VERDICT IS TOSSED IN ’95 MURDER:
Judge scraps conviction in ’95 kid-shoot
TWENTY YEARS ago, Sundhe Moses says he was pulled out of bed by an NYPD detective and forced to confess to killing a 4-year-old girl.
Four years after Moses was released on parole and following months of hearings, Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Dineen Riviezzo decided on Thursday to overturn Moses’ conviction.
“The battle has been won, but the war is not over,” said Moses, 42, as he embraced his mother, Elaine Hill, 65, outside of court.
“This was not an exoneration, this was a judge’s decision to overturn the conviction. The district attorney’s office takes a position that I did this crime,” said Moses, who hopes prosecutors will decline to try the case again.
Brooklyn prosecutors will decide on Feb. 16 if they will retry Moses for participating in the Aug. 27, 1995, drive-by shooting that left little Shamone Johnson dead and four others wounded.
At Moses’ April 1997 jury trial, he testified that Detective Louis Scarcella (photo below) threatened and beat him inside the 90th Precinct stationhouse to get him to confess.
Moses was convicted and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.
Scarcella’s questionable police tactics — which allegedly included coercing witnesses, fabricating confessions and withholding evidence favorable to defendants — have been cited in 12 other overturned convictions since 2013, when the Brooklyn district attorney office’s conviction review unit began investigating the controversial cop’s cases.
Scarcella retired in 1999.
Four state Supreme Court justices, now including Riviezzo, have cited Scarcella in their decisions to overturn convictions.
The review unit last year named Scarcella as a culprit in the wrongful conviction of Jabbar Washington, who went to prison for killing a man during a 1995 push-in robbery in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
Washington, whose conviction was overturned, asserted he was forced by Scarcella to confess.
Reading from her 18-page decision for Moses, Riviezzo said, “The nature of the recent impeachment testimony dovetails with defendant’s defense, mounted back in 1997 and reiterated again now, that Detective Scarcella coerced his testimony.”
At Moses’ evidentiary hearings last year, co-defendant Terrence Morgan testified that the then 19-year-old Moses was not in the car with him and another gunman seeking revenge for the death of a reputed drug dealer. Shamone’s cousin Sharron Ivory recanted his identification of Moses.
Scarcella testified that he had minimal involvement with the investigation, yet Detective Joseph Falcone testified that Scarcella was at the precinct when Moses was there.
Moses’ attorneys Ron Kuby and Leah Busby praised Justice Riviezzo for her due diligence as well as other defendants whose convictions were overturned.
“Derrick Hamilton’s work (to get) his case overturned . . . helped get Shabaka Shakur out of prison, and Shabaka Shakur’s work with Jabbar Washington’s case helped with Sundhe’s decision today,” Kuby said.