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.

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