Around 1 am on November 26, 1995, two men approached a subway ticket booth in Brooklyn, poured gas through the slot, and lit a book of matches on fire. The resulting explosion leveled the structure and sent the employee flying inside, his body on fire. He died two weeks later. Three teenagers, Vincent Ellerbe, James Irons, and Thomas Malick, later confessed to the crime, were convicted of second-degree murder, and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. On Friday, a state court judge freed the three, now much older, at the request of the Brooklyn district attorney, who said his office had determined the confessions were false and had been coerced by detectives whose work in dozens of other cases has been breached. scrutiny. “The findings of an exhaustive, multi-year review of this case leave us unable to stand by the defendants’ convictions,” District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a news release, adding that there are “serious problems with the evidence underlying these convictions.” . In vacating the convictions, the judge, Matthew J. D’Emic, released Mr. Irons and Mr. Malik, both 45, from prison. Mr Ellerbe, 44, was released on parole in 2020. Speaking to a courtroom packed with relatives and supporters, Mr Ellerbe delivered an emotional account of his life behind bars. He said he has a 26-year-old daughter who grew up without him and had developed epilepsy while in prison. “Twenty-five years I had to look in the mirror knowing I was in prison for something I had nothing to do with,” he said in a quiet, sometimes halting voice. As he spoke, Mr. Malik’s wife, Michele, wept openly. “The penitentiary breaks you or turns you into a monster,” Mr. Ellerbe added, “and I had to become something I’m not just to survive.” Mr. Ellerbe was 17 when he was arrested. Mr Irons and Mr Malik were 18 years old. In addition to pressuring them to confess, Mr. Gonzalez said, the lead detectives, Louis Scarcella and Stephen Chmil, failed to reveal the flimsy nature of witness identifications and ignored real inconsistencies in the evidence and the youths’ confessions. For Mr. Scarcella, who retired in 1999, the dismissal of the convictions was another blemish on a career in which he led some of the most high-profile crimes in a unit that investigated more than 500 homicides a year. His reputation began to crumble in 2013 after one of his most high-profile investigations — the murder of a Hasidic rabbi in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood — amid defense allegations that he had framed a suspect. Despite Mr. Scarcella’s insistence that he had done nothing wrong, the prosecutor’s office began looking into about 70 of his cases. The investigation has so far led to more than a dozen acquittals — about a third of the 33 the district attorney’s office’s Conviction Review Unit has produced since 2014 — and New York City has paid tens of millions of dollars to settle lawsuits that arising from cases in which he participated. Richard E. Signorelli, a lawyer who has represented Mr. Scarcella in such suits, said the retired detective had “an exemplary career with the Police Department” and “vehemently denies all allegations of wrongdoing in this case.” Police officials did not respond to a request for comment on the acquittals or a question about whether they planned to reopen their investigation into who killed the employee, Harry Kaufman, a 22-year transit veteran. The killing of Mr. Kaufman, 50, reverberated far beyond New York, in part because it happened several days after the opening of the movie “Money Train,” which featured a scene depicting a similar crime. The deadly attack, at the Kingston-Throop Avenues station in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, was one of seven such arson attacks in contract booths in the days after the film’s release. Bob Dole, then-Senate Majority Leader and Republican presidential candidate, called for a boycott of the film after the attack, although authorities have never established whether it was inspired by the fictional crime. Mr. Kaufman, 50, was a 22-year veteran of the transit system. Speaking in court Friday, Lori Glachman, an assistant district attorney, said Mr. Kaufman was “working overtime to earn money to send his son to college” when he was killed in what she called “a heinous, heinous crime.” . However, he said, investigators had reached the “inevitable conclusion” that the convictions “do not stand up”. Mr Irons’ lawyer, David Sanis, said the police had subjected his client to “threats, lies, sleep deprivation and physical violence”. And while he thanked the prosecution for its work, he also criticized it for a “carefully tailored” set of conclusions that only discredited the police while remaining silent on the conduct of prosecutors. A spokesman for Mr. Gonzalez, Oren Yaniv, said the review found no violation of rules requiring prosecutors to share exculpatory information with defense lawyers. Ronald L. Kuby, who represented Mr. Malik at trial and in his exoneration bid, said Friday that coerced confessions of the type accused of drawing Mr. Scarcella and Chmil into the case would be unlikely now because such interviews are videotaped. That and other criminal justice reforms in the intervening years, he said, would have spared his clients, so “the real people who murdered Harry Kaufman might have been caught.” Reached by phone on Friday, Mr. Kaufman’s widow and son expressed a range of feelings about the turn of events, which they said they only learned about on Thursday. “If they didn’t, who did?” Mr. Kaufman’s son, Adrian, said, adding that he was skeptical that anyone else would be charged with the murder. “I don’t think justice will be served for his family.” His mother, Stella Kaufman, echoed that sentiment. “Everybody wants to know how I feel,” she said. “I feel there is no justice for Harry.” Kirsten Noyes contributed to the research.
