Twenty years ago, Derrick Hamilton was at his lowest point: locked in solitary confinement for a murder he insisted he did not commit. Over the next two decades, he slowly crawled his way out of the belly of the beast.
One of those officers, Louis Scarcella, a retired New York detective, has emerged in recent years as symbol of wrongful convictions, as numerous cases he handled have fallen apart. Under the terms of the agreement, reached on the eve of what would have been a trial in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, Scarcella admitted no wrongdoing. He had been scheduled, like Hamilton, to testify at the trial.
Still, the jury convicted him, and Hamilton was sent away in 1992 to what soon became a series of upstate prisons. By that point, the district attorney’s office was two years into an expansive investigation of dozens of Scarcella’s former murder cases, looking into allegations that he had coerced other witnesses and had threatened people to get them to confess. That investigation, which is ongoing, has led to the release of 14 inmates and has resulted in the city and state paying tens of millions of dollars to settle lawsuits against Scarcella.
A few years ago, he founded a support group called Friends and Family of the Wrongfully Convicted with another former inmate, Sundhe Moses, who was also arrested by Scarcella and was ultimately freed.
Source: Law Daily Report (lawdailyreport.net)
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