But as he looked out from the witness box in a Brooklyn courtroom Friday, he could plainly see the row of angry men staring him down in the audience, all wearing hats that said “Wrongfully Convicted.” They were men he had helped to arrest and put in prison decades ago and who had later been exonerated.
Scarcella was in court to testify about yet another imprisoned man, Nelson Cruz, who claimed he had been framed for murder. Once again, Scarcella was asked to defend his work, and once again, he did so without apology.
When Cruz’s lawyer, Justin Bonus, asked him, “Do you stand by all of the investigations you’ve conducted?” Scarcella replied, “110 percent.”
Derrick Hamilton, 53, was one of the exonerated men listening to Scarcella testify. He spent nearly 21 years in prison for a 1991 killing investigated by Scarcella, before his conviction was overturned in 2015. It was the fourth time he had watched Scarcella testify at a wrongful conviction hearing.
“His story is the same: He doesn’t have anything to do with the case. He wasn’t involved. It was somebody else’s case,” Hamilton said. “But he did all the work.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, Scarcella was a rock-star homicide detective in some of Brooklyn’s most crime-ridden precincts. He cut a swaggering figure, with a taste for cigars and a reputation for persuading even the toughest suspects to confess.
Then in 2013, one of Scarcella’s most celebrated cases — the arrest of David Ranta, an unemployed drug addict convicted of killing a Hasidic rabbi — fell apart after evidence emerged that Ranta had been framed. The collapse of the case led to Ranta’s release from prison after 23 years and to an inquiry into more than 70 homicides that Scarcella had helped to investigate over his long career.
Since then, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office has asked judges eight times to reverse guilty verdicts that Scarcella helped to obtain. Several other people imprisoned for crimes Scarcella investigated have been released by judges after hearings.
In some of those cases, judges noted in their decisions that the former detective had not been truthful in his testimony. Yet he has never been charged with breaking the law or official misconduct.
Scarcella, who retired in 1999 after 26 years as a police officer, has steadfastly stood by his work and has maintained he never fabricated a confession in his life.
Cruz, 38, was a teenager when he was convicted in the March 1998 shooting death of Trevor Vieira in East New York. He has claimed in court filings that Scarcella and his partner, Stephen W. Chmil, pressured a witness to falsely identify Cruz as the gunman, despite police officers at the scene saying he was not there.
A judge rejected Cruz’s first motion to throw out his conviction, but he and his lawyers are rearguing it before Justice ShawnDya L. Simpson with new evidence.
On the stand, Scarcella demurred when asked about his reputation among his peers as a closer other detectives turned to.
“I helped whenever I could.” Scarcella said.
At another point, Bonus asked the retired detective about his 2007 appearance on the television show, “Dr. Phil.” The subject was false confessions.
“Did you say on Dr. Phil there was no rules on homicide investigations?” the lawyer asked.
“I stated there were no rules, but I operated under the law,” Scarcella said. “That’s what everybody leaves out.”
Scarcella, who grew up in Brooklyn, wore a wide-shouldered dark suit with a patterned tie; his thinning hair was slicked back, and he looked like an older version of the sharply dressed detective he used to be.
Friday was not the first time that Scarcella, who now lives on Staten Island, had to come to court since his retirement to answer accusations that he had manufactured evidence or coerced confessions.
He testified in 2017 in a review of the case of Sundhe Moses, whose guilty verdict was later thrown out by a Brooklyn judge. Moses served 18 years for the killing of a 4-year-old girl caught in a hail of gang gunfire and claimed in his appeal that he had confessed after Scarcella choked and punched him.
In 2015, Scarcella said on the stand that he had trouble remembering how he came to arrest a 14-year-old in the 1991 shootings of two off-duty correction officers, one of whom died of his injuries.
Scarcella, 68, was adamant Friday that he did not run the investigation leading to the arrest and conviction of Cruz. He only pitched in, he said, as he was often asked to do. He blamed his incomplete memory on the passage of time and on the sheer number of homicide cases he handled — more than 160 by his own estimate.
He flatly rejected any suggestion that he had ever done anything unethical to get a conviction.
As Bonus reeled off the names of people in other cases who were freed or had convictions overturned, Scarcella refused to discuss some of them. He bristled at hearing old accusations leveled at him again.
“Ridiculous!” he said when asked by Bonus if he had once tilted a lineup by telling witnesses “to pick the guy with the big nose.”
Outside the courtroom, the group of older men in “Wrongfully Convicted” hats mocked Scarcella’s memory lapses as convenient.
“Every time he does this he gets more and more confident because he knows that nothing is going to happen to him,” said Shabuka Shakur, 54, who spent more than 27 years behind bars on a false murder conviction he said was aided by Scarcella.
Hamilton, who is suing Scarcella, said watching the former detective on the stand is torture.
“To see that this guy hasn’t been arrested — it really bothers me,” Hamilton said. “And they call guys like us criminals.”
Scarcella, who had his lawyer by his side during his testimony, declined to answer questions as he left the courthouse in the company of other detectives and union representatives.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.