Most of the reader comments on this New York Times story are the same: “Why isn’t he in prison?”
Former NYPD detective, Louis N. Scarcella has been shown to have rigged more than a dozen investigations leading to successful prosecutions and imprisonment. Scarcella was a legendary detective in the Brooklyn North homicide squad in the 1980s and ’90s. Before he retired in 1999, he was renowned for solving murder cases when his colleagues failed. Now it is becoming apparent how. He rigged the investigations, manufactured confessions and fabricated evidence.
Defense attorneys accused him of coaching witnesses, and not just coercing false confessions but sometimes inventing them. A Times investigation discovered that confessions by defendants in different cases contained identical language. Witnesses frequently changed their accounts after Scarcella met with them. But it was not before more than a decade had passed that his methods were fully exposed, along with many false convictions.
After one of Scarcella’s high-profile cases was shown to have resulted in a man being wrongly imprisoned for more than 20 years, the Times commenced a investigation into all of Scarcella’s remarkable successes in “closing” criminal cases. (Indeed, his nickname was “The Closer.”) The paper found that Scarcella had repeatedly used the same woman, a crack addict, to testify in his murder cases. Presented with this damning evidence, the district attorney’s office agreed to review all of Scarcella’s homicide cases in which his testimony supported a guilty verdict. Now eighteen people convicted due to Scarcella’s machinations have had their convictions overturned after serving a total of 268 years in prison, according to the National Exonerations Registry.
His victims have already received a $73.1 million in settlements from New York City and another $36.9 million from the state, and the totals are expected to rise by tens of millions more. But although Scarcella’s rigged convictions place him among the elite super-corrupt cops in U.S. history, Scarcella has not been charged with any crimes.
Something is clearly amiss. “[A]lthough [the settlements] bring a measure of justice to the wrongfully convicted person who has been harmed by the system, it doesn’t do anything for accountability, because the taxpayers are the ones who are bearing the impact,” Vanessa Potkin, director of special litigation for the Innocence Project, told the Times.
Indeed. Louis Scarcella is enjoying a peaceful retirement, and happily collects his pension.
Ethics Alarms 
IANAL suborning perjury isn’t a criminal offense? or is it a statute of limitations issue?
IAAL and I thought both of those things.
I also came up with half a dozen other potential crimes. The statute of limitations is a big deal, I bet.
Having said that, I am very careful about speculating on criminal cases. The devil is always in the details. More so than in civil cases, you have to be deliberately pedantic about what constitutes a crime. On most questions, my response is, “I have to read the statute.”
-Jut
I can think of two criminal statutes in my state that would apply to a situation like this: “Official Misconduct” and “Official Oppression.” Both are felonies, and retirement won’t shield you from them. I would also presume that Scarcella could be sued civilly. He may not have much (relative to the damage he caused), but he deserves to lose all he has.
Surely one of those imaginative Trump prosecutors could build a case of some sort.
Well, they could charge him with raping a woman in the early 90’s.
I remember being a pup lawyer and meeting a criminal defense attorney and being amazed by the conviction and vehemence with which he casually asserted in an aside, “All cops lie.”
Yeah, and I know just as many cops who will tell you, “All lawyers are crooked.” During my career I found neither accusation to be true.
But surely, Jim, you experienced the culture in law enforcement where police are under pressure to lie in hearings and at trial to enhance a dubious arrest or search when the perp is unquestionable guilty. I sure did as a prosecutor. My friend Tom Manger, the Capitol Police chief, told an audience in a theater talk-back I arranged that as a young cop he faced an ethical fork in the road: getting a bad guy off the street by shading the facts on the stand, or telling the whole truth and letting the guy get off. And he said he was ostracized for taking the latter course.
Jack,
I think a lot of the phenomenon of police corruption (of all types) is dependent on where an officer works (the particular agency and its culture as well as the jurisdiction and its culture, crime rate, etc.), in addition to the moral character of the individual officer. I spent my whole career here in the mid-south, the so-called “Buckle of the Bible Belt,” in small cities and rural counties. The largest agency I worked for (27 years) had about two hundred officers and maybe forty civilian employees when I retired in 2014. Crime rates where I worked were nothing compared to major population centers. Our citizens were typically much more worried about residential burglary than violent crime. We usually had no more than two or three homicides per year, and perhaps six to ten armed robberies annually, mostly travelling criminals off the interstate highway.
I began my career in 1974. New York’s Knapp Commission had just released its final report on NYPD corruption (think “Frank Serpico”) a little over a year before I began. The report of the U. S. President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice report was pretty fresh, as well as the multi-volume report of the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals. Most agencies in this region were trying to overcome the stereotypes of Southern “good-old-boy” knuckle-dragging law enforcement, and embracing new and higher standards in recruitment, hiring, training, retention and performance. Police corruption of all kinds was certainly at the forefront of concern for local politicians and police executives, and that trickled down throughout their agencies.
My police academy emphasized honesty, integrity, and adherence to the law and ethical standards. Throughout my career, the agencies I worked for and the prosecutors I worked with were scrupulous about ethics and integrity in the policing process.
As a uniformed officer, investigator or supervisor, I never felt pressured to lie or empowered to manufacture evidence or testimony against a defendant, either by my higher-ups or my peers, nor did I ever even hint at condoning dishonesty from those who worked for me.
The idea of convicting an innocent person was abhorrent to us. That would mean the innocent were further suffering while the guilty went unpunished. Our emphasis was always on conducting complete and thorough investigations. We went only where the evidence led us. As a budding investigator, the general attitude I encountered from my superiors about losing a case in court was, “We do the best job we can following the best police practices and the law, and if they get off this time, we’ll get them the next time, and with criminals there’s almost always a next time.” If any of my peers ever lied on the witness stand, I never found out about it. I’m not saying that no one ever lied, I’m just saying it was not acceptable and would have been punished if found out. In over forty years on the job, I personally knew and worked with one corrupt officer who was caught after taking a substantial bribe to protect a gambling operation. He was promptly fired and, when convicted, went to prison for a couple of years. Another detective struck a suspect during an interrogation; he was also fired.
As a detective supervisor, I once recommended demotion (the extent of my authority) for a detective for blatantly lying, in a pre-trial consultation with prosecutors, about his police experience and his prior role in a multi-jurisdictional drug task force. One of the prosecutors called me to verify some things the detective had told them about himself, and I was shocked at his self-aggrandizing prevarications. His lies had nothing to do with the facts or evidence in the case at hand, but I no longer trusted him. He was reassigned from my unit and left our agency for another job shortly after that incident. A few people might have thought my reaction was too harsh, but allowing deception is a slippery slope.
I worked for and with some commanders who occasionally gave me reason to question their competence, but none who gave me cause to question their honesty. I served on the command staffs of three different sheriffs over the last sixteen years of my career. I was never asked by any of them to do anything that was immoral, unethical, or illegal.
Shortly after I became an adjunct instructor at our regional police academy in 1997, I got the opportunity to add Police Ethics to my teaching repertoire. I taught the topic for more than twenty years there. I authored my former agency’s new code of ethics in 2010, and even helped them review and update it a couple of years ago. I’m pretty bullish on this subject.
It has been my experience that communities will generally get the quality of law enforcement that they insist upon, just like other public services such as schools, roads, fire service, etc. Citizens must notice and pay attention to how their community is policed. Sheriff’s, chiefs of police and other law enforcement executives must be kept mindful that citizens are watching what is done and how it is being done. Police executives should embrace community policing to keep the agency and the community in communication with one another. Transparency has to be more than a buzzword.
Again, if I had worked in jurisdictions where crime was rampant, and the public, the press, the politicians and the police brass were pressuring officers to solve cases, and turning a blind eye to shortcuts, where the ethical culture was less rigorous and where the community was more tolerant of police overreach and corner cutting, I might have seen more folks engage in misconduct. I certainly heard and read about such places, but never worked in one, nor would I have.
(My apologies for the lengthy comment.)
Working in criminal law enforcement and criminal justice has to be a tough, tough deal. Spending all one’s time around criminals and the chaos they wreak has to be corrosive.