only problem was he never followed the rules.”
He added, “I don’t want to say he manufactured witnesses, but he got people to say what he wanted them to say.”
The Police Department would not comment on Mr. Scarcella or make his personnel record available.
Jay Saltpeter, a former detective who worked with Mr. Scarcella and is now a private investigator, says Mr. Scarcella is being unfairly scapegoated. He said detectives back then often assembled sloppy cases that prosecutors accepted. But he also said people did harbor doubts about Mr. Scarcella. “All the questions and rumors we heard then are coming out now,” he said.
In the 1987 murder trial of James Jenkins, who was convicted, Judge Francis X. Egitto said that the witness identification procedures used by Mr. Scarcella were “a classic illustration of what not to do.” Witnesses were shown one photo rather than a gallery, the court records show. They were allowed to mingle together while making an identification of Mr. Jenkins, and Mr. Scarcella told them, “We have the guy who committed the murder.”
“That was wrong if I did that,” Mr. Scarcella said. “But I don’t remember.”
Questionable Tactics
When Shabaka Shakur was interrogated by Mr. Scarcella back in 1989, he said he told the detective nothing of consequence.
But when Mr. Shakur showed up in court for his double murder trial, he was confronted by an incriminating statement that Mr. Scarcella swore he had taken from him. Mr. Scarcella’s underlying interrogation notes were missing, a lapse that shows up in other Scarcella cases.
Mr. Shakur was convicted in what was characterized by prosecutors as a squabble over car payments. The key evidence was an eyewitness and the incriminating statement.
Mr. Shakur, 48, is at Auburn Correctional Facility, in his 26th year of a 40-year-to-life sentence. In a telephone interview, he said Mr. Scarcella fabricated the statement and “they ignored the evidence that shows I wasn’t the guy.”
Ronald Kuby, his current lawyer, said he believes further investigation will show that a vicious drug gang was responsible.
Mr. Scarcella said he did not recall the case.
He does readily acknowledge that he obtained confessions and witnesses that fellow detectives could not. But he ascribes it to his beguiling manner.
“You’re right,” Mr. Scarcella said, “there were cases where suspects talked to one detective and they got nothing, and they called me and I got statements. A lot of guys don’t know how to talk to people.”
At times, he would bang tables and belittle suspects, but he said he favored more delicate approaches.
“Sometimes I would cry with them. Sometimes I would pray with them. Sometimes I would sit with them for hours and hours and hours,” he said, adding, “One young man, after advising him of his rights, said I was the father he never had. He felt so good. Unfortunately, he killed his roommate.”
In 2007, Mr. Scarcella appeared on the Dr. Phil show as an interrogation expert to discuss false confessions. At one point, he said: “Are there rules when it comes to homicide? No. No, there are none. I lie to them. I will use deception. The bad guys don’t play by the rules when they kill Ma and Pop, shoot them in the head, ruin the lives of their family. I don’t play by the rules.”
He went on: “I would use a lie. I had a case, and I said: ‘I have your prints. You were there, and that’s it.’ He said: ‘No. No way. I wasn’t there.’ It’s like 4 in the morning. I take him into the bathroom, and he says to me, ‘Louis, you were right. I was there, but he kicked me, and I shot him by accident.’ I said, ‘Don’t you feel better now?’ And he’s now doing 37 ½ years to life.”
Few individuals feel as wronged by Mr. Scarcella as Derrick Hamilton. He spent nearly 21 years in prison for a 1991 murder, before being paroled in 2011. Now a paralegal, he continues to try to prove he was set up by Mr. Scarcella.
Prosecutors defend the conviction, but Mr. Hamilton has affidavits from four witnesses, including a former police officer, who put him in New Haven, Conn., when the murder occurred. None had originally testified. The sole eyewitness who testified said Mr. Scarcella coached her on what to say, and has since recanted.
Mr. Hamilton, 47, had earlier served seven years for manslaughter. When Mr. Scarcella came to arrest him at a beauty parlor, Mr. Hamilton said, the detective gave him a smart-alecky kiss, and then at the precinct “looked me straight in the eye and said he knew for a fact I didn’t do it, but said I didn’t do enough time on a prior case.”
Asked about that, Mr. Scarcella said: “He can drop dead. The man is an out-and-out liar.”
Accusations of Intimidation
Witnesses as well as suspects accused Mr. Scarcella of coercing false testimony from them.
In 1992, Ronald Pondexter was accused of murdering a man during a middle-of-the-night robbery in the vestibule of an apartment building. The victim was with another man, who survived. After first offering a description that did not match Mr. Pondexter, the survivor said Mr. Pondexter was the killer, though his consumption of 12 drinks undercut his reliability as a witness.
Mr. Scarcella, the arresting officer, produced one other witness, a 19-year-old girl.
Her testimony of what she saw outside her window implicated Mr. Pondexter. Her mother, however, swore her daughter was asleep. In court papers, it was suggested that the mother might have been intimidated by associates of Mr. Pondexter.
During the trial, Michael Baum, Mr. Pondexter’s defense lawyer, said the daughter told him that she had lied because Mr. Scarcella had threatened her.
The judge did not allow her to take the stand again or strike her testimony. Mr. Pondexter was convicted. In 1996, the Court of Appeals ordered a new trial. The girl did not appear, and Mr. Pondexter was acquitted.
Mr. Scarcella called it “ridiculous” that he would intimidate a person to testify.
“I have no recollection of that whatsoever,” he said.
New Strides in Spaying and Neutering
http://nyti.ms/IDWeYd
Todd Bruce, a herd manager on a farm in Oregon City, Ore., had long resisted neutering his 5-year-old Australian cattle dog, Cody, for fear of losing the extra set (or two) of legs in the field.
“I just wanted him to maintain his working abilities,” said Mr. Bruce, 28. “I’ve had other dogs neutered that have had a lot of weight gain, and their bodies go through huge changes, and I didn’t want that to happen with my dog this time.”
Then Mr. Bruce’s sister, a veterinary student, told him about Zeuterin, a drug that sterilizes male dogs without the removal of the testicles, thus preserving some testosterone production. In June, Mr. Bruce volunteered Cody for the procedure, performed by veterinarians as part of a training program at a clinic in Portland. The next day, Cody was back at work, enthusiastically rounding up livestock.
“It was quick, painless and super uninvasive,” Mr. Bruce said. “He’s mellowed out a bit, but I haven’t had the problems I had before.”
The 40-year movement to convince Americans that they should spay or neuter their pets has been nothing short of a triumph: 83 percent of owned dogs and 91 percent of owned cats are now spayed or neutered in the United States, compared with only about 10 percent in the 1970s. But surgically removing the reproductive organs of every pet is still time-consuming for veterinarians, unpopular among a subset of pet owners and ethically troubling to animal welfare advocates.
It is also an impractical solution to sterilizing stray animals, which constitute the bulk of America’s nuisance animal problem. “Surgery is definitely a bottleneck for humane animal control,” said Dr. Julie K. Levy, a veterinarian at the University of Florida who has researched the problem.
Now, a handful of nonsurgical sterilization treatments are emerging — led by Zeuterin, which could be commercially available in the United States by the end of this year — that could reduce or even eliminate the need for traditional neutering.
“The truth is, we may have maximized what we can do with surgical spay-neuter,” said Joyce Briggs, the president of the Alliance for Contraception in Cats and Dogs, a group advocating alternative approaches. “Nonsurgical sterilants could be a game-changer for animal welfare across the world.”
The problem, she added, is persuading enough veterinarians, pet owners and pharmaceutical companies to embrace the new technology.
The remedy nearest to market is Zeuterin, a mix of zinc gluconate and arginine that is injected directly into a dog’s testicles, killing the sperm and then shutting down the passageway through which it would normally travel. The results are permanent, and the process takes only a few hours, poses little risk compared with surgery and works in 99.6 percent of dogs, according to research trials.
“I think it’s an outstanding product,” said Dr. Levy, who used the drug nearly a decade ago to sterilize wild dogs in the Galápagos. She is eager for Americans to see what Zeuterin can accomplish.
“There’s just a communication issue,” she added.
The drug now called Zeuterin has been on the market before and failed. Introduced as Neutersol in 2003, the drug, which needs to be injected very precisely and delicately, was sold to veterinarians without much training or support. As a result, too many dogs had adverse reactions (inflamed testicles, mostly), and the drug earned a bad reputation. By 2005, both it and the company behind it had disappeared.
“This product isn’t a product,” said Joe Tosini, the founder and chief executive of Ark Sciences, which bought the rights to the drug and renamed it. “It’s really a procedure that has to be taught.” The company is waiting for the Food and Drug Administration to approve its manufacturing facilities so it can sell the drug in the United States. Approval may come as early as this month.
Mr. Tosini, a former minister who was an original investor in Neutersol, said Ark Sciences had learned from the mistakes of its predecessor. To provide Zeuterin, veterinarians will have to complete a five-hour course that includes injecting the drug into several dogs.
The idea that surgical castration causes weight gain or even behavioral changes in dogs is still a matter of debate among veterinarians. Nonetheless, the procedure remains unpopular among some pet owners who rely on their dogs for hunting, sports or protection, who fear that castration could affect their pets’ performance.
Some owners simply cannot afford the procedure, which can cost upward of $400 depending on the region (Ark Sciences plans to make Zeuterin available at clinics for as little as $15). Other owners, particularly those with male dogs, make a conscious choice not to sterilize.
“In certain cultures, and Latin cultures are among them, castration is really viewed as very emasculating, and I think people identify with their dogs,” Dr. Levy said.
Few other companies have shown much enthusiasm for walking the long, expensive regulatory path required to get approval for nonsurgical sterilization drugs — a process that takes five to seven years and can cost more than $10 million.
The perception, some researchers say, is that surgical spaying and neutering are now just too deeply ingrained in veterinary practices.
“What I often hear from the big animal health company executives is, ‘Well, vets just like to spay and neuter dogs and cats, so there’s no market for this,’ ” said Dr. Linda Rhodes, the chief scientific officer of Aratana Therapeutics, a company that licenses the rights to use drugs developed for humans in animals.
Although most veterinarians lose money on spaying and neutering, they prefer to stick with the technique they know rather than try something they consider experimental, said Dr. Mark Russak, the immediate past president of the American Animal Hospital Association. “We wonder, ‘What’s going to happen in 10 years? Are these dogs going to get cancer?’ We’d rather let the guy up the street try it first.”
Elsewhere, nonsurgical sterilizers are starting to catch on. In recent years, castration-resistant owners in Australia, New Zealand and parts of Europe have been turning to Suprelorin, an implant that sterilizes male dogs for six or 12 months by neutralizing the production of reproductive hormones.
Though an implant that must regularly be replaced like Suprelorin is not practical for strays, a vaccine known as GonaCon and developed by the Department of Agriculture to sterilize deer and wild horses may be a viable alternative, Dr. Levy said. Studies have shown that a single injection of GonaCon will sterilize most cats and dogs for up to four years — about the life span of a stray animal. And because it blocks reproductive hormones, GonaCon eliminates many of the nuisance behaviors, like fighting and spraying, associated with strays.
But GonaCon would need to be approved by the F.D.A. for use in dogs and cats, and there is hardly enough money to be made in treating stray animals to justify that cost for a for-profit company.
“We’re kind of looking at a charity population,” Dr. Levy said. “It’s like developing drugs to treat disease that only occur in impoverished countries.” One charitable organization, The Found Animals Foundation, is offering a $25 million award to the inventor of the first single-shot, nonsurgical sterilant that works in both dogs and cats. But no one has been able to claim the prize.
With a successful Zeuterin debut, other companies might choose to invest in similar treatments. But for now Ark Sciences, aware of the resistance to change, is focusing its marketing efforts on early adopters, veterinarians like Dr. Levy who already know the virtues of nonsurgical sterilants.
For many of them, the switch to a new neutering strategy will be like “giving an airplane to people who are used to traveling by covered wagon,” Mr. Tosini said.
Seeing the Toll, Schools Revise Zero Tolerance
http://nyti.ms/1g3Hh0i
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Faced with mounting evidence that get-tough policies in schools are leading to arrest records, low academic achievement and high dropout rates that especially affect minority students, cities and school districts around the country are rethinking their approach to minor offenses.
Perhaps nowhere has the shift been more pronounced than in Broward County’s public schools. Two years ago, the school district achieved an ignominious Florida record: More students were arrested on school campuses here than in any other state district, the vast majority for misdemeanors like possessing marijuana or spraying graffiti.
The Florida district, the sixth largest in the nation, was far from an outlier. In the past two decades, schools around the country have seen suspensions, expulsions and arrests for minor nonviolent offenses climb together with the number of police officers stationed at schools. The policy, called zero tolerance, first grew out of the war on drugs in the 1990s and became more aggressive in the wake of school shootings like the one at Columbine High School in Colorado.
But in November, Broward veered in a different direction, joining other large school districts, including Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and Denver, in backing away from the get-tough approach.
Rather than push children out of school, districts like Broward are now doing the opposite: choosing to keep lawbreaking students in school, away from trouble on the streets, and offering them counseling and other assistance aimed at changing behavior.
These alternative efforts are increasingly supported, sometimes even led, by state juvenile justice directors, judges and police officers.
In Broward, which had more than 1,000 arrests in the 2011 school year, the school district entered into a wide-ranging agreement last month with local law enforcement, the juvenile justice department and civil rights groups like the N.A.A.C.P. to overhaul its disciplinary policies and de-emphasize punishment.
Some states, prodded by parents and student groups, are similarly moving to change the laws; in 2009, Florida amended its laws to allow school administrators greater discretion in disciplining students.
“A knee-jerk reaction for minor offenses, suspending and expelling students, this is not the business we should be in,” said Robert W. Runcie, the Broward County Schools superintendent, who took the job in late 2011. “We are not accepting that we need to have hundreds of students getting arrested and getting records that impact their lifelong chances to get a job, go into the military, get financial aid.”
Nationwide, more than 70 percent of students involved in arrests or referrals to court are black or Hispanic, according to federal data.
“What you see is the beginning of a national trend here,” said Michael Thompson, the director of the Council of State Governments Justice Center. “Everybody recognizes right now that if we want to really find ways to close the achievement gap, we are really going to need to look at the huge number of kids being removed from school campuses who are not receiving any classroom time.”
Pressure to change has come from the Obama administration, too. Beginning in 2009, the Department of Justice and the Department of Education aggressively began to encourage schools to think twice before arresting and pushing children out of school. In some cases, as in Meridian, Miss., the federal government has sued to force change in schools.
Some view the shift as politically driven and worry that the pendulum may swing too far in the other direction. Ken Trump, a school security consultant, said that while existing policies are at times misused by school staffs and officers, the policies mostly work well, offering schools the right amount of discretion.
“It’s a political movement by civil rights organizations that have targeted school police,” Mr. Trump said. “If you politicize this on either side, it’s not going to help on the front lines.”
Supporters, though, emphasize the flexibility in these new policies and stress that they do not apply to students who commit felonies or pose a danger.
“We are not taking these tools out of the toolbox,” said Russell Skiba, a school psychology professor at Indiana University who promotes disciplinary changes. “We are saying these should be tools of last resort.”
In Broward County, the shift has shown immediate results, although it is too early to predict overall success. School-based arrests have dropped by 41 percent, and suspensions, which in 2011 added up to 87,000 out of 258,000 students, are down 66 percent from the same period in 2012, school data shows.
Under the new agreement, students caught for the first time committing any of 11 nonviolent misdemeanors are no longer arrested and sent to court. Rather, they attend counseling and perform community service.
Nor do students face suspension for minor infractions. Instead, they also attend a program called Promise for three days or more. Repeat offenders get several chances to change their behavior before more punitive measures kick in.
One recent afternoon, an 18-year-old senior sat in the cafeteria at the Pine Ridge Alternative Center, where students are sent in lieu of a suspension, and spoke with a psychology graduate student on a counseling team. The girl had been caught with a small amount of marijuana in her car on her high school campus, a misdemeanor that would have led to a suspension or arrest in the past. It was the first time she had gotten in trouble at school.
“I was freaking out,” she said. Her first fear was that she would be barred from prom. Here, though, she saw the larger picture and came to view the incident as “her second chance.”
She learned about bullying and drugs and alcohol. “It was a slap in the face,” she said. “I don’t even want to smoke anymore.”
Other students here learn to manage their anger, if that is their issue. Parents are involved in the process. And counselors have helped identify problems at home including abusive situations, something that administrators said underscores how invaluable the counseling component has been for the Promise program, said Belinda Hope, the principal at Pine Ridge.
Mr. Runcie and others said the more punitive measures tended to make a bad situation worse. Suspended and expelled children would be home alone or on the street, falling behind academically. Those arrested could be stigmatized by criminal records.
“The data showed an increase in the harshness of the disciplinary practices in schools — what was once a trip to the principal’s office is now a trip to the jail cell,” said Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil-rights group involved in the effort.
Juvenile judges were among the first to express alarm over the jump in the number of students appearing in court on misdemeanors, an increase they said is tied to the proliferation of school police officers.
“We started to see the officers as a disciplinary tool,” said Judge Elijah H. Williams of Broward County Circuit Court, a juvenile judge who said he was “no flaming liberal” but saw the need for change. “Somebody writes graffiti in a stall, O.K., you’re under arrest. A person gets caught with a marijuana cigarette, you’re under arrest.”
