NEW 'RELEASE' ON LIFE FOR SCARCELLA'S EXONEREES
Moving on after years in prison off of charges linked to disgraced detective
WHEN Shabaka Shakur was released from prison after 27½ years behind bars for a double murder he didn’t commit, he struggled to make sense of life outside a cell.
There were little things he didn’t understand, like how to use a smartphone or a new computer. And there were bigger, more basic issues, like how to get a job and pay for a roof over his head.
“It was a shock. A lot of things had changed,” he recently told The Post. “There was a lot of stuff I didn’t know. I didn’t even really go out. People would invite me to parties and I’d be like, ‘No, I’m good.’ I just stayed in the house.”
Twelve convictions tied to discredited former NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella have been tossed since 2013, when the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office began reviewing about 70 of his old homicide cases after the retired cop’s work came under scrutiny.
Shakur is one of those exonerees — and he’s come a long way since 2015, when he walked free.
He’s gone from inmate to business owner, opening a Downtown Brooklyn watering hole and restaurant, Brownstone, with his longtime prison pal Derrick Hamilton, who also got his Scarcella-involved murder conviction overturned in 2015.
Both men won substantial payouts for their time behind bars: Shakur got a $3.6 million payout from the city, while Hamilton settled with the state for $3.75 million. That money helped make Brownstone a reality.
Together, the city and state have spent more than $37 million to settle claims related to overturned Scarcella cases so far.
“It gives us an opportunity to give someone a place where there’s no judgement,” Shakur, 52, said. “Almost every Scarcella victim has been to the restaurant at least once.”
Their eatery was Jabbar Washington’s first stop after a judge scrapped his felony-murder conviction in July, more than 20 years after Scarcella helped put him behind bars. Washington popped open a bottle of pink champagne with family, toasting to freedom.
“It was exciting because I know the feeling,” Shakur said of Washington stopping by. “I went through it myself. The joy. When you’re innocent and you’re telling this to people for decades, it gets you nowhere. Then to finally get out and have your family there to see it, it’s phenomenal.”
But getting out is one thing. Starting a new life after the nightmare is over is another.
“I didn’t know how to use a MetroCard. Getting used to sleeping in the bed with somebody, the noise level, the fast movement — it was overwhelming,” Hamilton, 51, explained. “Having a family and support system was everything for me because they were able to tell me, ‘Derrick, it’s OK you’re not earning money yet. We’re going to take care of you until you’re able to.’ ”
SCARCELLA was once one of the NYPD’s most respected detectives, a skilled interrogator known for quickly cracking difficult cases as a member of the Brooklyn North homicide squad.
The retired detective’s sterling reputation began to unravel in 2013, when witnesses who helped put a Brooklyn man, David Ranta, away for murder admitted they’d lied during the investigation. One claimed he’d been coached by Scarcella to pick Ranta out of a lineup.
By then it had been decades since Ranta was convicted of gunning down Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger, an Auschwitz survi- vor who was murdered on Aug. 8, 1990, by a jewelry thief fleeing a botched robbery.
There was no physical evidence tying Ranta to the crime, but the witnesses fingered the unemployed, drug-addicted painter. Scarcella claimed Ranta had confessed.
He was convicted of murder in May 1991 and spent 23 years behind bars — until 2013, when he became the first Scarcella-tied inmate to be exonerated.
It took him years to adjust to life on the outside.
“The first time I ate at a restaurant and used their restroom, I couldn’t figure out how to use the sink; it was one of those automatic motion-sensor faucets,’’
Ranta told The Post in 2013. “I had to get someone to show me what to do and I felt embarrassed.”
Ranta, 63, won a $6.4 million settlement from the city in 2014 and now lives in Virginia Beach, where he’s building houses and spending quality time with his 5year-old grandson.
“I’m doing quite well,” he says. “I’m staying away from Brooklyn and all that mess.”
Scarcella has denied any misconduct. His lawyers, Joel Cohen and Alan Abramson, declined comment.
JOHN Bunn is still haunted by his prison days — but says he’s been trying to push forward with “purpose and positivity.”
He was an illiterate 14-year-old when he was arrested in 1991 with another young teen, Rosean Hargrave, for killing off-duty Correction Officer Rolando Neischer in Crown Heights.
There was no physical evidence against them — but a surviving victim, Correction Officer Robert Crosson, identified both in police lineups organized by Scarcella. At his one-day murder trial, Bunn couldn’t even pass notes to his lawyer. He didn’t know how to write.
Bunn was paroled after 16 years behind bars, and it took nearly a decade longer to get his murder conviction vacated. The judge who tossed his conviction, Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice ShawnDya Simpson, said in her decision that Scarcella’s “malfeasance in fabricating false-identification evidence gravely undermines the evidence that convicted the defendants in this case.”
Even now, Bunn, who taught himself to read in prison, is still fighting to completely clear his name, battling an appeal by the District Attorney’s office. But at least he’s free.
“Not being locked up is everything to me, and not being on parole makes me feel free,” he told The Post. “Like, they acknowledge the fact that I’m innocent, that means something to me.”
The 40-year-old battles “intense” anxiety, something ther- apy has helped him with, and sometimes he can’t sleep. It’s taken him years to stop “thinking like an inmate,” he said.
Bunn, who lives with his mom in the same apartment they did the day he was arrested, helps the community through a program he’s started called Voice for the Unheard.
“It’s a way for me to give back and heal myself at the same time, because it’s therapeutic,” he said of the program for troubled youth.
CARLOS Davis had been out of prison for over 15 years when authorities showed up at his door in March 2015, requesting to speak with him. He tried to send them away at first.
It wasn’t until a couple days later, after he reached out to an attorney, that he fully realized why they were there: the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office wanted to exonerate him.
“When they came to the house I was more in shock,” he said.
By that point, Davis had given up on getting justice, having little faith in the system that wrongfully put him behind bars for 8 ¹/2 years.
In 1988, Scarcella and his partner arrested Davis for the murder of 19-year-old Norris Williams in East New York. At trial, a single witness testified against Davis, saying she was talking on a pay phone and saw him shoot.
He was acquitted of the murder charge, but convicted of possessing a weapon and sentenced to 7 ¹/2 to 15 years in prison. In 1997, Davis was released on parole.
“You hear so many people say, ‘I didn’t do it — I’m innocent.’ And every time I would say it, it was just like another person saying it and no one was trying to help me,” Davis said. “After so long, you pretty much give up.”
Like Bunn, Davis finds giving back to the community therapeutic, and has devoted his spare time to coaching youth sports.
“It’s like therapy for me. It takes me away from thinking about what’s going on,” he said.
WHAT plagues all these Scarcella exonerees is lost time: the years spent away from loved ones, the suffering inside a prison cell and wondering how they got there in the first place.
“My mother passed like three years before I was released,” Shakur said. “She never got the chance to see me exonerated. That was one of the things that hurt me the most.”
Shakur and Hamilton were close friends at upstate Auburn Correctional Facility, where they spent their days learning the ins and outs of criminal law.
“Derrick was one of the first ones who put me on the path to knowing the law,” Shakur said. “He said, ‘If you’re going to get yourself out of jail, you need to learn the law.’ ”
Shakur was convicted for the 1988 slayings of two Bushwick men and finally freed from Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Wallkill, after Judge Desmond Green decided there was “reasonable probability” his confession to Scarcella was “indeed fabricated.”
Hamilton, who was in prison on a second-degree murder charge, was released on parole in 2011 — and four years later, the late Brooklyn DA Ken Thompson threw out his conviction.
Now Hamilton and Shakur are fighting for other innocent inmates, making sure their cases are heard, and that they’re getting the legal representation they deserve.
“Day 1, when you come home, everybody is excited and happy,” Shakur explained. “Day 2 is, ‘What do I do now?’ That’s what I wanted to help with, dealing with the reentry.”