During New York City’s crack era in the early 1990s, with homicides five times higher than today, authorities turned to ruthless law enforcement.
“The police would pull over your car at will, just because you were black, and go through your car and your pockets,” said Derrick Hamilton, 57, who grew up in public housing in Brooklyn in the 1980s and was arrested for first time as a teenager. “They would take your socks and pants off.”
Crime fell across the country in the decades that followed in a sweeping social change, and New York became one of America’s safest big cities and a thriving tourist destination. But in its darkest days, police and prosecutors had used tactics that left innocent numbers of innocent people, mostly poor people of color, incarcerated on false charges of murder, rape, and robbery.
The prisoners’ dogged legal challenges led to reinvestigations with the help of left-wing prosecutors, advances in DNA testing, pressure from newly formed advocacy groups, and generous government restitution, turning New York into a national hotbed of exoneration In recent years, one innocent middle-aged man after another has been released, ravaged by years of imprisonment, into a tamer city.
There is no more striking personification of change than Yusef Salaam, 49, who was arrested in the infamous 1989 Central Park runner rape case, in which detectives coerced false confessions from five Harlem teenagers . They were exonerated after years in prison.
Last month, Mr. Salaam won a Democratic primary for a City Council seat, making him almost certain to become the first exonerated to hold elected office in the city.
“In the nineties it was inconceivable that Yusef Salaam could be elected to the City Council, but all these years later, there is a change in public consciousness and now there is a will to put the victims of that time in positions of authority Joel said. Rudin, an attorney who has handled dozens of wrongful conviction claims. “We’ve come a long way.”
In the past, prosecutors’ offices were invested in defending wrongful convictions, but now they emphasize them with review units in the five boroughs. Progressive district attorneys who campaigned on the issue have thrown out hundreds of lower-level convictions involving discredited police officers.
The cause has attracted wealthy patrons as well as prestigious law firms that now do pro bono work. It has become fodder for documentaries, docudramas and podcasts.
For those exonerated, compensation cases are being settled for increasing amounts, often exceeding $10 million. Over the past decade, the city has paid about $500 million. And payouts for claims against New York State, another source of compensation, are among the highest in the country.
Along with recoveries in civil rights cases, the more than $1 billion paid to wrongfully convicted people in New York is by far the highest of any state in the country, according to Jeffrey Gutman, a law professor at George Washington University. . A small industry of private attorneys has sprung up to help ex-prisoners collect and collect themselves.
The situation was spawned by a very different New York. For many residents, the streets and the subway were to be avoided after dark. Bryant Park in Midtown, today a revitalized urban gem, was a drug market. In 1990, there were nearly 2,250 murders, five times the current totals.
For the police, it was a time to crack down on minor offenses and street crime units operated under the motto ‘We own the night’.
The desperation to catch and convict at any cost fostered “a willingness to bend the rules,” Mr. Rudin.
Emboldened detectives fabricated cases by tampering with witnesses, coercing confessions, using suggestive identification procedures and withholding exculpatory evidence, he said. Locking up a certain percentage of innocent people was simply “collateral damage”.
Mr. Salaam said in an interview last week that he and the other members of the Central Park Five were “run over by the spoke wheels of justice,” thanks to detectives who knew what levers to pull in 1989.
“The system was working exactly as designed,” he said. “These were people who were supposed to protect and serve us, but they literally built their careers off the backs of people like me.”
As the city’s economy improved and unemployment declined in the 1990s, murders and other violent crimes declined. However, the bad arrests continued.
Rudolph W. Giuliani took office in 1994 with a promise to crack down on crime through aggressive policing. His administration was marred by allegations of police brutality and civil rights abuses, as well as crimes such as the torture of Abner Louima and the murder of Amadou Diallo.
The highest totals for wrongful convictions in the city came in 1997, when there were 22, including 15 for murder, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. The group lists at least 230 waivers for New York City since 1989.
“Detectives were expected to crack cases, and once they made up their minds, they would stop investigating,” said Irving Cohen, 80, who has represented about 15 wrongfully convicted New Yorkers since the late 1980s. He recalled receiving weekly letters from inmates asking for help. “There was a lot of killing,” he said. “They did everything they had to do to convict the person, whether they believed the person was guilty or not.”
The exoneration of Mr. Salaam in 2002 was a stunning reversal, one of the first cases to show the pitfalls of New York’s wholesale justice. A convicted serial killer and rapist admitted he was responsible for the attack, and the Manhattan district attorney’s office filed court documents to clear Mr. Salaam and the other members of the Central Park Five.
But some police officials continued to blame the wrongly convicted men despite the DNA evidence. Then-District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau found no coercion by officers or prosecutors.
Many dismissed cases involved a relative handful of officers, including Louis Scarcella, a former Brooklyn homicide detective whose conduct has led to the review of dozens of cases and the overturning of at least eight convictions for murder Mr Scarcella has denied any wrongdoing.
One of his cases was that of Mr. Hamilton, who served more than 20 years on a murder charge in 1991. He litigated from prison, with limited access to telephones and correspondence. He drafted briefs from a cramped cell, researched cases in a sparse law library, and wrote legal letters by hand from solitary confinement.
For Mr. Hamilton, things changed when a key eyewitness came forward years after his conviction to say that Mr. Scarcella had coerced him into lying.
The case was taken on by the Brooklyn district attorney’s sentencing integrity unit, which, with more than 30 exonerations since 2014, is one of the strongest units in the country and one of the reasons the borough has by far the largest number of overturned convictions. in the city, with 88 in the national register.
In 2019, after the Bronx prosecutors’ sentencing integrity unit and the Innocence Project presented new evidence, a judge overturned the 1989 murder conviction of Huwe Burton, who had been coerced by detectives into a false confession at the age of 16.
Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark said the detectives had used the discredited practices of the time.
“What they did wasn’t necessarily wrong, that’s how things were done back then,” he told The New York Times in 2019. “By 1989, this was standard practice for the NYPD, but now we know better “.
Some disagree. Police and prosecutors are almost never disciplined for misconduct, including coercing innocent suspects into confessing, said Rebecca Brown, who for the past eight years served as policy director for the Innocence Project in Manhattan.
And police can still lie and make false promises to suspects, including children, to get false confessions, he said.
“Many of the causes they contributed to are still alive and well in New York City,” he said. “There’s nothing like robust accountability.”
Still, there have been changes to questioning and suspect lineups, and there is more oversight by prosecutors and access to officers’ disciplinary records.
Standards have been improved to obtain more reliable confessions and identifications, Mr. Rudin, adding that judges and prosecutors are now generally more skeptical of cases built around jailhouse informants. Defense attorneys, previously hampered by limited access to prosecutors’ case information, are now entitled to more and can prepare a proper defense, he said.
And the policy has changed. In the City Hall campaign of Mr. Salaam, he often spoke of his conviction and exoneration. In his interview, he urged measures such as drug treatment instead of prison for drug offenders and allowing lower-level offenders to avoid Rikers Island.
“We don’t want to put innocent people in jail,” he said.
As for Mr. Hamilton, has worked since his release as an activist and paralegal to identify and overturn other wrongful convictions, including numerous linked to Mr. Scarcella. He is part of a brotherhood of exonerated people who collaborate to prepare legal briefs and continue to visit prisoners, donate money and raise awareness about cases.
“My loyalty,” he said, “is to the guys who are still unjustly in prison.”
