December 12, 2022 • 42 mins
Just past 1am on November 26, 1995, 50 year old Harry Kaufman was working the token booth at a subway station in Brooklyn, NY, when multiple men set the booth on fire, causing explosions, an eruption of flames, and ultimately, Kaufman’s death. Hefty rewards were offered for information, and police received many tips from multiple informants. Ultimately, they honed in on James Irons, Thomas Malik and Vincent Ellerbe. The three were ultimately convicted based on confessions they made to the Detective Louis Scarcella. They were all sentenced to 25 years to life.
As Co-Director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and co-host and writer of the award-winning Lava For Good podcast, Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions, Laura represents individuals who were wrongfully convicted when they were children or teenagers.
To learn more about false confessions, visit:
https://lavaforgood.com/false-confessions/
Wrongful Conviction is a production of Lava for Good™ Podcasts in association with Signal Co. No1.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm Jason Flom, host of Rawful Conviction, but this week,
instead of hearing me, I've invited a legitimate genius from
the legal world to bring their knowledge and expertise to
the conversation as guest host here at Rawful Conviction, we
believe that sharing the stories of the incarcerated innocent can
create real change in the world, even beyond with these
(00:22):
real life legal superheroes do every day. In the middle
of one November night, there was an explosion in Brooklyn,
New York. Nine different people called to report what they
heard and what they saw. They reported seeing two men
running up to a subway token booth on Kingston Avenue.
(00:46):
They poured gasoline into the coin slot and threatened the
attendant with a match. Almost immediately, the toll booth burst
into flames. The attendant was a man named Harry Kaufman,
and as the toll booth caught on fire, he did too.
Harry was able to run up the street, where passers
by helped extinguish the flames on his body. More than
(01:07):
eight percent of his body was badly burned. He died
a few weeks later. The crime made headlines in New
York and around the country. Prominent politicians like Senator Bob
Dole and Mayor Rudy Giuliani mentioned the case in their
tough on crime rhetoric. Pressure was mounting for the police
to find the attackers. With little physical evidence and no
(01:30):
clear suspects, Detective Louis Scarcella turned to one of his
favorite tactics, coercing witnesses. One of the nine one one callers,
James Irons, was forced to give a false confession and
to name two more accomplicits. Thomas Malik and Vincent Ellerbee,
were both detained and interrogated, and both eventually gave false
(01:52):
confessions under pressure. After an investigation and a trial riddled
with lies and misconduct, Thomas Malie and Vincent Ellerby were
convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to twenty five
years to life. This is Wrongful Conviction. Hi, everybody, it's
(02:21):
Laura and I writer. I am so glad to be
here guest hosting another episode of Wrongful Conviction. I'm the
co director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University,
and you might also recognize my voice from another series
I co hosted on this podcast, feed False Confessions. Today
I'm here with a real fighter, a real survivor of
(02:42):
false confessions, Vincent Ellerby Vince, you've endured more than any
human should be asked to endure. I am so honored
to get a chance to talk to you today. Do
you want to introduce yourself? Hi? My name vincenw four years,
eleven months in days. Some had nothing to do it.
I was forced to take the way for crime. I
(03:03):
had nothing to do it. And I'm Ron Coopy. I
was the lawyer for Vince's co defendant way back in
the nineties, and they were tried together, although in front
of separate juries. Ron, We're so glad to have you here,
and Vince, I am so glad you said every one
of those days, because every one of those days, hours
(03:26):
and minutes counts. But Ron, I'm going to start out
by asking you what was New York City like in
the ninety nineties in terms of crime and how people
were talking about crime. Back then, we were pretty much
in our tenth year of the crack epidemic, which saw
a dramatic increase in crime and and a wildly dramatic
(03:51):
increase in punitive law enforcement. It was a time in
which the super predator theory was gained and had gained
tremendous currency in legal circles and sociological circles. It was
coined by a sociologist who later attracted it, but the
damage had been done. The theory was there was a
(04:11):
whole generation of black youth growing up without fathers, living
on the streets who were committing crimes. There was never
any consequence to their crimes. They would always get away
with crime after crime after crime, and as a result,
they would become super predators. These are people who were
so feral and so conscious less they would go out
(04:34):
and do anything to anybody without any empathy, compassion, or mercy.
And we were in the process of creating a whole
generation of these people, and the only thing that we
could do about it as a society was to incarceraate
them forever. It's one of the most toxic theories out there, right,
I mean, we know this is the theory that led
(04:54):
to the wrongful conviction of the Central Park five, for example,
now called the Exonerated five just to few years before
this happened events and there are so many other cases
around the country that were driven by the super predator myth.
Right here in Chicago, the Dicksmore five, the Englewood four,
the Marquette Park for the Uptown seven. These numbers just
keep mounting and mounting and mounting. And Vince's case in
(05:18):
particular is a horrific example of these racist tropes being
used to incarcerate black kids, Black male children in particular.
So tell us how this toxic brew of racist myths
showed up in this case. So on November, outside of
a token booth in Brooklyn, two people, two people, not three,
(05:42):
And this will become important later on in the story.
Two people went to that token boothe One of them
was armed with a thirty caliber carbine a rifle. The
other had a bottle with gasoline in it. They were
trying to rob the token booths. The token booth clerk
Harry Kaufman, and refused to give up the money, and
(06:04):
he was behind bulletproof glass, and the perpetrators poured gasoline
into the slot. According to the prosecution, they then set
it on fire. The token booth exploded, It blew up
the booth, it blew up the money, and it burned
up Harry Kaufman, and he had third degree burns over
(06:26):
most of his body. And he lingered in the burn unit,
agonizing day after agonizing day until I think December he died.
It was one of those horrific crimes that still made
the headlines in New York even though crime overall actually
(06:47):
had had dropped as the crack epidemic wane. But it
was still one of those incredibly high profile crimes that
people used to illustrate why you can no longer live
in New York City. Our mayor at the time, a
guy better known to this audience in his latter incarnation
as a Trump apologist. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, for reasons still unclear,
(07:13):
noted that the movie Money Trained had just come out,
and he claimed utterly without evidence, that this particular robbery
murder had been inspired by the movie Money Train. So
it was a horrific crime, and everybody agreed. It was
a horrific crime, of course, made more so by the
(07:36):
the fableism of of our mayor. What evidence did investigators
begin to look into? What leads do they have to
go on? The problem was they had no suspects, There
were no fingerprints at the scene, the firearm couldn't be traced.
This was before the days when there were cameras everywhere,
(07:58):
and everybody had a cell phone. Uh, there were no
cell phone towers. There was absolutely no evidence, uh that
the cops had to give them a lead to anybody.
So when nobody's a suspect, everybody becomes a suspect. Now
that night, that night, nineteen people called to report an
(08:22):
explosion in the subway station. One of those people was
a guy named James Irons and he was in his
mom's apartment. He called up as well, and later his
mom got on the phone. And this is noteworthy because
James iron sounded normal on the phone. That is, obviously
(08:44):
he was panic. Something horrible. It just happened, but but
it just seemed like another nine one one caller. So
I want to take a minute and just ask you
to tell us a little bit about the cops who
ended up getting assigned to this investigation. They were out
of the seventy ninth Precinct. Right. Stephen Camill of the
Brooklyn North Homicide Squad was lead on this case, and
he was assisted by Louis Scarcella, which is a name
(09:07):
that listeners of this podcast will remember. Can you give
us a little bit of background here, now, Disgrace Detective
Louis Scarcella and his partner Stephen Camille were known as
Batman and Robin, and Scarcella was very much Batman. Whatever
the lead was, whoever the lead detective was named, whether
(09:27):
it was Camille or Murphy or O'Reilly or Derita or
O'Toole um, it was Scarcella who was actually in charge.
He led a homicide task force throughout Brooklyn that had
a roving commission to stick their nose in any homicide
they wished. And the amazing thing about Detective Scarcella and
(09:49):
the reason he received such adulation within the police department
and the d a's office was he got witnesses, and
he got confess sessions, even in cases where there appeared
to be no witnesses, and even in cases where there
appeared to be no suspects. He was known as the
closer as well, because he will close this case. At
(10:14):
this point, there's there's close to I think two dozen
wrongful conviction cases attributed to Scarcella. I think at this count,
eighteen have been exonerated. There are still some cases in
the pipeline that may or may not result in exonerations.
Out of ninety trials, nine homicide trials that that that
(10:36):
he works. It's unbelievable. It sounds like he's been responsible
for so many lost centuries. It's mind blowing. He's been
responsible for lost millennia of black life. If you add
all those years together, it's not going to be in
the hundreds at this point. Pretty sure it's going to
be in the thousands. And he didn't have any suspects either,
(10:58):
So so when you have a case like this with
no suspects, kind of everybody's a suspect. So what you
do is you go out and you take every snitch,
every informant, every person on the street that you know of,
and you basically beat the crap out of them. So
(11:19):
they go back to the nine one one calls. I
don't know the television theory the criminal always returns to
the scene of the crime, and maybe one of the
nine callers actually committed the crime, right, So so footnote here.
You know, you're told if you see something, say something.
The lesson of this case, if you see something and
(11:40):
you say something, depending on who you are, you may
end up getting convicted for what you saw and said.
Because one of those good Samaritans who called nine one one,
who tried to help out was this kid, eighteen year
old James Irons. But here's the thing, right, if if
he did the crime and then called from his home,
he would have to run really really fast in order
(12:02):
to get home and call nine one one when their
call lug say he did. He would have been out
of breath on that nine one one call, and he wasn't.
That just doesn't make sense. So right there, right there,
if you were paying attention, which nobody was, you would
have had your doubts. Anyway, Scarce and Camille bring him
in and he gives a confession. He gives a full confession.
(12:24):
The confession itself is ruddled with things that are completely untrue,
and he starts to name people that he was with.
He places himself as the look at. So the way
this works in interrogations, right, is that when you've got
a group of people that you want to turn into suspects,
you bring one of them in and you accuse that
(12:46):
person of being there. But you say, hey, I'm going
to cut you a deal. You were probably the lookouts,
You probably weren't an active participant, and things will go
easier for you if you just tell us a story
where you were the lookout, and you some other guys
do it. Right. You see this over and over and
over again in all these cases around the country, involving
(13:06):
multiple defendants, all of whom eventually falsely confessed to the
same crime. Right, And so they get people to say, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I knew there was gonna be a robbery, but I
don't know nothing about a murder. And the guy thinks
he's getting Okay, I'll do time for the robbery. Lone Behold,
he just confessed to fell any murder or yeah, you
were just a lookout. H asked you to look out
while they went in and did something. Yeah, yeah, I
(13:27):
was just like making sure nobody came down. I didn't
have a weapon. Boom, you've just confessed again to acting
in concert in a murder. Very very common, and it's
one of the flashing yellow lights when you see it today, exactly.
It's a hallmark of a false confession. So here you've
got the idea that irons would just be a lookout.
(13:48):
The details of his story aren't matching up with the facts, right,
the number of people, the gun, he's getting things wildly off.
But he does put some names forward. He does he
among other names he puts in our Vincent l RB
and Thomas Mulwick. So, Vince Ron and I just spoke
(14:21):
at length about your hometown, Brooklyn, New York, and the
horrible crime that happened there in novemb Vince, I want
to ask you, what was it like to realize all
of a sudden, but you were caught up in this
case and you were facing these charges. When I went
to Rackets Island behind, I didn't really have enough time
to really sit back and dwell on the case, because
(14:42):
you know, you're walking in the Rackets Island. You know
you gotta worry about the phone, making sure that nobody
taken one from you. So in my mind, I just
blanked it. I just blocked it all out. I just
put on my faith for my lawyer, because I said
to myself, it's no way possible that they're gonna find
me guilty. It's impossible, no matter what, it's impossible, no
(15:04):
matter the confessions. They're going to see everything. It's it's
a lie. Is mathematically impossible for you not to see
it a blind magazine. You were gonna like short term
survival mode, right like this is gonna be over because
they're gonna see I'm innocent. Yeah, so it's just out
here they say this is a normal environment, but when
(15:25):
you get it locked up, that's an abnormal environment. So
you gotta adjust to that. I had. I just put
my faith for my lawyer, and I put my faith
for my code offending because he already knew the law.
So for me, it was just I was just in
survival mode. Survival mode and the Rikers in the nineties,
(15:46):
it's no joke. No, you gotta make adjustments real fast.
And there's somebody else and Wrikers at the time, right,
somebody who ended up giving police what he said was
information about your case. Yeah, Ray Kuan Sbas, Yeah, they
called him ice picked Marlin yeh. I met him. I
(16:07):
knew him for all the three days, and I'm not
going to lie to you. When we went to trial,
we were sitting there and we're on trial, so I
never know him as Ray Kuan Sbas. I only knew
him as Marlin show as we're sitting there. When the
d A, I mean the d A calls the next witness,
they say, Ray Kua she Bas, and I turned and
(16:29):
looked at my co defended and he put his head
down so I tapped him. I'm like, what's uping? And
he shook his head like so I'm saying to myself like, okay,
who And the door opened up and he come out.
He got this Jene suit on looking fly and in
my mind, I'm saying, what is he doing here? And
(16:51):
he gett on the stand and he get the proceed
of telling him how TIMEY chold him what we did
and how I told him what we did and that
I was in one up and with him for like
three months. And I'm and I'm saying to myself like,
they got records that will show you how long I
was up there. So when when when Ron and George's
(17:12):
question and the guy and you just you just you
just see it, you see it. Then they brought up
his past. That's when I found out about we wasn't
the first individuals he did this too. In my mind,
I know, I'm coming home now. So you're there, you're
being tried with Tommy, right, you're being tried together, separate juries,
but you're being tried together. And Shabaz comes up and
(17:35):
says that you confessed again to him, and he must
be sitting there going I'm going home because this guy
is crazy. When you look at everything, from every witness
that they had, so all the confessions to everything. If
you just look at it, it's not a jury in
the world. It's not a jury in the universe that's
(17:57):
gonna convict the mother's crime. Ron. Can you of this
a rundown of this trial? How was this case with
all these holes, these confessions that are obviously wrong, How
does it result in these convictions? This was really before
the time there was much science available on the issue
of false confessions. UH. Some people had started work on
(18:18):
its saul cast and I think had been doing it
for a few years. But the idea of calling a
false confession expert that that just was not an idea
that existed UH in New York criminal trial practice at
the time. And Ray Kwon Shababs I actually did one
(18:38):
of these these sort of bush league lawyer things. I
took his criminal record, which at that time was written
on paper, and I taped all of the sheets together,
and as I approached him, I left the sheets unspooled
as they did, and I handed him the document, which
at this point stretched all the way back to the
(19:00):
defense table, and I asked him if he recognized it,
and he said, yes, it's his criminal record. I knew
that he had done this twice before, and I considered
him to be a so called professional informant. He worked
for the d a's office, not regularly, but whenever he
needed to. Whenever he got in a jam, he would
(19:20):
cook up some sort of plot, some confession, some conspiracy,
and go to the d a's office and trade it
for lighter treatment. The d a's office admitted that, yes,
he had testified once in Brooklyn, and yes he had
testified once in Queen's Judge. France's xavier A Geto, a
name which should also be familiar to your listeners because
(19:42):
he presided over many of these wrongful convictions, said at
two times isn't enough to make him a professional witness,
and they let him testify. What we did not know,
but the Brooklyn d A's office certainly knew, was that
in the Brooklyn case which prec did this, he had
testified that he was a professional liar. He was asked,
(20:08):
you lie for a living, don't you, Mr Shabaz, and
he said yes, it's insane. I mean, when you think
about the way that this playing field was stacked, right,
It's stacked from the moment that a teenager walks into
the interrogation room alone, without a parent, without a lawyer,
without any clue about what's facing him, and a trial
(20:29):
that all just continues with lies and concealments. Vince, I
want to ask you if you'll take us back to
that moment. I mean, this is when the wheels really
come off. Right. You've been sitting at this trial. You've
been telling yourself, I just have to make it to
the acquittal. I just have to make it to the
moment when the jury realizes that this entire situation is
(20:51):
constructed bullshit. Well, when they after closing organis, they came
back with diverting little fat thing it was, and I
don't I don't even think we probably wasn't even downstairs
an hour something like that. They called us back upstairs.
I remember sitting down and I'm saying to myself, all right,
I'm about to slide up out of here. It's over.
(21:13):
And he said, we found the defenders guilty on all
charges so quick fast. I did a calculation in my head.
I how older people and I go to the board.
I said, I'd be forty two years old. I said,
i'd be an old man. My daughter wasn't even born yet,
a mother was six months pregnantly. But I really didn't
hit me until I went back to get sentence, because
(21:34):
even then I still thought they might have made a mistake,
might be a chance. But I think the one good
day about that sentence. That day I wore regular clothes, jeans,
sweat on, sneakers, and my co defended. That's the only
thing that made me smell that day. He walked into
(21:55):
the court room. Until this day, I don't know where
he got it from, but he had on alarme green suit,
alarm green suit. And I'm looking at him, and I'm
saying to myself, this guy can't be serious. They're about
to give us twenty five years and you walking here
(22:15):
with a live green SUITO. And I remember when I
was taking me out the court when I started singing Tupac,
And somehow when I went to the board, somehow it
changed for me singing Tupac to me cursing the judge
out the barod board. When I went to the board,
they asked, They asked me that I cursed the judge out.
(22:35):
I said, no, I didn't curach the judge out, I said,
I read a statement that my mother wrote from me,
I said, And when I walked out, I was singing Tupac.
I said. I don't know how y'all got that, but
it really didn't hit me until I got downstate that
I wasn't going home for a long time. How did
you survive all those years in prison? Y'all understand something
(22:59):
rack is outand is different from the penitentiary. And you
hear all the Harvard stories about the penitentiary. When I
get downstay the old timer that I ran into, he
asked me, did I want to do a smooth bed?
And I said yeah. He said, okay, that's what you do.
He said, for the first five years of your bid,
you put in major work. I don't care if somebody
(23:21):
owe you a stamp, if they don't have your money.
When they say they're gonna have it, you give him
the business. So what happens. What happened to me, and
it still affects me to this day. My heart became
real cold because that's what the penitentiary turned me into.
I drink now a lot to shield all the pain
(23:44):
I go through every day. Nobody knows what it's like
when you go to prison for a crime you commit,
and you wake up every morning and you go to
brush your teeth, wash your face. You can't accept that.
But when you're there, there the day after hour, year
after year, for something you didn't do, a lot of
(24:06):
hate build up, a lot of thoughts about suicide setting.
I couldn't put a rope around my neck. I couldn't
take a lot of pills. I couldn't do that, Okay,
so I would cause a lot of problems hoping that
the police would kill me because I became tired. Nobody
(24:31):
knows what it's like for me, even to this day,
just to fight to get up. I got to get
myself a reason. They keep getting up every day. Yeah,
people see me. I still look young, still got my swag,
but they don't know what it's like from me. I
gave these people twenty plus years of my life for
(24:53):
no reason, and they started detective he's living somewhere suburbs,
somewhere to get his picture. Yeah all right here, all right,
No matter how many times people do stories about that
coward not feeling another happitude. But I thought they say,
(25:13):
when you committed crime, you go to jail for I
ain't commit no crime. I went to jail. They exonerated us.
So that means everything he did, he lied, he can
committed crumsy he forms to five evidence, they say it's
a misdemeanor what he did. Okay, cool. I know a
(25:35):
whole lot of people that got mister meetings that went
to jail. I went with a few of them, So
I understand what y'all doing. I appreciate. Let me make
this clear to y'all, and I'm just being honest. It's
only one person that's gonna make him pay for what
he did to all of us. Everyone. It was not
just me and my code of fitters. We're the only
(25:58):
ones that coward valet it. We ain't throwny ones. But
the long I'm making pay for it though, he's gonna
be Iraq. He gonna be Iraq. They broke me a
little bit, but I'm gonna keep fighting there. They don't
my code offending need me to hold him down. Now
it's my turn. Do you help me? Damn? Do you
(26:22):
helped me? Damn? While I was in prison, ripping and running,
he was in a lower live brary fighting for both
of us. These tears just say for me, he's tear
for him too. My code defended is hurt. It's the
way they broke me. They broke my code defended too,
But he kept fighting for That's what I'm sitting there.
(26:44):
He got us to this point. No matter how many
interviews I gotta do, I got us. I'm gonna let
the people know about that coward. I got nephews that
I didn't even grow up with. My mom's, my sister.
What about their paid what about them knowing that they
(27:06):
huh like no, I was in the same I got
a door room. We'd never have a relationship because she
can't never understand why her dad wasn't there. And I
don't know how to fix that. That coward took that
from me. That coward took that from me. You know,
(27:26):
yesterday I watched my daughter come out of the building
from coming from my mom's house, and she was in
the cab and she just turned and looked at me,
and we looked at each other like we were full
blooded enemies. You know how that feels. Don't nobody know
how that ship. But it's all right though, So all right,
(27:50):
it's part of life. That's the only way it could
make sense for me. That's The only way I could
survive is if I say it's all right. That's the anyway.
I ain't got no choice no more. Without that, my
mom's and my sister be bevery at me. That's how
(28:10):
it makes sense of it. It's all right. That's how
I keep going everything. It's all right when I wake
up every day, it's all right for me. I'm real
for it because of the moment I stopped saying it's
all right. It's the moment I don't want to be
(28:33):
here no more. So it's all right. I don't want
me it's all right, you know what, Let's let's take
a break. Okay, let's just take a break for a
second from having to talk about this for just the NOMA. Okay,
I think I just need a few minutes. I just
need a few minutes to our listeners. I just want
(29:18):
to acknowledge that Vince is clearly in a lot of
pain here. All of us who work on this podcast
take the health and safety of our guests very seriously.
Immediately after this interview, we connected Vince with a specialized
trauma therapist, and we talked to his family to make
sure he was being taken care of and supported. In
(29:39):
the days and weeks following this conversation, we also spent
a lot of time talking and thinking about which parts
of this interview to air, whether or not his pain
was too raw, too fresh, Whether or not Vince really
wanted all of this out in the world, We asked him,
and the answer is he does. He wants the world
to know what happened to him and how it still
(30:00):
affects him today. You know, wrongful conviction stories are often
packaged as these stories of triumph, but behind so many
of them there's deep emotional suffering. So to Vince, I
just want to say that I'm amazed and humbled by
your bravery. You're sharing the truth of what happened to you,
and our shared life work is to stop this from
(30:22):
happening to anyone else ever again. So with that, let's
get back to what happened next in Vince's story. So, Ron,
let's go back to you. You've been involved at the
time of trial. Years pass and you do get back
(30:44):
involved with this case. Can you tell us how you
got involved again and how the case eventually started to
turn its direction back towards justice. The turning point in
the case came in early when Tommy Malik, who never
gave up, sent the most extraordinary document to me that
I've ever seen. And what Tommy found was a ten
(31:08):
page order from a state Supreme Court justice regarding ray
Kwan Shabaz and his most recent false testimony where he
created a conspiracy to murder a sitting judge. The FBI
got involved and they quickly realized what the d A's
(31:29):
office could never face, which this is. This is a hoax.
This is something that Shabaz is doing simply to to
create a reason for him to be an informer, to
get out of prison. And judge the judge issues a
ten page injunction saying that ray Kwan Shabaz a k a.
Marlon O. Villa is a clear and present danger to
(31:53):
the administration of justice. He is permanently enjoined from ever
intacting anyone in law enforcement. Again. If he feels the
need to contact someone in law enforcement, he will contact
a Special Master who I am appointing, And he is
(32:13):
the only person that Shabbaz is ever to contact because
his history and his habit of lying, creating cases, falsifying testimony,
falsifying conspiracies is such that to let him talk to
law enforcement is, in fact, to to disrupt the criminal
(32:34):
justice system. I had never seen a document like this before.
I have never seen a document like that since. And
I called the head of the conviction Review Unit, who
I had known from other cases, and he said, just
wait a little bit. There's gonna be things coming out
about Detective Scarcella that you're going to want to know.
(32:55):
Early on, they took this case, this case was handed
to them in and by the time of this exoneration
in two it was the oldest case, the longest any
case had lingered. But in the end they found everything
they needed to convince everybody beyond any doubt whatsoever, that
(33:20):
all three of these young men, then young men, were
wrongfully convicted. I started with Tommy, and then in I
realized that they were all going to stand or fall
together just like they did at trial. And so you
ended up representing Vince too in his effort to be exonerated.
(33:41):
But at this point, Vince, you had already been paroled, right,
you were parrolled in. How did you and Ron get
in touch again? I got a letter from him and
he said he wanted to come see me. All right,
I already knew who he was, so ang really. You know,
by this time is two thousand and seventeen. I got
(34:04):
three years left before I go to the board. So
all right, I said, my code of fitting. Munster came
up with something. He pulled the rabbit out of had
force or something. He comes up here just just for
no reason. And when he came to see me then
he said, look, it's a seventy five percent chance we're
(34:26):
gonna get it over to him. Sorry, seventy five percent.
I'm saying to myself, that's pretty hard. On the seventy
five percent note. Normally a lawyer tell you at the
at the most he might put it at If he's
trying to be a little cocky, he might put it
at fifty. So right before I went to the board,
I let him I was going to the board, and
I asked me to write me a letter. Now, normally,
(34:47):
when you go in front of the parole board, you know,
after you say your name, they tell you who they are,
they name and everything, and they actually your name. They
jumped right into the case, said everything. But they didn't
do that with me. The first thing they asked me
about what's the letter from my lawyer? And I said, yeah,
I guess after getting a letter from Ron, and Ron
(35:08):
told him he let him know straight up and down.
Y'all should do the right thing because this case is
gonna get over. Trunk. Y'all don't want to be the
reason why he had to stay in prison any longer,
so y'all should let him go. And he was right.
I made my board when I came home, and then
I was sleeping. Called me early in the morning, like
(35:33):
you always do. When he called me his greeting, Hey, Vince,
I said, what's several are you doing? He said, I'm
all right. He said, listen, you gotta be at the
court on Friday because your kids getting over. I said yeah,
he said, yeah. I was tired. I was tired that morning.
I was tired that morning. But after they told me
(35:55):
that I couldn't go back to sleep, I started trying
to put together what I'm away the court, nice white
white shorts, my fit of hat broke down to the side.
I still got a little bit of swag. I told
you all that. Yeah, I came in there, you know,
and I'm not gonna lie to them when I got there.
(36:15):
Ra High, however loyal. She met me out in the hallway.
She says, I was nervous, so I asked me with
my code defending, was that so? What Timmy yet? She
said they're bringing them out, So I said all right,
And they brought him out in the handcuffs. That kind
of that that that that that pissed me off seeing
him come out of handcuffs. We walked out, We walked
(36:38):
out together. At the end, they asked as what we're
gonna do now, and I told him We're going to
Disney World. So when this is all over with, when
everything is all over with, man my boy going to
Disney World. Depending on how this turned out, depending on
how I see that the last the the ending cut,
I might invite y'all. I don't know yet. And all
(37:00):
I want to see is him in lime green, you
and white at Disney World. That is how I want
to see you. No he no, no, no, he can
never know. He can never put on lime green again. No, no,
that is against the rules for him. Ron, We're getting
to the end of the story. I just want to say,
you've been working on this case for a long time.
(37:21):
This has been a twenty seven year labor for you. Yeah.
I mean, look, it's one of the advantages about living
to be. My age is that sometimes you do get
to see stuff come around again. I'm happy that I'm
old enough now that I am living to see some
(37:41):
of these things happen. So I wouldn't call it a
twenty seven year labor. I'd call it twenty seven year
look at watching what goes around finally finally does come around.
And while I don't think the moral arc of the
universe bends towards justice, in fact, I don't think the
(38:02):
moral ark of the universe freaking exists. I do know
that sometimes for some people there is a reckoning at least,
and that's what's happened here, and that reckoning, I think
is going to come one day for the officers who
did this. We all know that the law creates exceptions
for police officers. We know that qualified immunity protects police
(38:23):
officers even when they do things like this. But what
I will say is that the world will know their names.
They will know their names as bad police, and that's
going to have to be where we leave this for now.
At the end of every episode of Wrongful Conviction, we
do what we call closing arguments. Vince. This is where
you get to close out the show. You can talk
(38:45):
about anything you want to talk about. And before you do,
I just want to say thank you to Ron and
thank you to Vince for sharing your story with us today.
It has been an honor. Vince. I'll give you the
floor first and foremost, let me say thank you the
wrong thank you to my codeffind Thomas Malee, because without there,
(39:06):
I wouldn't be sitting there right now now. Yeah, the
penitentiary broken. I ain't afraid to say, if you look
deep enough in my eyes, you're sick. But I'm just
good at shilling it. That's what the penitentiary is designed
to make, break your break you down. But for me,
like I said, I just keep telling myself it's gonna
(39:28):
be all right. They said, LAWD don't place a burden
on the person that they can't bear. And I guess
it was designed for me to carry a heavy burden.
Some days it is light, like today it's real heavy,
and for the next couple of days is gonna be
real heavy. And I may isolate myself. My girlfriend may
(39:50):
not understand it, my mom's may not understand it. My
sister will law that's my baby girl, my sister. These
tear as you see man, he's ain't it for sal
This is years a hurting pain. Those that we'll see this.
(40:11):
No one understands something man penitentiary and designed for nobody. Man, white, black,
blue green, especially for those that didn't do it. If
you did a crime, you know, would't understand what it is.
I could have did a million years longer than for
something I did. But it's all right though. Life goes on.
(40:36):
Me and my cold and friends are gonna survive because
the same thing I tell myself, each other, itself, because
that's all we got. Our family there, but that's all
we got tell ourself. We all right, We're gonna make it.
And I'll leave you out with that. Thank you, Thank
(41:02):
you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. I'm your guest host,
Laura and I writer. I'd like to thank our executive
producers Jason Slum and Kevin Wordis. The Senior producer for
this episode is Jackie Polly, and our producers are Lila
Robinson and Jeff Clyburne. Our editor is Roxandra Gwedy. The
music in this production is by three time OSCAR nominated
(41:24):
composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram
at Wrongful Conviction on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast and
on Twitter at wrong Conviction, as well as at Lava
for Good. On all three platforms, you can follow me
on Instagram and Twitter at Laura and I Writer. Wrongful
(41:46):
Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in
association with Signal Company Number one. Next week, on the
guest hosted episodes of Wrongful Conviction and Lauren Bright Pacheco
will sit down with Mark Shannon, the victim of the Springfield,
Massachusetts Police Department and their blatant disregard for the truth.
(42:08):
Mark served nearly thirty years behind bars while his family
and community fought for his freedom, surviving not only prison
but also a dire medical emergency. Lauren Bry Pacheco is
a brilliant investigator and she's no stranger to wrongful conviction cases.
You may know her from her groundbreaking incredible podcast Murder
(42:30):
in Oregon and Murder in Illinois. Listen next Monday in
the Wrongful Conviction podcast feed
I'm Jason Flom, host of Rawful Conviction, but this week,
instead of hearing me, I've invited a legitimate genius from
the legal world to bring their knowledge and expertise to
the conversation as guest host here at Rawful Conviction, we
believe that sharing the stories of the incarcerated innocent can
create real change in the world, even beyond with these
(00:22):
real life legal superheroes do every day. In the middle
of one November night, there was an explosion in Brooklyn,
New York. Nine different people called to report what they
heard and what they saw. They reported seeing two men
running up to a subway token booth on Kingston Avenue.
(00:46):
They poured gasoline into the coin slot and threatened the
attendant with a match. Almost immediately, the toll booth burst
into flames. The attendant was a man named Harry Kaufman,
and as the toll booth caught on fire, he did too.
Harry was able to run up the street, where passers
by helped extinguish the flames on his body. More than
(01:07):
eight percent of his body was badly burned. He died
a few weeks later. The crime made headlines in New
York and around the country. Prominent politicians like Senator Bob
Dole and Mayor Rudy Giuliani mentioned the case in their
tough on crime rhetoric. Pressure was mounting for the police
to find the attackers. With little physical evidence and no
(01:30):
clear suspects, Detective Louis Scarcella turned to one of his
favorite tactics, coercing witnesses. One of the nine one one callers,
James Irons, was forced to give a false confession and
to name two more accomplicits. Thomas Malik and Vincent Ellerbee,
were both detained and interrogated, and both eventually gave false
(01:52):
confessions under pressure. After an investigation and a trial riddled
with lies and misconduct, Thomas Malie and Vincent Ellerby were
convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to twenty five
years to life. This is Wrongful Conviction. Hi, everybody, it's
(02:21):
Laura and I writer. I am so glad to be
here guest hosting another episode of Wrongful Conviction. I'm the
co director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University,
and you might also recognize my voice from another series
I co hosted on this podcast, feed False Confessions. Today
I'm here with a real fighter, a real survivor of
(02:42):
false confessions, Vincent Ellerby Vince, you've endured more than any
human should be asked to endure. I am so honored
to get a chance to talk to you today. Do
you want to introduce yourself? Hi? My name vincenw four years,
eleven months in days. Some had nothing to do it.
I was forced to take the way for crime. I
(03:03):
had nothing to do it. And I'm Ron Coopy. I
was the lawyer for Vince's co defendant way back in
the nineties, and they were tried together, although in front
of separate juries. Ron, We're so glad to have you here,
and Vince, I am so glad you said every one
of those days, because every one of those days, hours
(03:26):
and minutes counts. But Ron, I'm going to start out
by asking you what was New York City like in
the ninety nineties in terms of crime and how people
were talking about crime. Back then, we were pretty much
in our tenth year of the crack epidemic, which saw
a dramatic increase in crime and and a wildly dramatic
(03:51):
increase in punitive law enforcement. It was a time in
which the super predator theory was gained and had gained
tremendous currency in legal circles and sociological circles. It was
coined by a sociologist who later attracted it, but the
damage had been done. The theory was there was a
(04:11):
whole generation of black youth growing up without fathers, living
on the streets who were committing crimes. There was never
any consequence to their crimes. They would always get away
with crime after crime after crime, and as a result,
they would become super predators. These are people who were
so feral and so conscious less they would go out
(04:34):
and do anything to anybody without any empathy, compassion, or mercy.
And we were in the process of creating a whole
generation of these people, and the only thing that we
could do about it as a society was to incarceraate
them forever. It's one of the most toxic theories out there, right,
I mean, we know this is the theory that led
(04:54):
to the wrongful conviction of the Central Park five, for example,
now called the Exonerated five just to few years before
this happened events and there are so many other cases
around the country that were driven by the super predator myth.
Right here in Chicago, the Dicksmore five, the Englewood four,
the Marquette Park for the Uptown seven. These numbers just
keep mounting and mounting and mounting. And Vince's case in
(05:18):
particular is a horrific example of these racist tropes being
used to incarcerate black kids, Black male children in particular.
So tell us how this toxic brew of racist myths
showed up in this case. So on November, outside of
a token booth in Brooklyn, two people, two people, not three,
(05:42):
And this will become important later on in the story.
Two people went to that token boothe One of them
was armed with a thirty caliber carbine a rifle. The
other had a bottle with gasoline in it. They were
trying to rob the token booths. The token booth clerk
Harry Kaufman, and refused to give up the money, and
(06:04):
he was behind bulletproof glass, and the perpetrators poured gasoline
into the slot. According to the prosecution, they then set
it on fire. The token booth exploded, It blew up
the booth, it blew up the money, and it burned
up Harry Kaufman, and he had third degree burns over
(06:26):
most of his body. And he lingered in the burn unit,
agonizing day after agonizing day until I think December he died.
It was one of those horrific crimes that still made
the headlines in New York even though crime overall actually
(06:47):
had had dropped as the crack epidemic wane. But it
was still one of those incredibly high profile crimes that
people used to illustrate why you can no longer live
in New York City. Our mayor at the time, a
guy better known to this audience in his latter incarnation
as a Trump apologist. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, for reasons still unclear,
(07:13):
noted that the movie Money Trained had just come out,
and he claimed utterly without evidence, that this particular robbery
murder had been inspired by the movie Money Train. So
it was a horrific crime, and everybody agreed. It was
a horrific crime, of course, made more so by the
(07:36):
the fableism of of our mayor. What evidence did investigators
begin to look into? What leads do they have to
go on? The problem was they had no suspects, There
were no fingerprints at the scene, the firearm couldn't be traced.
This was before the days when there were cameras everywhere,
(07:58):
and everybody had a cell phone. Uh, there were no
cell phone towers. There was absolutely no evidence, uh that
the cops had to give them a lead to anybody.
So when nobody's a suspect, everybody becomes a suspect. Now
that night, that night, nineteen people called to report an
(08:22):
explosion in the subway station. One of those people was
a guy named James Irons and he was in his
mom's apartment. He called up as well, and later his
mom got on the phone. And this is noteworthy because
James iron sounded normal on the phone. That is, obviously
(08:44):
he was panic. Something horrible. It just happened, but but
it just seemed like another nine one one caller. So
I want to take a minute and just ask you
to tell us a little bit about the cops who
ended up getting assigned to this investigation. They were out
of the seventy ninth Precinct. Right. Stephen Camill of the
Brooklyn North Homicide Squad was lead on this case, and
he was assisted by Louis Scarcella, which is a name
(09:07):
that listeners of this podcast will remember. Can you give
us a little bit of background here, now, Disgrace Detective
Louis Scarcella and his partner Stephen Camille were known as
Batman and Robin, and Scarcella was very much Batman. Whatever
the lead was, whoever the lead detective was named, whether
(09:27):
it was Camille or Murphy or O'Reilly or Derita or
O'Toole um, it was Scarcella who was actually in charge.
He led a homicide task force throughout Brooklyn that had
a roving commission to stick their nose in any homicide
they wished. And the amazing thing about Detective Scarcella and
(09:49):
the reason he received such adulation within the police department
and the d a's office was he got witnesses, and
he got confess sessions, even in cases where there appeared
to be no witnesses, and even in cases where there
appeared to be no suspects. He was known as the
closer as well, because he will close this case. At
(10:14):
this point, there's there's close to I think two dozen
wrongful conviction cases attributed to Scarcella. I think at this count,
eighteen have been exonerated. There are still some cases in
the pipeline that may or may not result in exonerations.
Out of ninety trials, nine homicide trials that that that
(10:36):
he works. It's unbelievable. It sounds like he's been responsible
for so many lost centuries. It's mind blowing. He's been
responsible for lost millennia of black life. If you add
all those years together, it's not going to be in
the hundreds at this point. Pretty sure it's going to
be in the thousands. And he didn't have any suspects either,
(10:58):
So so when you have a case like this with
no suspects, kind of everybody's a suspect. So what you
do is you go out and you take every snitch,
every informant, every person on the street that you know of,
and you basically beat the crap out of them. So
(11:19):
they go back to the nine one one calls. I
don't know the television theory the criminal always returns to
the scene of the crime, and maybe one of the
nine callers actually committed the crime, right, So so footnote here.
You know, you're told if you see something, say something.
The lesson of this case, if you see something and
(11:40):
you say something, depending on who you are, you may
end up getting convicted for what you saw and said.
Because one of those good Samaritans who called nine one one,
who tried to help out was this kid, eighteen year
old James Irons. But here's the thing, right, if if
he did the crime and then called from his home,
he would have to run really really fast in order
(12:02):
to get home and call nine one one when their
call lug say he did. He would have been out
of breath on that nine one one call, and he wasn't.
That just doesn't make sense. So right there, right there,
if you were paying attention, which nobody was, you would
have had your doubts. Anyway, Scarce and Camille bring him
in and he gives a confession. He gives a full confession.
(12:24):
The confession itself is ruddled with things that are completely untrue,
and he starts to name people that he was with.
He places himself as the look at. So the way
this works in interrogations, right, is that when you've got
a group of people that you want to turn into suspects,
you bring one of them in and you accuse that
(12:46):
person of being there. But you say, hey, I'm going
to cut you a deal. You were probably the lookouts,
You probably weren't an active participant, and things will go
easier for you if you just tell us a story
where you were the lookout, and you some other guys
do it. Right. You see this over and over and
over again in all these cases around the country, involving
(13:06):
multiple defendants, all of whom eventually falsely confessed to the
same crime. Right, And so they get people to say, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I knew there was gonna be a robbery, but I
don't know nothing about a murder. And the guy thinks
he's getting Okay, I'll do time for the robbery. Lone Behold,
he just confessed to fell any murder or yeah, you
were just a lookout. H asked you to look out
while they went in and did something. Yeah, yeah, I
(13:27):
was just like making sure nobody came down. I didn't
have a weapon. Boom, you've just confessed again to acting
in concert in a murder. Very very common, and it's
one of the flashing yellow lights when you see it today, exactly.
It's a hallmark of a false confession. So here you've
got the idea that irons would just be a lookout.
(13:48):
The details of his story aren't matching up with the facts, right,
the number of people, the gun, he's getting things wildly off.
But he does put some names forward. He does he
among other names he puts in our Vincent l RB
and Thomas Mulwick. So, Vince Ron and I just spoke
(14:21):
at length about your hometown, Brooklyn, New York, and the
horrible crime that happened there in novemb Vince, I want
to ask you, what was it like to realize all
of a sudden, but you were caught up in this
case and you were facing these charges. When I went
to Rackets Island behind, I didn't really have enough time
to really sit back and dwell on the case, because
(14:42):
you know, you're walking in the Rackets Island. You know
you gotta worry about the phone, making sure that nobody
taken one from you. So in my mind, I just
blanked it. I just blocked it all out. I just
put on my faith for my lawyer, because I said
to myself, it's no way possible that they're gonna find
me guilty. It's impossible, no matter what, it's impossible, no
(15:04):
matter the confessions. They're going to see everything. It's it's
a lie. Is mathematically impossible for you not to see
it a blind magazine. You were gonna like short term
survival mode, right like this is gonna be over because
they're gonna see I'm innocent. Yeah, so it's just out
here they say this is a normal environment, but when
(15:25):
you get it locked up, that's an abnormal environment. So
you gotta adjust to that. I had. I just put
my faith for my lawyer, and I put my faith
for my code offending because he already knew the law.
So for me, it was just I was just in
survival mode. Survival mode and the Rikers in the nineties,
(15:46):
it's no joke. No, you gotta make adjustments real fast.
And there's somebody else and Wrikers at the time, right,
somebody who ended up giving police what he said was
information about your case. Yeah, Ray Kuan Sbas, Yeah, they
called him ice picked Marlin yeh. I met him. I
(16:07):
knew him for all the three days, and I'm not
going to lie to you. When we went to trial,
we were sitting there and we're on trial, so I
never know him as Ray Kuan Sbas. I only knew
him as Marlin show as we're sitting there. When the
d A, I mean the d A calls the next witness,
they say, Ray Kua she Bas, and I turned and
(16:29):
looked at my co defended and he put his head
down so I tapped him. I'm like, what's uping? And
he shook his head like so I'm saying to myself like, okay,
who And the door opened up and he come out.
He got this Jene suit on looking fly and in
my mind, I'm saying, what is he doing here? And
(16:51):
he gett on the stand and he get the proceed
of telling him how TIMEY chold him what we did
and how I told him what we did and that
I was in one up and with him for like
three months. And I'm and I'm saying to myself like,
they got records that will show you how long I
was up there. So when when when Ron and George's
(17:12):
question and the guy and you just you just you
just see it, you see it. Then they brought up
his past. That's when I found out about we wasn't
the first individuals he did this too. In my mind,
I know, I'm coming home now. So you're there, you're
being tried with Tommy, right, you're being tried together, separate juries,
but you're being tried together. And Shabaz comes up and
(17:35):
says that you confessed again to him, and he must
be sitting there going I'm going home because this guy
is crazy. When you look at everything, from every witness
that they had, so all the confessions to everything. If
you just look at it, it's not a jury in
the world. It's not a jury in the universe that's
(17:57):
gonna convict the mother's crime. Ron. Can you of this
a rundown of this trial? How was this case with
all these holes, these confessions that are obviously wrong, How
does it result in these convictions? This was really before
the time there was much science available on the issue
of false confessions. UH. Some people had started work on
(18:18):
its saul cast and I think had been doing it
for a few years. But the idea of calling a
false confession expert that that just was not an idea
that existed UH in New York criminal trial practice at
the time. And Ray Kwon Shababs I actually did one
(18:38):
of these these sort of bush league lawyer things. I
took his criminal record, which at that time was written
on paper, and I taped all of the sheets together,
and as I approached him, I left the sheets unspooled
as they did, and I handed him the document, which
at this point stretched all the way back to the
(19:00):
defense table, and I asked him if he recognized it,
and he said, yes, it's his criminal record. I knew
that he had done this twice before, and I considered
him to be a so called professional informant. He worked
for the d a's office, not regularly, but whenever he
needed to. Whenever he got in a jam, he would
(19:20):
cook up some sort of plot, some confession, some conspiracy,
and go to the d a's office and trade it
for lighter treatment. The d a's office admitted that, yes,
he had testified once in Brooklyn, and yes he had
testified once in Queen's Judge. France's xavier A Geto, a
name which should also be familiar to your listeners because
(19:42):
he presided over many of these wrongful convictions, said at
two times isn't enough to make him a professional witness,
and they let him testify. What we did not know,
but the Brooklyn d A's office certainly knew, was that
in the Brooklyn case which prec did this, he had
testified that he was a professional liar. He was asked,
(20:08):
you lie for a living, don't you, Mr Shabaz, and
he said yes, it's insane. I mean, when you think
about the way that this playing field was stacked, right,
It's stacked from the moment that a teenager walks into
the interrogation room alone, without a parent, without a lawyer,
without any clue about what's facing him, and a trial
(20:29):
that all just continues with lies and concealments. Vince, I
want to ask you if you'll take us back to
that moment. I mean, this is when the wheels really
come off. Right. You've been sitting at this trial. You've
been telling yourself, I just have to make it to
the acquittal. I just have to make it to the
moment when the jury realizes that this entire situation is
(20:51):
constructed bullshit. Well, when they after closing organis, they came
back with diverting little fat thing it was, and I
don't I don't even think we probably wasn't even downstairs
an hour something like that. They called us back upstairs.
I remember sitting down and I'm saying to myself, all right,
I'm about to slide up out of here. It's over.
(21:13):
And he said, we found the defenders guilty on all
charges so quick fast. I did a calculation in my head.
I how older people and I go to the board.
I said, I'd be forty two years old. I said,
i'd be an old man. My daughter wasn't even born yet,
a mother was six months pregnantly. But I really didn't
hit me until I went back to get sentence, because
(21:34):
even then I still thought they might have made a mistake,
might be a chance. But I think the one good
day about that sentence. That day I wore regular clothes, jeans,
sweat on, sneakers, and my co defended. That's the only
thing that made me smell that day. He walked into
(21:55):
the court room. Until this day, I don't know where
he got it from, but he had on alarme green suit,
alarm green suit. And I'm looking at him, and I'm
saying to myself, this guy can't be serious. They're about
to give us twenty five years and you walking here
(22:15):
with a live green SUITO. And I remember when I
was taking me out the court when I started singing Tupac,
And somehow when I went to the board, somehow it
changed for me singing Tupac to me cursing the judge
out the barod board. When I went to the board,
they asked, They asked me that I cursed the judge out.
(22:35):
I said, no, I didn't curach the judge out, I said,
I read a statement that my mother wrote from me,
I said, And when I walked out, I was singing Tupac.
I said. I don't know how y'all got that, but
it really didn't hit me until I got downstate that
I wasn't going home for a long time. How did
you survive all those years in prison? Y'all understand something
(22:59):
rack is outand is different from the penitentiary. And you
hear all the Harvard stories about the penitentiary. When I
get downstay the old timer that I ran into, he
asked me, did I want to do a smooth bed?
And I said yeah. He said, okay, that's what you do.
He said, for the first five years of your bid,
you put in major work. I don't care if somebody
(23:21):
owe you a stamp, if they don't have your money.
When they say they're gonna have it, you give him
the business. So what happens. What happened to me, and
it still affects me to this day. My heart became
real cold because that's what the penitentiary turned me into.
I drink now a lot to shield all the pain
(23:44):
I go through every day. Nobody knows what it's like
when you go to prison for a crime you commit,
and you wake up every morning and you go to
brush your teeth, wash your face. You can't accept that.
But when you're there, there the day after hour, year
after year, for something you didn't do, a lot of
(24:06):
hate build up, a lot of thoughts about suicide setting.
I couldn't put a rope around my neck. I couldn't
take a lot of pills. I couldn't do that, Okay,
so I would cause a lot of problems hoping that
the police would kill me because I became tired. Nobody
(24:31):
knows what it's like for me, even to this day,
just to fight to get up. I got to get
myself a reason. They keep getting up every day. Yeah,
people see me. I still look young, still got my swag,
but they don't know what it's like from me. I
gave these people twenty plus years of my life for
(24:53):
no reason, and they started detective he's living somewhere suburbs,
somewhere to get his picture. Yeah all right here, all right,
No matter how many times people do stories about that
coward not feeling another happitude. But I thought they say,
(25:13):
when you committed crime, you go to jail for I
ain't commit no crime. I went to jail. They exonerated us.
So that means everything he did, he lied, he can
committed crumsy he forms to five evidence, they say it's
a misdemeanor what he did. Okay, cool. I know a
(25:35):
whole lot of people that got mister meetings that went
to jail. I went with a few of them, So
I understand what y'all doing. I appreciate. Let me make
this clear to y'all, and I'm just being honest. It's
only one person that's gonna make him pay for what
he did to all of us. Everyone. It was not
just me and my code of fitters. We're the only
(25:58):
ones that coward valet it. We ain't throwny ones. But
the long I'm making pay for it though, he's gonna
be Iraq. He gonna be Iraq. They broke me a
little bit, but I'm gonna keep fighting there. They don't
my code offending need me to hold him down. Now
it's my turn. Do you help me? Damn? Do you
(26:22):
helped me? Damn? While I was in prison, ripping and running,
he was in a lower live brary fighting for both
of us. These tears just say for me, he's tear
for him too. My code defended is hurt. It's the
way they broke me. They broke my code defended too,
But he kept fighting for That's what I'm sitting there.
(26:44):
He got us to this point. No matter how many
interviews I gotta do, I got us. I'm gonna let
the people know about that coward. I got nephews that
I didn't even grow up with. My mom's, my sister.
What about their paid what about them knowing that they
(27:06):
huh like no, I was in the same I got
a door room. We'd never have a relationship because she
can't never understand why her dad wasn't there. And I
don't know how to fix that. That coward took that
from me. That coward took that from me. You know,
(27:26):
yesterday I watched my daughter come out of the building
from coming from my mom's house, and she was in
the cab and she just turned and looked at me,
and we looked at each other like we were full
blooded enemies. You know how that feels. Don't nobody know
how that ship. But it's all right though, So all right,
(27:50):
it's part of life. That's the only way it could
make sense for me. That's The only way I could
survive is if I say it's all right. That's the anyway.
I ain't got no choice no more. Without that, my
mom's and my sister be bevery at me. That's how
(28:10):
it makes sense of it. It's all right. That's how
I keep going everything. It's all right when I wake
up every day, it's all right for me. I'm real
for it because of the moment I stopped saying it's
all right. It's the moment I don't want to be
(28:33):
here no more. So it's all right. I don't want
me it's all right, you know what, Let's let's take
a break. Okay, let's just take a break for a
second from having to talk about this for just the NOMA. Okay,
I think I just need a few minutes. I just
need a few minutes to our listeners. I just want
(29:18):
to acknowledge that Vince is clearly in a lot of
pain here. All of us who work on this podcast
take the health and safety of our guests very seriously.
Immediately after this interview, we connected Vince with a specialized
trauma therapist, and we talked to his family to make
sure he was being taken care of and supported. In
(29:39):
the days and weeks following this conversation, we also spent
a lot of time talking and thinking about which parts
of this interview to air, whether or not his pain
was too raw, too fresh, Whether or not Vince really
wanted all of this out in the world, We asked him,
and the answer is he does. He wants the world
to know what happened to him and how it still
(30:00):
affects him today. You know, wrongful conviction stories are often
packaged as these stories of triumph, but behind so many
of them there's deep emotional suffering. So to Vince, I
just want to say that I'm amazed and humbled by
your bravery. You're sharing the truth of what happened to you,
and our shared life work is to stop this from
(30:22):
happening to anyone else ever again. So with that, let's
get back to what happened next in Vince's story. So, Ron,
let's go back to you. You've been involved at the
time of trial. Years pass and you do get back
(30:44):
involved with this case. Can you tell us how you
got involved again and how the case eventually started to
turn its direction back towards justice. The turning point in
the case came in early when Tommy Malik, who never
gave up, sent the most extraordinary document to me that
I've ever seen. And what Tommy found was a ten
(31:08):
page order from a state Supreme Court justice regarding ray
Kwan Shabaz and his most recent false testimony where he
created a conspiracy to murder a sitting judge. The FBI
got involved and they quickly realized what the d A's
(31:29):
office could never face, which this is. This is a hoax.
This is something that Shabaz is doing simply to to
create a reason for him to be an informer, to
get out of prison. And judge the judge issues a
ten page injunction saying that ray Kwan Shabaz a k a.
Marlon O. Villa is a clear and present danger to
(31:53):
the administration of justice. He is permanently enjoined from ever
intacting anyone in law enforcement. Again. If he feels the
need to contact someone in law enforcement, he will contact
a Special Master who I am appointing, And he is
(32:13):
the only person that Shabbaz is ever to contact because
his history and his habit of lying, creating cases, falsifying testimony,
falsifying conspiracies is such that to let him talk to
law enforcement is, in fact, to to disrupt the criminal
(32:34):
justice system. I had never seen a document like this before.
I have never seen a document like that since. And
I called the head of the conviction Review Unit, who
I had known from other cases, and he said, just
wait a little bit. There's gonna be things coming out
about Detective Scarcella that you're going to want to know.
(32:55):
Early on, they took this case, this case was handed
to them in and by the time of this exoneration
in two it was the oldest case, the longest any
case had lingered. But in the end they found everything
they needed to convince everybody beyond any doubt whatsoever, that
(33:20):
all three of these young men, then young men, were
wrongfully convicted. I started with Tommy, and then in I
realized that they were all going to stand or fall
together just like they did at trial. And so you
ended up representing Vince too in his effort to be exonerated.
(33:41):
But at this point, Vince, you had already been paroled, right,
you were parrolled in. How did you and Ron get
in touch again? I got a letter from him and
he said he wanted to come see me. All right,
I already knew who he was, so ang really. You know,
by this time is two thousand and seventeen. I got
(34:04):
three years left before I go to the board. So
all right, I said, my code of fitting. Munster came
up with something. He pulled the rabbit out of had
force or something. He comes up here just just for
no reason. And when he came to see me then
he said, look, it's a seventy five percent chance we're
(34:26):
gonna get it over to him. Sorry, seventy five percent.
I'm saying to myself, that's pretty hard. On the seventy
five percent note. Normally a lawyer tell you at the
at the most he might put it at If he's
trying to be a little cocky, he might put it
at fifty. So right before I went to the board,
I let him I was going to the board, and
I asked me to write me a letter. Now, normally,
(34:47):
when you go in front of the parole board, you know,
after you say your name, they tell you who they are,
they name and everything, and they actually your name. They
jumped right into the case, said everything. But they didn't
do that with me. The first thing they asked me
about what's the letter from my lawyer? And I said, yeah,
I guess after getting a letter from Ron, and Ron
(35:08):
told him he let him know straight up and down.
Y'all should do the right thing because this case is
gonna get over. Trunk. Y'all don't want to be the
reason why he had to stay in prison any longer,
so y'all should let him go. And he was right.
I made my board when I came home, and then
I was sleeping. Called me early in the morning, like
(35:33):
you always do. When he called me his greeting, Hey, Vince,
I said, what's several are you doing? He said, I'm
all right. He said, listen, you gotta be at the
court on Friday because your kids getting over. I said yeah,
he said, yeah. I was tired. I was tired that morning.
I was tired that morning. But after they told me
(35:55):
that I couldn't go back to sleep, I started trying
to put together what I'm away the court, nice white
white shorts, my fit of hat broke down to the side.
I still got a little bit of swag. I told
you all that. Yeah, I came in there, you know,
and I'm not gonna lie to them when I got there.
(36:15):
Ra High, however loyal. She met me out in the hallway.
She says, I was nervous, so I asked me with
my code defending, was that so? What Timmy yet? She
said they're bringing them out, So I said all right,
And they brought him out in the handcuffs. That kind
of that that that that that pissed me off seeing
him come out of handcuffs. We walked out, We walked
(36:38):
out together. At the end, they asked as what we're
gonna do now, and I told him We're going to
Disney World. So when this is all over with, when
everything is all over with, man my boy going to
Disney World. Depending on how this turned out, depending on
how I see that the last the the ending cut,
I might invite y'all. I don't know yet. And all
(37:00):
I want to see is him in lime green, you
and white at Disney World. That is how I want
to see you. No he no, no, no, he can
never know. He can never put on lime green again. No, no,
that is against the rules for him. Ron, We're getting
to the end of the story. I just want to say,
you've been working on this case for a long time.
(37:21):
This has been a twenty seven year labor for you. Yeah.
I mean, look, it's one of the advantages about living
to be. My age is that sometimes you do get
to see stuff come around again. I'm happy that I'm
old enough now that I am living to see some
(37:41):
of these things happen. So I wouldn't call it a
twenty seven year labor. I'd call it twenty seven year
look at watching what goes around finally finally does come around.
And while I don't think the moral arc of the
universe bends towards justice, in fact, I don't think the
(38:02):
moral ark of the universe freaking exists. I do know
that sometimes for some people there is a reckoning at least,
and that's what's happened here, and that reckoning, I think
is going to come one day for the officers who
did this. We all know that the law creates exceptions
for police officers. We know that qualified immunity protects police
(38:23):
officers even when they do things like this. But what
I will say is that the world will know their names.
They will know their names as bad police, and that's
going to have to be where we leave this for now.
At the end of every episode of Wrongful Conviction, we
do what we call closing arguments. Vince. This is where
you get to close out the show. You can talk
(38:45):
about anything you want to talk about. And before you do,
I just want to say thank you to Ron and
thank you to Vince for sharing your story with us today.
It has been an honor. Vince. I'll give you the
floor first and foremost, let me say thank you the
wrong thank you to my codeffind Thomas Malee, because without there,
(39:06):
I wouldn't be sitting there right now now. Yeah, the
penitentiary broken. I ain't afraid to say, if you look
deep enough in my eyes, you're sick. But I'm just
good at shilling it. That's what the penitentiary is designed
to make, break your break you down. But for me,
like I said, I just keep telling myself it's gonna
(39:28):
be all right. They said, LAWD don't place a burden
on the person that they can't bear. And I guess
it was designed for me to carry a heavy burden.
Some days it is light, like today it's real heavy,
and for the next couple of days is gonna be
real heavy. And I may isolate myself. My girlfriend may
(39:50):
not understand it, my mom's may not understand it. My
sister will law that's my baby girl, my sister. These
tear as you see man, he's ain't it for sal
This is years a hurting pain. Those that we'll see this.
(40:11):
No one understands something man penitentiary and designed for nobody. Man, white, black,
blue green, especially for those that didn't do it. If
you did a crime, you know, would't understand what it is.
I could have did a million years longer than for
something I did. But it's all right though. Life goes on.
(40:36):
Me and my cold and friends are gonna survive because
the same thing I tell myself, each other, itself, because
that's all we got. Our family there, but that's all
we got tell ourself. We all right, We're gonna make it.
And I'll leave you out with that. Thank you, Thank
(41:02):
you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. I'm your guest host,
Laura and I writer. I'd like to thank our executive
producers Jason Slum and Kevin Wordis. The Senior producer for
this episode is Jackie Polly, and our producers are Lila
Robinson and Jeff Clyburne. Our editor is Roxandra Gwedy. The
music in this production is by three time OSCAR nominated
(41:24):
composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram
at Wrongful Conviction on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast and
on Twitter at wrong Conviction, as well as at Lava
for Good. On all three platforms, you can follow me
on Instagram and Twitter at Laura and I Writer. Wrongful
(41:46):
Conviction is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in
association with Signal Company Number one. Next week, on the
guest hosted episodes of Wrongful Conviction and Lauren Bright Pacheco
will sit down with Mark Shannon, the victim of the Springfield,
Massachusetts Police Department and their blatant disregard for the truth.
(42:08):
Mark served nearly thirty years behind bars while his family
and community fought for his freedom, surviving not only prison
but also a dire medical emergency. Lauren Bry Pacheco is
a brilliant investigator and she's no stranger to wrongful conviction cases.
You may know her from her groundbreaking incredible podcast Murder
(42:30):
in Oregon and Murder in Illinois. Listen next Monday in
the Wrongful Conviction podcast feed
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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