The killing was shocking even for New York, which was filled with violence at the time.
Around 1 a.m. on November 26, 1995, two men approached a subway token booth in Brooklyn, poured gas through the slot and lit a matchbook. The resulting explosion flattens the structure and sends the employee inside flying, his body ablaze. He died two weeks later.
Three teenagers, Vincent Ellerbe, James Irons, and Thomas Malik, later confessed to the crime, were convicted of second-degree murder, and were sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
On Friday, a state court judge released the three, now much older, at the request of the Brooklyn district attorney, who said his office determined the confessions were false and were coerced by detectives whose work in dozens of other cases subjected to inspection.
“The findings of a thorough, years-long reinvestigation of this case leave us unable to stand behind the defendants’ convictions,” District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a news release, adding that there were “serious problems with the evidence on which these convictions were based.” “
In overturning the convictions, 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 gave an emotional account of his life behind bars. He said he has a 26-year-old daughter who has grown up without him, and that he developed epilepsy while in prison.
“For 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 low, sometimes wavering voice. As he spoke, Mr. Malik’s wife, Michele, wept openly.
“Prison 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. In addition to pressuring them to confess, Mr. Gonzalez said, the lead detectives, Luis Scarcella and Steven Chmil, failed to uncover the shaky nature of witness identification and neglected the factual inconsistencies in the evidence and in the young men’s confessions.
For Mr. Scarcella, who retired in 1999, the overturning of the convictions was another blemish on a career that saw him preside over some of the most high-profile crimes in a department that investigates more than 500 murders a year.
His reputation began to crumble in 2013 after one of his most high-profile investigations — the slaying of a Hasidic rabbi in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood — unraveled amid defense allegations that he had framed a suspect.
Despite Mr. Scarcella’s insistence that he had done nothing wrong, the district attorney’s office began investigating about 70 of his cases. The investigation has so far led to more than a dozen exonerations — roughly one-third of the 33 conviction review units of the district attorney’s office created since 2014 — and New York has paid tens of millions of dollars to settle lawsuits stemming from the cases , in which he was involved.
Richard E. Signorelli, a lawyer who has represented Mr. Scarcella in similar cases, said the retired detective had an “exemplary career in 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 release or whether they planned to reopen their investigation into who killed the officer, Harry Kaufman, a 22-year veteran of the transportation.
The killing of Mr. Kaufman, 50, reverberated far beyond New York, in part because it came days after the release 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 similar arson attacks on token booths in the days after the film’s release.
Bob Dole, the Senate Majority Leader at the time and a Republican presidential candidate, called for a boycott of the film after the attack, although authorities have never determined whether it was inspired by the fictional crime.
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 “heinous, heinous crime.” Still, she said, investigators had come to the “inevitable conclusion” that the sentences “could not stand.”
Mr Irons’ lawyer, David Chanies, said police had subjected his client to “threats, lies, sleep deprivation and physical abuse”. And while he thanked the district attorney’s office for its work, he also criticized it for a “carefully tailored” set of conclusions that only discredited the police while remaining silent on prosecutors’ conduct.
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 bid to be exonerated, said Friday that coerced confessions of the type Mr. Scarcella and Mr. Chmil were accused of extracting in the case, now they would be unlikely because such interviews are videotaped.
That and other criminal justice reforms in the coming years, he said, would have spared his clients so “the real people who killed Harry Kaufman might have been caught.”
Reached by telephone on Friday, Mr. Kaufman’s widow and son expressed a range of emotions about the turn of events, which they said they were only made aware of on Thursday.
“If they didn’t do it, 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 there will be justice 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 research.
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