July 16, 2018 • 61 mins
On January 11, 1988, Fitzgerald Clarke and Steven Hewitt were fatally shot in Brooklyn, NY outside of a building where they sold drugs. Shabaka Shakur, a friend of both victims, was brought in for questioning after a witness told officers that Shabaka harbored a dispute over money he owned Hewitt. Another witness told police that Shabaka admitted to committing the crime before he was arrested, but this witness never testified and recanted in 2014. In Detective Phillip Mahony’s initial interview with Shabaka, he denied any involvement in the crime. But after Mahony, Shabaka was interviewed by the now disgraced Detective Louis Scarcella, who claimed that he confessed to shooting the victims. Shabaka Shakur was convicted on two counts of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years to life. After 27 years–and in large part to his determination–Shabaka Shakur was exonerated. He is joined by his defense attorney, Ron Kuby, in this episode. Ron Kuby is the star of a new series *Wrong Man *on STARZ. The series follows a team of esteemed experts as they re-investigate the cases of three inmates who have been locked up for decades and claim they're innocent.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
I've never been to trouble of my life. I didn't
even have a parking ticket, and you know what I mean.
I was brought up like cops are the good guys.
I didn't know what was going to happen, but I
do know that everything was stacked against me. Everything like everything,
this isn't supposed to happen this way. I'm innocent. I
(00:22):
know I'm innocent. I know I had nothing to do
with this. How is this possible? I grew up trusting
the systems. I grew up believing that every human thing
should do the right thing. And that's why, even though
I was dealing with corrop people, I wasn't going to
brave anyone to get me out of prison because I
wouldn't live with the fact that I braved my way
out of my wife's death. I'm not innocent to proven guilty.
(00:46):
I'm guilty until I proved my innocence. And that's absolutely
what happened to me. Our system. Since I've been out
ten years, it's coming little ways, but it's still broken,
a totally little trust in humanity after what happened to me.
This is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to wrongful conviction. With
(01:18):
Jason Flam that's me and today we have a very
interesting and unusual show plan for you. Um Our two
guests today are Shabaka Shakur, who served twenty seven years
in prison for double murder that he had nothing to
do with and Shivaca. Welcome to the show, thank you,
(01:39):
thank you for having me. And with him is his attorney,
who has had a very colorful history, to say the least.
It's been involved in some of the most controversial and
interesting cases of the last generation. And I'm really excited
to hear from you today. So Ron Kubi, welcome to
(02:01):
the show. Thank you, Jason, pony Tail and all there.
He's still a hippy. It's unbelievable. Um We got Ron
who's got as much hair as you can imagine, and
Chewbacca who's got absolutely none. So I'm just giving everybody
a visual. Um So, I want to mention quickly the
fact that you are a TV star now right you
(02:23):
have your own show on Stars. I wouldn't go that far,
but Stars is doing a fantastic series called Wrongman Uh,
directed and produced by Joe Burlinger, who had done the
Paradise Lost series, and basically they take three cases of
people all homicides around the country who claimed they were innocent,
have done many years in prison, and they put resources
(02:46):
into the case. They they hire me detectives, former States Attorney,
Detroit homicide detective, FBI cold case consultant, and they have
us reinvestigate these cases for scratch. So they're doing this right,
They're they're absolutely right there providing the resources that defense
lawyers didn't have originally and most of us don't have now, uh,
(03:09):
to go through the case from the beginning and to
determine whether or not it indeed is the wrong Man.
Six episodes, three cases, One Question, Wrong Man, on Stars
every Sunday night at nine pm and available for downloading
on these Stars app All right, shout out to Jeff Hirsch,
my fad at Stars and and the whole crew in
(03:31):
Joanna who's here. Um, that's the show that I'm going
to be watching and I hope everyone else will too,
and I'm looking forward to learning more about these cases.
Thanks Vaka. This uh, this story is as terrifying as
it is typical. Um. And what I mean by that,
and we'll get into it, is that you are a
(03:51):
victim of someone who was the detective who was one
of the most notorious detectives in terms of framing people
in the history of our country to the world. UM.
It's a very dubious distinction, and we'll get into all
of that, um, but let's go back to the beginning. UM,
did you grow up in Brooklyn. Yes, I was born
(04:13):
and raised in Brooklyn, lived most of my earlier life
in Brownsville and Bethor Stubinson areas. Uh, Brooklyn and um
Shabaka Shakur is not your birth name, no, my um.
I was named after my father, lou Holmes. UM. But
going back to your childhood, so did you have a
(04:34):
traditional family situation. Was it a crazy neighborhood you grew
up in? Can you paint the picture because this was
crazy times when you were growing up in um Well.
I lived in Brownsvill, I lived in the projects. I
grew up in the projects. UM lived in the projects
mostly all my life. But I did have both my
mother and my father. You know, we lived in a
you know, I wasn't a single parent house or the
(04:56):
normal you know routine that they try to say. I
had of parents. I went to good schools. UM, have
brothers and sisters. We were we were a solid family,
So you grew up around this environment. Um, that's you know,
well known to anyone who's you know, familiar with New York. Um.
(05:17):
And it's interesting because the time we live in now,
you know it, contrary to what people would have you believe,
is that we're hitting historic lows in terms of crime rates.
And I think that back then we were probably pretty
close to the high I'm a New Yorker born and bred,
so I remember it was. You know, it was well
known that the stuff was. It was crazy in those times, um.
(05:39):
And then one day in everything went haywire. Your world
got turned, well, I got turned completely upside down sometimes
between eight eight and eighty nine, right when you were
wrongfully convicted. But in night, there was a double murder
in your neighborhood. And it was a couple of guys
(06:00):
that you knew right right. It was guys that I
had known them for almost a decade. I went to
school with one of them, Um, but I knew both
of them. They were close friends who hung out altogether,
so I met one through the other. But um, Stephen
Herewood was a guy that I went to high school with,
and I knew him from my first year in high
school and we went through high school together and Fitzgerald Clark,
(06:23):
who we called c was Steven's best friend and they
lived in Flatbush. But um, we went to school downtown
for a green area and we knew each other, so
we hung out during school and even after school. They
were they were close friends of mine, and they were
they were in the game then yeah, um game, they
(06:45):
were drug dealers. Uh. At the time they were talking
about this was during the crack academic so not only
was it high in crime, but you know, the city
was being devastated by crack and there was a call
for um aggressive policing because with crack came not only
(07:08):
did the destruction of people physically from the drug, but
also an increase of violence. You know. Um, crack was
one of the most lucrative drug trades at the time,
and people were killing for for neighborhoods, you know, right.
And it's interesting when we're going back to this because
I've that, you know, twenty five years working to decriminalize
(07:30):
drugs and you know, restore some sanity to our drug policy.
And the only distinction I want to make there is
it crack didn't make people violent. Um, the money made
people violence, right, The people who were committing the violence
weren't high. They were they were they were the ones
who weren't high, they were ones who want to get
everybody else high, and they were competing and fighting and
killing for the right to have that that income stream. So, um,
(07:54):
I just want to make that clear to our audience
who may not be as familiar since this shows, you
know that we don't spent a lot of time talking
about drugs. But that being said, so these two guys
get murdered and what seems like it was a drug head, right, yes?
And how did they end up focusing on you? Um?
(08:14):
You know, was it just laziness? Was it? Well? It
was it was partly laziness, and it was partly um
I would say, a tunnel vision by by the police.
Once I became a suspect, they zeroed in on me
and they ignored everything else. Um So I knew these
(08:36):
guys and we had a really close relationship. Um So
at that time I had driven one of them over
to the black where we were selling drugs and Gates
Avenue and um in the Bushick section of Brooklyn, and
we was having a conversation about a car. So I
(08:56):
was trying to sell them my car because was at
the time I was working in Queen's Queen's County Registers Department,
and I was trying to have a more calm life
when I at one point, to be honest with you,
I was selling drugs with you know what I'm saying, UM,
I needed money. They they you know, came to me,
(09:19):
they said, listen, help us out with this. And I
made runs. I did errands. I did didn't work for
them to um to make money for myself. But it
got to the point where I had a decent job.
I really didn't want to do it no more. I
didn't want to take a chance on going to prison,
so I was backing away from that. But I still
had a good report with them, So I went around there.
(09:41):
I had met a girl that I was dealing with
that lived in that neighborhood, So I went around there
to where their drug spot was. Their brother who didn't
live in New York, who actually lived in Florida. Uh.
He was the brother of Fitzgerald Clark, the guy that
we used to call see and he was the older brother.
(10:02):
He didn't know what he didn't know me. He had
just barely Uh, he had just met us because he
didn't live in New York, and he started becoming involved
in their drug trade, bringing drugs from Florida New York.
So this is like one of the few interactions that
he had with with me personally. That night, UM, me
(10:25):
and Steve had made an agreement about the car. He
wanted to buy my car. He was gonna give me
a certain amount of money. Um. He wanted to give
me some money from the drug spot that night and
then owe me the rest. See who was his friend
and minds. But we used to always argue. We we
just had that type of relationship where we was always
(10:46):
arguing about everything, but not a violent relationship or aggressive
relationship trade each other. We just grew up together and
we was always um on opposite sides of everything. So
me and him would argue at about the car and
sees brother witnessed this argument. So later on, when when
(11:11):
c and Stephen were murdered, his brother, recalling that I
was arguing with his brother, went to the police and
implicated me in the murder, and the police um that
stip me came and get me to take me to
the priest and to question me. I answered all the questions,
(11:32):
told him where I was, told him I wasn't nowhere
in Brooklyn at that time, explained to them the whole situation,
gave him the name of alibi witnesses that they could
contact right there. They contacted him that same night and
verified my alibi. Uh. But when they went to Detective
Scarcella and said, we got a guy that was pointed
(11:52):
out by the brother of the deceased, but the guy
has an alibi and he's saying he wasn't there and
we really don't have anything. Scarcella took it upon himself
two Um join into the interrogation and then fabricated a
confession against me, right and that's you know, it is interesting,
(12:14):
you know you talk about how you had alibi witnesses
more than one. Uh. There was no physical evidence connecting
you to the crime. They found the gun that was used,
but it didn't trace back to you in any way.
There were no fingerprints, there was no there was nothing
for them to go on. There's nothing to point the
finger at you, but they didn't care. Um and Scarcella.
(12:35):
People who are fans of the show listen the show
have heard his name before because we've had other ex
honorees on who were framed by the same guy. And
you know, Ron, this is where I want to turn
to you, because you have probably as much experience as
anyone in the country going after police who are on
(12:56):
the wrong side of the law. So I'd love to
get your take on as part of the story, because
obviously you have intimate knowledge of it as well as
knowledge of the entire world of of you know that
that that that blew wall, so to speak. So I
had first met Detective Scarcella in the nineties when he
(13:16):
was still working as a detective, still doing the things
that we we know now that that he did, and
I had cross examined him in a in a very
high profile case which itself is now under or no.
This was the token booth bombing case. And he amazed
me at just how good he was at lying, how charming,
(13:42):
how how avuncular, how we would look at the jury
and bond with them. And I knew he was lying
because I knew the facts of the particular case. But
but it didn't matter. People really liked Luis Scarcella. Juries
liked him, Judges loved him. Prosecutors thought he is you know,
the greatest thing on earth, because he would literally make
(14:03):
their cases. So I had a lot of experience with
him from that time before he became famous in the
public with the rant A case. Shabaka had written to
me he had done his own post conviction motion was
all put together and and the singular witness against him
(14:23):
was the Scarcella confession. And this was a remarkable confession
because it was not witnessed by anybody else. Scarcella was
not the case detective. There was no audio tape me,
there was no video tape made, there was no signature
of of Shabaka's. The whole confession existed only out of
(14:45):
Scarcella's mouth, and it was almost the stereotypical conviction. It
started out like so many of Scarcella's convictions did, and
the confessions he obtained, with a shout out to the
cleverness of Scarcella. That is to say, in Shibaka's confession, Uh,
Scarcella had Sebaka saying, you know what's going on? You
(15:08):
know the story? Other cases, Uh, you got it right,
I was there. I mean this that. Phrases like that
come up in close to a dozen different cases. So
the confession always starts out with congratulations, Mr detective, You're
such a smart guy. You got me. Uh. And in
(15:29):
this case, there was no corroboration, which is unheard of,
especially since Scarcella was not even the case detective. The
case detective question Sebaka for hours, and all he got
was Shabaka's alibi, which by the way, proved to be
completely correct. Eventually get him out of prison. Eventually comes,
you know, twenty eight years later though. And so Scarcella
(15:51):
walks into the cell and then walks out twenty minutes
later with this confession and didn't even call the case
detective and say, hey, hey, hey, detective Mahoney, come on in,
this guy's got something to say. Nothing. It's the only
place this confession occurred. And and the paperwork showed that
(16:12):
Scarcella really wanted Mahoney, who was the case detective, to
take responsibility for the confession. He was willing to give
it up. Mahoney could say that he got it. Mahoney
didn't trust it. So Mahoney wrote the statement down but
never attributed to anybody in any fashion. And and that
you know what we called the orphan statement, Like Mahoney
(16:32):
could remember where it came from, who said that he
knows that Shebaka didn't say that to him, and there
was a key piece of evidence that got Sbaka convicted.
Let's go back to that conviction. Because you were arrested.
I'm assuming on that day after Scarcela came in and
magically produced this confession in twenty minutes, that this other
(16:55):
experience detective couldn't get from you in hours and hours
of questioning. Well, well, I was um. The murder happened
one night. The next day, I was at work and
they came to um get me at work to tell
me that they wanted to take me to the priests
and to ask me questions. Um. Now, of course I
didn't know about the murder at the time, So I
(17:15):
went to the precinct and I answered the question because
I didn't know what was going on. They didn't take
take me to the priest and say, oh, we want
to talk to you about the murder. They just said
we want to ask you some questions about where you
were last night. So I'm answering the questions because I
didn't want to get in trouble. Were you're thinking that
they knew something about your past drug stuff? For um?
(17:38):
On the way to the priests and one of the
cops asked me if I owned a green BMW, which
I did, right, So that was the car that I
had given to Steve the night before, so I knew
who had the car, and I know that they were
drug dealers. So in my mind, I'm thinking, did they
get caught with drugs in the car? And now it's
(17:59):
coming back to me, you know, I'm trying to figure
out what it is, but I don't want to lie.
So I'm going to the priests and when they asked me,
do you know these guys, I'm saying, yeah, I know
these guys. Is this your car? I'm saying, yeah, that
is my car. Um, But I didn't have my car
last night. I wasn't with them last night. I was
in Queen's. I was with this person. I was with
(18:21):
that person. So I didn't want to lie, but I'm
telling them exactly where I'm at so that they would
realize that whatever happened, I wasn't involved. It wasn't until
the end of nearly nearing the end of that conversation
with Detective Mahoney that he tells me about their murders.
So now I'm like, okay, I don't know nothing about that.
(18:44):
I had nothing to do with nobody being murdered. Um,
I already told you where I was. And that was
the gist of my conversation with with Detective Mahoney. I
had no previous knowledge prior to him telling me about
what was going on. Um. When Detective Scott Sella came in, UM,
like Ron said, he had nothing to do with my case.
(19:04):
He wasn't assigned to my case. He was just in
the precinct. And when he came in, they came to
him and said, look, we got a guy who was
saying he wasn't there, but he's the only suspect that
we have. Remember, I was like, I'll take care of this, right,
and that's exactly what he did. He came in and
(19:24):
he said, Okay, I got it, I'll handle this, and
he came in there to talk to me. But as
soon as he came in there, he came in there
aggressively accusing me. I know you did it. I know
who you are. You were selling drugs with these guys.
These guys are drug inners, all of y'all involved you
You uh, you murdered them so that you wouldn't have
(19:46):
to share the block with dumb or whatever. Right. So
I looked at him and I said, you know why,
I don't even want to talk to you, you know,
and he got aggressive, started banging on the table. I'm
trying to help you, but instead you're gonna go up
north for a long time. You're gonna go down for
these murders. So I was telling them, you know, very politely,
(20:09):
go f yourself because I didn't want to deal with that,
and he left. At that point, I had no idea
that he was going to fabricate a confession. I thought
that was the end of the conversation. I didn't even
know about the confession until um I was arrested and
I was given a quarter pointed attorney and uh, the
(20:33):
quarter point attorney tells me, you confessed, And I said,
are you crazy? I didn't confess. I told the people
where I was. I gave him the alibi witnesses. They
verified my alibi witnesses, and the quarter point he said, yeah,
that's what you told this detective, but you confess to
the other detective. And that's when I realized that this
guy had fabricated a confession. And this is an important
(20:54):
time to mention that the confession is the most powerful
evidence that there can be. Um, it's really hard for
any jury or jurist or juror, I should say, it's
hard for any juror to understand why someone would confess
to a crime they didn't commit. And you know, as
people listen to the show and they hear these stories
(21:16):
over and over again, they start to understand many cases
their course confessions. In your case, there was no confession.
And let's not forget this. Carcela was a guy who
used the same witness in six different murder cases, who
was a drug addict, um, part time prostitute, I think
who he was supplying with drugs and was you know,
and he she he was so lucky that she having
(21:36):
to witness six different murders. I mean, that's kind of
a miracle. But I do want to take this opportunity
because Ron's here too, um and maybe he could ask
(21:58):
something of this. But I often tell people on the show,
and Shabaka would have benefited from this advice. I think
right that if you get arrested for something you didn't do,
and you get taken in the only thing you should
say is your name, your address, And I want a lawyer.
Would you agree with that without a doubt? And whenever
I debate with cops about this, I always say, let
(22:22):
me ask you this if if your son called you
from a precinct and said, Dad, I've just been arrested,
what should I do? What are you gonna tell? And
the cops invariably say, I said, don't say anything, We'll
get you a lawyer. Don't say we're without a lawyer.
And we know that's true. Now, now, Sebaka had some
experience in the criminal justice system, so and he knew
(22:42):
he didn't do anything, so he felt comfortable giving his alibi,
which was ultimately born out decades later, and he felt
comfortable telling Scarcella, get the f out of here, I'm
not going to talk to you. What nobody anticipated was
that Scarcella would simply make up a confession. So you've
(23:06):
got the made up confession. You have the brother of
the dead guy, originally telling a muddled story but thinking
Shabako was involved, But through a period of time with Scarcella,
his story changes, evolves, morphs until he saw Shabaka shoot
both of them, you know, one in the back and
(23:29):
another in the back as he was running the things
that he could not have seen because because physically impossible
because he wasn't there. Well, he wasn't here, but had
he been there, uh, just the location of the bodies
was all wrong. But but okay, so now you've got
your eye witness kind of, you've got your confession, not really,
and you stop looking for anybody else. Now, had they
(23:52):
spent all another day or two, they would have discovered
that one of the guys who got made dead at
night had been the subject of a previous murder attempt
just two months earlier by the Rankers. Actually both of them, right, yeah,
both of them, right right, yes, okay, let me because
(24:15):
this one came with instructions, right right right. It's like, okay,
they missed the first time, and they shot up the club,
but they missed the guys the first time, so and
everybody knew it was the Rankers, which is a Jamaican
drug dealing group, particularly violent even by the standards of
the time. And they're not sort of forgive and forget
kind of people there, and they weren't like, okay, well
(24:36):
we missed him the first time. We'll give you a pass.
There was every reason to think that they had fallen
into conflict with the rankers over drug turf uh, and
that that's what this murder was, but nobody cared at
the time. I will note that they continued to look
at the rankers after Shabaka was convicted. After he was convicted,
given his forty life and sent up state, there were
(24:59):
still other detectives who weren't entirely comfortable, and we're pursuing
those leads, which ultimately went mad. They've done it. At
the beginning, this whole thing would have been different. Like
Ron said, the the confession, the alleged confession, Um, nobody,
nobody would have predicted that, you know what I'm saying. Um,
(25:22):
it was it was just beyond my thinking that this
guy was going to say that I confessed to something. Um.
The situation around it was suspicious from the from the
get go because you're in a precinct with at least
thirty forty police officers and not one, not one police
officer heard the confession. Right, There's no notes, there's no
(25:47):
there's nothing, there's no proof of it. There's no you know,
any time you take a confession, any time you see
a police officer interview anybody, they write it down. There
was nothing in there. There was no signing of the fashion.
They didn't even call the prosecutor and say this guy
just confessed. They didn't take a videotape. There was absolutely
(26:07):
no proof of a confession other than that detectives car
seller just saying it out of his mouth, even though
we're in a precinct full of people. So there was
no proof that a confession ever existed. Now what Ron
said about, um, the previous attack on these people. Two
months prior to that, there was an attempt on both
(26:30):
of these same guys. So what's the odds that somebody
tries to kill two guys and then two months later
those same two guys actually get killed. Have been really unpopular.
I mean, look, it's happened, but but those would be
the likely suspects to begin with. So so what you
have here, Okay, you've got a bad detective, no question
(26:53):
about it, but he's not the only person involved. You
have an allegedly not bad detective, the actual case detective,
who does nothing. You have a prosecutor who decides to
go ahead and believe this stuff or at least put
it in front of the jury. You have a judge
who who has seen Scarcella before, and we'll see Scarcella
(27:17):
again and allows this whole case to go forward. And
ultimately you have a jury that has never seen Scarcella before,
but gosh, you know, he seems like a much you know,
dapper dude. Then then the black guy here and and convicts,
and appeals court after appeals court after appeals court affirms.
And this has been the pattern, not just in Shabaka's case,
(27:40):
but but in in over a dozen other cases that
this detective got involved in. And I want to point
out that the only winners in this scenario were the rankers, right, Um,
which is uh, society loses, um. Obviously, Shabaka gets his
life taken away from or you know, most of it,
(28:00):
and um, you know, the victims don't get justice. Um.
And these guys are free to go out there and
shoot the next guy that crosses their their path. Those
guys actually ended up going to federal prison for I believe,
like twelve different murders. Um. But the the amazing thing
is that how they discovered this um. One of the
(28:22):
guys in my case, fitz Gerald Clark, had got arrested
in a shootout with a machine gun against the rinkers
drawing that previous attempt. So when he ends up dead
from the case that I'm in jail for, he has
an open case that he doesn't show up for. When
he doesn't show up, the judge access okay whereas he at.
(28:44):
So the family has to go and say, oh, he's dead.
He's no longer alive. So the judge access for, well,
let me see some type of proof. You can't just
come in here and say he's dead. So the proof
that they give him was the death certificate in my case.
So at that point, the district attorney's office has connected
the two cases. Right, They know that this guy had
(29:06):
a previous attempt on him and then he's dead. They
know who did the previous attempt, yet their tunnel vision
prevented them from investigating that this is a suspect. You know,
here's here's a story that just that the brothers saying, oh,
this guy had argue with my brother. But here's a
guy who here's some guys who actually attempted to kill
him just recently. So their suspects. But because of the
(29:30):
tunnel vision of the police and the prosecutor, they ignored
that evidence. If they had searched just a little bit,
they would have found out that the attorney who bailed
out fitz Gerald Clark, the guy who got killed in
my case, was the same attorney who worked for the
Rankers who got this bar for fraud in working with
(29:53):
the rankers in fraudulent paperwork that he did for them. Like,
the connections are all in, So there was a lot
of stuff there. It could have been investigated, that should
have been investigated, but Scarcella, like so many of his colleagues,
decided to short circuit this entire process because he was
convinced Shibaco was guilty. I have actually never known a
(30:16):
cop who went out and deliberately framed a person who
he knew was innocent, planted evidence and somebody he believed
to be innocent, or lied about a person who believed
to be innocent. Uniformly. Uniformly, when the police engage in
this kind of activity, it's because they think the person
is guilty, and that guilty person they think is going
to get off because there's not enough evidence against him.
(30:39):
So it falls to the Scarcella's of the world, of
whom there were many and remain many. He was just
better at it than anybody else, it falls to them
to to put some extra frosting on the cake to
make sure that the guilty guy gets convicted. Stay tuned,
will be right back. So you go to trial with
(31:04):
your public defender, UM, having been held in jail, I'm
assuming pretty trial for what for about a year? For
I think it was fourteen months? Did how First of all,
how long was the trial? The trial was like two
days a day and a half something like that. Pretty
question trials when you don't have any of it. You
(31:26):
have your alibi witnesses and they were never called. What
happened was, Um, I had uh a public defender who
did not believe I was innocent, and like you said,
he just like most people thought, this guy confessed he's guilty.
So he came to me and tried to say and
(31:48):
told me, I'm going to get you a good plea.
And I told him I don't want to plea. I'm
going to go to trial. I didn't commit this murder.
And he said, listen, you can't win a trial. I'm
going to get your good plead. So he never investigated
my case at all. Um, I wrote to the judge.
Six months in, I wrote to the judge and told
(32:10):
the judge, listen, I need a new lawyer. This guy
does not believe I'm innocne. He's not doing any investigative work. Um,
he's not gonna be able to prove my innocence. The
judge ignored it. Six months later, a year in, I
write to the judge again and file of motion to
have him dismissed as my um as my attorney because
(32:32):
he's done no investigation. I've given him the name of
alibi witnesses. I've given him everything that I can give him.
You know, I've told him people that I remember that
live on that block who he could go um interview.
He does none of this. So right before I'm getting
ready to go to trial, I go back to the
judge and the judge on record tells me I'm not
(32:54):
gonna give rid of your lawyer now you're getting ready
to start trial. But I'm telling the judge he hasn't
investigated anything. The day I start trial, I have to
write a summary of the facts because he didn't even
know the facts of the case. Did he ever visit
you in jail? He never visited me. He after court
(33:15):
that um court dates he would go in the back
and talk to me, and we would argue, um, because
I told him, you're not investigating I'm innocent. Um. He
tried to get me to take a plea. When I
wouldn't take the plea, and I kept pushing to go
to trial, he said, Okay, we're gonna go to trial.
Like I said, I had to write him a summary
of the facts because he didn't know the facts of
(33:36):
my case. We went to trial, um, and he did
terrible because he hadn't he hadn't investigated, he hadn't talked
to none of the alibi witnesses. I had to get
on the phone and core one of my alibi witnesses
and tell him come to court because the lawyer had
never reached out to her. And she came to court.
(33:56):
And when she came to court, she stepped in the
courtroom and told basically the judge, I'm the out of
our witnesses, you know. And he still did not use
the out of our witness at try have heard that
story more times than I would like to have heard it.
So so take a quick pause. Here, what are the
elements we have so far? We have a a corrupt detective. Uh,
(34:17):
we have a system that believes Shakur is guilty, uh,
and is not looking at any other suspects. We have
a prosecutor who's more than willing to to put a
highly dubious story before a jury, and we have a
judge who's willing to allow it. And now sort of
the last piece of this is in place an utterly
incompetent defense lawyer who not only doesn't believe his client
(34:41):
is innocent, but is unwilling to even prepare a defense
for the client he believes is guilty. All he wants
is to plea He hasn't done any work, he's underpaid, uh,
and just doesn't care. So this is the storm. And
I was going to say that if you didn't already.
I mean, the worst part of it, really, the most
excuseable part, is that he doesn't care. I mean, you know,
(35:05):
he's sitting there and I think everyone listening is probably
feeling the same way I'm feeling. That that the the
feeling of helplessness that you must have had as a
person who's literally facing spending the rest of your life
in prison, um and nobody's helping you. That that word
(35:25):
is exactly how I felt helpless because I brought it
to the judge's attention, and the judge said, no, you
have to go on with disattorney. Even though I'm telling
the judge he's not doing anything. He's not investigating the case.
He hasn't spoken to any of the witnesses. There are
gaping holes in this story, right. The brother of fitz
(35:48):
Gerald Clark, his initial statement to the police was, um,
I know who did this? Right, He never said I
saw it. And then he in his statement that night
in the precinct, when he did speak in detail to
the police, he still didn't say he saw me commit
(36:09):
the crime. A year later, he's not saying, oh, I
know who did this because he had an argument. He's saying,
I actually saw the murder. I've seen Shabaka sneak up
behind my brother and shoot my brother twice in the back.
Amazing how the memory comes back. Here's the thing. His
brother died from a single gunshot wound to the chess.
(36:33):
So the account that he gave a trial didn't even
match the ballistics or the or the autopsy or anything. Right.
And and after we got the case and we did
some reinvestigation. I mean this, the witness had long since died,
but we did speak to his brother uh and his
(36:55):
brother was convinced that he was convinced that Shabaka had
done it. It's not as though he got on the
witness stand deciding to implicate somebody he thought was innocent.
He got on the witness stand with the encouragement of
Scarcella and the district attorney and the judge and and
embellished a story again because he thought the guy was guilty.
(37:19):
And if I don't tell these things the way I'm
supposed to tell them, this guilty guy is going to
get off. So you were fucked. I mean, basically, the odds.
If I was a bookie and I was watching this proceeding,
I wouldn't have taken any money from anybody who wanted
to be guilty. There would have been no odds that
I would have accepted because it was it was a lock.
(37:41):
I mean, you were done right. The what jury is
possibly going to watch that proceeding and come up with
any other conclusion other than that you're going when he
has something funny? The jury took longer in deliberation than
the trial. Wow. The jury took two and a half
days of deliberation. The trial was only a day a
(38:02):
day and a half the jury even hearing these stories
and having no defense because no Alabama was presented, no
defense at all. The jury had problems because they kept saying,
this confession doesn't make sense, and this guy's story doesn't
make sense. So they took two and a half days
(38:24):
of deliberation before they found me guilty. So they come
back in and obviously they found you guilty. And that moment.
Can you paint a picture of that moment? Like was
the courthouse? Was it a hot day? Cold day? Were
who was there? Was it noisy? Was it? This? Was
it that? Um my mother was dead. That's what I
(38:48):
remember because I remember turning around and looking at her
and she had tears in her eyes, and I just
kept thinking to myself, like, wow, I can't believe you
know that this is actually happening. Um it's it's funny
because to a certain extent, you know, even then, I
(39:08):
considered myself like conscious, like understanding that the system doesn't work,
but I still have some faith that it was gonna work.
I figured they can't find me guilty. They how can
somebody say they saw me shoot somebody in the back
and he was never shot in the back. You know,
how can somebody say, okay, he confessed and they don't
(39:30):
even have the confession, you know, they have nothing but
his word. So all of these things was running through
my mind, and I'm saying, there's no way that that
these guys can't realize that this is a set up.
And I was praying for the best, and then I
was just praying that it would be manslaughter. Um. And
(39:51):
when they convicted me a murder, I remember the judge.
I don't know if it was then all my senses enough,
but I remember the judge giving me an opportunity to
say something, and my lawyer basically saying, to be remorseful,
you know, And and I remember me telling the judge
I started to say, you know, I'm sorry about these
(40:12):
guys deaths. And I remember I said, I'm sorry about
these guys deaths, but I didn't do it. That's all
I can say. I said, I I really didn't do it,
and that was all I can say. And you know,
like my lawyer was kind of like pushing me say something,
be a be remorseful, try to you know, but I
just I was stuck because all I kept telling was
(40:34):
I didn't do it, and that was it. You know,
it's shocking to me that I don't think any maybe
there's one state that has mandatory videotaping of witness statements, right,
(40:57):
because the witnesses, as you said, can be led very easily.
They can be influenced, they could be fed information, and
I wouldness identification is such a tremendous factor. It's it's
the number one cause of right because even though we
know how how frequently witnesses eyewitnesses are wrong, even though
we have a zillion studies that has shown this, when
(41:21):
somebody gets up there in the courtroom and looks at
the defendant, points at the defendant, said it's him, I'll
never forget his face as long as he lives. People
believe that, just like people believe that only guilty people
make confessions, um and and so they believe the false confessions.
They believe the bad eyewitness identification. So that's what I
(41:43):
think people should. And obviously, if you have no forensic evidence,
especially these days where you know there's d n A,
there's cell phone, cell phone towers, Google searches, we all
leave these electronic signatures. If all of that is kind
of missing, then you should be really skeptical about this
in this country, if I was redoing the justice system,
(42:06):
I might put in a rule that says that if
there's no corroborating evidence other than a cross racial identification,
the case is not going identification of a stranger. Yeah,
I mean, if it happens to be your wife or something,
then that's right, fair enough, But that's that's not the
that's not the common Uh. Let me say also that
(42:29):
I think that there has to be open discovery also,
um because in in my case specifically, like I said,
the prosecutor knew that a previous attempt had been made
on these guys. They noticed a month after my arrest,
you know, so they if they had turned that information
(42:53):
over to the defense, you know. And assuming that the
defense lawyer would have investigated, because he did invested anything else,
but assuming that he had that information he would investigate it.
That was reasonable doubt. That's what I needed. And people
don't realize that even in place like New York, which
is fancied as a progressive state, we have trial by ambush.
(43:15):
And by that I mean you don't get the witness
statements against you until the day of jury selection, or
maybe a day earlier. Just so we don't have to
disrupt jury selection. All of that material, all of the
things the witnesses said they saw you do. You don't
(43:35):
get that until your trial is just about to begin,
which of course makes taking an intelligently impossible because you
have no idea what it is they have against you.
It makes investigation impossible, especially if you're innocent, you don't
have any idea who the witnesses are. If you're guilty,
it's easier because oh, yeah, yeah, Joe and Snappy they
were there. You know, I can tell you all about
(43:56):
him what's wrong with them. But if you're totally isnes
and you have no idea who these people are, then
there's no investigation that can take place. Right. Trial by
ambush with dates back to hundreds of years ago in
England where they used to think that, you know, this
was the best way to get to the truth was
by ambushing people so they wouldn't have time to get
a defense together. Um so, Shabaka, you end up getting
(44:17):
sentenced to forty years two sentences of twenty to life
running consecutively fourty years of life. You were twenty two
years old at the time, right, so we know that
when you hear these sentenses fifteen to life, twenty to
life for your life. It really means life unless you're
willing to take a plea to something you didn't do.
So because the parole board doesn't want to hear that
same story you told in the courtroom. I'm innocent, I
(44:39):
didn't do it. I'm sorry these people that nobody wants
to hear that. Ship So you go to prison. Um,
which prison were you sent to? Uh? First prison I
was sent to was sing sing and sing sing back then? Was?
I mean, it's still a very intimidating place just to visit, um,
and to go there as young man, uh two years old,
(45:03):
you must have been scared out of your wits. I
think that at the beginning, I went through a whole
transition of emotions at the beginning, Like I said, it
was my faure to accept what had happened. I just
kept believing that the best outcome was gonna happen. UM.
When my appeal started getting denied, UM, there was a
time of anger in which you know, I ended up
(45:24):
getting in trouble going to to the box solitary confinement
for years, you know, because I was just so angry
that my mind was thinking you know, these guys put
me in here, I'm gonna give them health, you know.
And it wasn't until I think I was in solitary
confinement that UM. I met other brothers in there that
have been in there for years, and they would ask me,
(45:48):
you know, what are you here for? And I would say,
I'm innocent, but I've been charged with two murders, and
they would tell me, you can't give up, you know.
And I started to see guys that I had came
to prison with who were doing five years, ten years,
and they were going home. And it started to dawn
(46:10):
on me that I would never go home, that this
was going to be my life from now on unless
I seriously got into trying to find a way out
and and it and it became a revelation that it
wasn't gonna be through somebody else helping me, that it
had to be me. So I started to go to school. UM.
(46:32):
I went to college, I got a college degree. I
started to learn law, started taking law classes UM. At
the time, Cornell was giving law classes inside of the prison,
so I started signing up for law classes. I got
a job in the law library. UM started learning by
working through with other people's cases, helping them with their cases,
(46:53):
and it happened to be the best thing that could
have ever happened to me, because working in the lower library,
I kept running into cases that had to do with
Detective Scarcella, you know. So as I'm reading people's cases
and I'm saying, this is the same detective in my case,
and I'm asking them questions about the case, and he said, yeah,
(47:13):
he set me up. And then I'm saying, yeah, he
set me up too. But then when he became like
two people, three people, four people, I started to see
the pattern and I said, wow, he didn't just do
this to me. He did it to a lot of people,
you know. And I started to formulate in my own
mind that the only way I was going to get
(47:37):
out was to expose Scarcella. We had to show that
this guy was a cricket cop um I think it was. UM.
I had started working on my motion and I met
up with Derek Hamilton, who was also a Scarceller case.
He had already put in his motion, so he was
(48:00):
waiting for his response, and I told him, I said, look,
we need to expose this guy. We need to really
concentrate on Scarcella. He's the key, you know. I told him,
I said, I know about three or four guys who
he set up. And he told me, well, I know
about three or four guys too, and we started comparing
our notes. So, like I said, he had already pushed
(48:21):
his motion. So in my motion, I started focusing on Scarcella.
Even though I started arguing the actual innocence claim, a
portion of it was saying that Scarcella should not be
believed because if his suspicious actions in all these cases.
And I started in numerating cases in which it was
(48:43):
very suspicious of confessions and evidence that, you know. So
as I did that, we're having to luck up. That
Derek Um was paroled, and because he was paroled, he
was outside. And by then we had started um gathering people,
me and him and Danny vinkoone who was another guy
(49:03):
that was innocent. We all worked in the law library
and we started working together as a group, and we
formed our own group which we call AI, which was
to us meant the actual innocence guys, and we would
work on actual innocence cases, Like if somebody came and
say we're innocent, we would sit down with them and
really grill them to see, if you know, go over
the evidence, go over their case to see if they
(49:25):
were really innocent, and if we believed it, we would
take them in and we would work with their case too.
You actually had a law firm in prison, yes, which
is pretty incredible. You know, all three of us were
law clerks and we knew the law, but our specialty
was really the actual innocence. So we started working on
people's cases like that. It's incredible. I mean they're just visualizing.
(49:48):
The law firm in president is just so. And I
know Derek very well as you know I know Derek,
and he's he's a brilliant guy, I mean, an incredible,
incredible legal mind. Um and uh. And his story is amazing.
Of course he's been on the podcast as well on
wrong for Conviction. So that was your moment where you
actually sort of found this you know, inner strength and
(50:08):
this desire to to to better yourself and in the
process find a way to get yourself out, which you did.
Um and the same for a number of other guys
that are still then there. And that's you know, and
that's so inspiring to people like me who are in
this movement realize that we don't have endless amounts of time.
I do want to get to the conclusion and Ron,
I want to get back to you, and then we're
(50:29):
gonna finish up with you. UM, so you get involved.
And what was the magic bullet? What was the silver
bullet here? How did you manage to help um Shabaka
find his way out of this morass twenty seven years later?
There wasn't a magic bullet. Uh. There there were a
lot of numerous small, non magic bullets that eventually perforated
(50:55):
the target sufficiently. Uh. Shabaka sent me his out of
papers and and you know, it was an amazing set
of papers. Uh. It was amazing. If a lawyer had
done it was even more impressive that it was. It
came from people who have the fewest resources uh and
the least formal legal education, although they did have a
(51:16):
lot of time and they a lot of motivation. And
I recognized Scarcella from from the earlier days and recognized
this is exactly the kind of stuff he did, and
I felt we could win this uh, and so I
agreed to take the case. Shabaka made it very clear
that Okay, he's happy that I'm taking the case. But
(51:36):
he remains in control of strategic decisions. He had had
enough lawyers telling him what was best for him, and
I agreed with that and agreed to work under those conditions.
And then it just became a very long process. The
judge granted a hearing. Before we went to hearing, all
(51:57):
of the stuff about Scarcella emerged. New information was found.
Shabaka had managed to find a couple of witnesses who
were there with Um Harley Young, the star eye witness
who were in the building with him at the time
the shooting took place. They came forward, the alibi witnesses
(52:17):
whoever the lawyer saw back then, the young women he
saw back then that he didn't want to put on
the stand, the the middle aged women right now were
extremely impressive, regular citizens, hard working, smart, very very persuasive,
and and over a series of I guess about a
(52:40):
year of hearings, finally the judge wrote a very strong
decision vacating his conviction and stating for the record that
there was a significant likelihood that Scarcella had fabricated the confession.
And at that point the d a's office, under new leadership,
now under Ken Thompson, called me and said we're done,
(53:03):
We're not appealing, we're not retrying. Charge will be dismissed,
and Shabaka walked out. In in June of how did
you get the news that that that the conviction was
being verytated after this crazy ordeal? When where were you?
I was in prison in Chowanka Correctional facility. At my
(53:24):
job I used to work um at that point, I
was working at the grievance department because they would no
longer let me work in the law library. So uh,
I was working at the grieve's department and the officer
came and said, you got a phone call from your wife.
So I went and got a call and I called
(53:48):
her and she said, uh, they reversed your case. So
initially I wasn't sure if she was correct, because you know,
she could have got it confused, and so I wanted
to hear from somebody officially. So I hung up and
I called Leah Busby, who was uh the attorney with
Ron Coolby on my case. And Leo was like excited.
(54:10):
She said, they reversed your case and you're gonna come home,
you know, And I was shocked. But my first question,
like when is it now? Tomorrow. Win. So they was like,
as soon as the paper were clear, you're you're getting out.
And it took a few days, but no, it was
(54:33):
the shortest time ever because I knew I was getting
out soon. Did you sleep during those three days? Yes, um,
everybody thought, and and that's the question that people always ask,
the anxiety of those last few days. But to be
honest with you, it was the most common days of
the whole bit. The anxiety comes when you don't know
(54:54):
what's happened. But when you know, okay, I'm getting out
of here in the next couple of day, is like
all my stress was gone. I was wondering about that
because there's people people follow me on Instagram, which I'm at.
It's Jason Flower, of course, but people find me know
that yesterday I walked the guy out of prison in Virginia,
Lenny Singleton, after twenty three years, and I was wondering.
I forgot to ask him that, but I was wondering
(55:15):
whether he had got any sleep the night before, knowing
that he was gonna get out the next day. But yeah,
I guess it's one or the other. You don't sleep
at all, you sleep like a baby. And now shabaka. Um.
The best part of the show every week is when
Um everyone stops talking and lets you well in this
case you, but whoever the featured UM guest on the
(55:36):
show is just have the mike to say whatever it
is you want. UM. One thing I am interested in
knowing is whether you feel bitter about what happened to
you and and what and how you're how you're processing
all this and moving forward. But uh, this is UM,
this is that time. So the mic is yours. Okay, UM.
(55:58):
I don't feel better. I feel uh, I feel sad
that the people having taken that there's been no accountability,
you know, like he said that Scarsella is still UM
basically has gotten away with what he's done. He's ruining lives, Uh,
not just minds, but normal so others. And then people
(56:19):
don't even realize that it's not just a defendant. It's
the families. It's the my mother and my father. My
mother died while I was in prison, and I never
got a chance to spend no time with her. My
father died within the year of me coming home, and
even when I came home, he was suffering from dementia.
Didn't even though I was home, so they never got
(56:41):
to see me as a free man. Um. It's it's
it's families that get destroyed because of the situation that
he created. And it's and like I said, it's not
just me, it's doesn't so far. Uh that saddens me
because they were people who could have stopped it. Not
only Detective Scarcella, but everybody who allowed it to go
(57:04):
on is complicit. You know what I'm saying. The district attorneys,
the other police officers, Uh, the judges who looked at
this case and seeing all of these gaping holes in
the story, continue to allow it. Everybody is responsible for this.
And until we actually take personal responsibility to say, Okay,
I'm gonna do something to not let this go on,
(57:27):
it's going to continue because that's the way the criminal
justice system has been created to protect people like Detective Scarcella. UM.
That's like I said, I'm not better. I'm just satting
that we haven't realized that and done something more about
that situation. Um. Since I've been home now, I continue
(57:49):
to work with certain cases. You know. Um, Danny Rnknen
is one. Uh, Stephen Brathway is another, James Jenkins. These
are people who I know are and sending who are
incarcerated and continue to work with them. I've been able
to put my life back in order to some extent
as far as you know, to reconnect with my family,
(58:12):
my brothers, my sisters, my nephews, my nieces, people who
you know, I have nephews and nieces who never even
saw me. You know, they was raised hearing about their uncle,
but never having an opportunity to see me. So it
gives me a time to put back my family. Uh,
I'm working now. I own a restaurant in Brooklyn and
(58:32):
Best Side Live eleven fourteen Forton Street and definitely come
then and eat with us and enjoy it because not
only is he a restaurant, but it's an event space
where we do things to give back to the community.
Like we are always having some type of event in
which we interact with the community and we try to
(58:54):
give back. You know. Um, I spent most of my
life in prison, so I want to be able to
really interact with the world now that I'm home and
to be some type of example for that even in prison,
you can come out and do something positive that because
(59:15):
there's a fear of of guys in prison and the
fear is purposely promoted so that people can do what
they want to do without anybody having any empathy for
those guys in prison. Well, I'm really happy to see
you out here doing good things. Um. If people want
(59:36):
to reach out to you, if they want to learn
more about these cases that you just talked about, if
they want to get involved and help, um, how can
they do that? Do you do? Do Facebook? Because we
want to get prick my Facebook pages Shobako shakoor, Um,
they can go up there. I'm always posting stuff about
these cases and about stuff that we're involved in and
(59:56):
stuff that we're doing. So if you follow me on Facebook,
you you could catch up on everything that we're doing. Okay,
Shabaka Sakar and of course as s h A b
A k A and Shako like Tupac shakur. Everybody knows
how to spell that. So um yeah, I please do
get involved, follow Shabaka and let's get these other guys
(01:00:19):
home and keep this momentum going. So UM, I want
to thank both of you for coming and dropping some
knowledge with everybody here on Wrong for Conviction, Ron, thank you,
thank you, Ron, kuby uh stars the wrong Man is
the show, and Shabaka Shakur is the right man for
(01:00:40):
the job, and he's gonna go get these other guys
out and I'm gonna help and your everybody get involved.
So Shabaka, thank you so much for being here, Thank
you for having me. Don't forget to give us a
(01:01:00):
fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts, it really helps.
And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project and
I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very
important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go
to Innocence Project dot org to learn how to donate
and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team,
Connor Hall and Kevin Wardis. The music on the show
(01:01:23):
is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be
sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and
on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason
Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in
association with Signal Company Number one
I've never been to trouble of my life. I didn't
even have a parking ticket, and you know what I mean.
I was brought up like cops are the good guys.
I didn't know what was going to happen, but I
do know that everything was stacked against me. Everything like everything,
this isn't supposed to happen this way. I'm innocent. I
(00:22):
know I'm innocent. I know I had nothing to do
with this. How is this possible? I grew up trusting
the systems. I grew up believing that every human thing
should do the right thing. And that's why, even though
I was dealing with corrop people, I wasn't going to
brave anyone to get me out of prison because I
wouldn't live with the fact that I braved my way
out of my wife's death. I'm not innocent to proven guilty.
(00:46):
I'm guilty until I proved my innocence. And that's absolutely
what happened to me. Our system. Since I've been out
ten years, it's coming little ways, but it's still broken,
a totally little trust in humanity after what happened to me.
This is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to wrongful conviction. With
(01:18):
Jason Flam that's me and today we have a very
interesting and unusual show plan for you. Um Our two
guests today are Shabaka Shakur, who served twenty seven years
in prison for double murder that he had nothing to
do with and Shivaca. Welcome to the show, thank you,
(01:39):
thank you for having me. And with him is his attorney,
who has had a very colorful history, to say the least.
It's been involved in some of the most controversial and
interesting cases of the last generation. And I'm really excited
to hear from you today. So Ron Kubi, welcome to
(02:01):
the show. Thank you, Jason, pony Tail and all there.
He's still a hippy. It's unbelievable. Um We got Ron
who's got as much hair as you can imagine, and
Chewbacca who's got absolutely none. So I'm just giving everybody
a visual. Um So, I want to mention quickly the
fact that you are a TV star now right you
(02:23):
have your own show on Stars. I wouldn't go that far,
but Stars is doing a fantastic series called Wrongman Uh,
directed and produced by Joe Burlinger, who had done the
Paradise Lost series, and basically they take three cases of
people all homicides around the country who claimed they were innocent,
have done many years in prison, and they put resources
(02:46):
into the case. They they hire me detectives, former States Attorney,
Detroit homicide detective, FBI cold case consultant, and they have
us reinvestigate these cases for scratch. So they're doing this right,
They're they're absolutely right there providing the resources that defense
lawyers didn't have originally and most of us don't have now, uh,
(03:09):
to go through the case from the beginning and to
determine whether or not it indeed is the wrong Man.
Six episodes, three cases, One Question, Wrong Man, on Stars
every Sunday night at nine pm and available for downloading
on these Stars app All right, shout out to Jeff Hirsch,
my fad at Stars and and the whole crew in
(03:31):
Joanna who's here. Um, that's the show that I'm going
to be watching and I hope everyone else will too,
and I'm looking forward to learning more about these cases.
Thanks Vaka. This uh, this story is as terrifying as
it is typical. Um. And what I mean by that,
and we'll get into it, is that you are a
(03:51):
victim of someone who was the detective who was one
of the most notorious detectives in terms of framing people
in the history of our country to the world. UM.
It's a very dubious distinction, and we'll get into all
of that, um, but let's go back to the beginning. UM,
did you grow up in Brooklyn. Yes, I was born
(04:13):
and raised in Brooklyn, lived most of my earlier life
in Brownsville and Bethor Stubinson areas. Uh, Brooklyn and um
Shabaka Shakur is not your birth name, no, my um.
I was named after my father, lou Holmes. UM. But
going back to your childhood, so did you have a
(04:34):
traditional family situation. Was it a crazy neighborhood you grew
up in? Can you paint the picture because this was
crazy times when you were growing up in um Well.
I lived in Brownsvill, I lived in the projects. I
grew up in the projects. UM lived in the projects
mostly all my life. But I did have both my
mother and my father. You know, we lived in a
you know, I wasn't a single parent house or the
(04:56):
normal you know routine that they try to say. I
had of parents. I went to good schools. UM, have
brothers and sisters. We were we were a solid family,
So you grew up around this environment. Um, that's you know,
well known to anyone who's you know, familiar with New York. Um.
(05:17):
And it's interesting because the time we live in now,
you know it, contrary to what people would have you believe,
is that we're hitting historic lows in terms of crime rates.
And I think that back then we were probably pretty
close to the high I'm a New Yorker born and bred,
so I remember it was. You know, it was well
known that the stuff was. It was crazy in those times, um.
(05:39):
And then one day in everything went haywire. Your world
got turned, well, I got turned completely upside down sometimes
between eight eight and eighty nine, right when you were
wrongfully convicted. But in night, there was a double murder
in your neighborhood. And it was a couple of guys
(06:00):
that you knew right right. It was guys that I
had known them for almost a decade. I went to
school with one of them, Um, but I knew both
of them. They were close friends who hung out altogether,
so I met one through the other. But um, Stephen
Herewood was a guy that I went to high school with,
and I knew him from my first year in high
school and we went through high school together and Fitzgerald Clark,
(06:23):
who we called c was Steven's best friend and they
lived in Flatbush. But um, we went to school downtown
for a green area and we knew each other, so
we hung out during school and even after school. They
were they were close friends of mine, and they were
they were in the game then yeah, um game, they
(06:45):
were drug dealers. Uh. At the time they were talking
about this was during the crack academic so not only
was it high in crime, but you know, the city
was being devastated by crack and there was a call
for um aggressive policing because with crack came not only
(07:08):
did the destruction of people physically from the drug, but
also an increase of violence. You know. Um, crack was
one of the most lucrative drug trades at the time,
and people were killing for for neighborhoods, you know, right.
And it's interesting when we're going back to this because
I've that, you know, twenty five years working to decriminalize
(07:30):
drugs and you know, restore some sanity to our drug policy.
And the only distinction I want to make there is
it crack didn't make people violent. Um, the money made
people violence, right, The people who were committing the violence
weren't high. They were they were they were the ones
who weren't high, they were ones who want to get
everybody else high, and they were competing and fighting and
killing for the right to have that that income stream. So, um,
(07:54):
I just want to make that clear to our audience
who may not be as familiar since this shows, you
know that we don't spent a lot of time talking
about drugs. But that being said, so these two guys
get murdered and what seems like it was a drug head, right, yes?
And how did they end up focusing on you? Um?
(08:14):
You know, was it just laziness? Was it? Well? It
was it was partly laziness, and it was partly um
I would say, a tunnel vision by by the police.
Once I became a suspect, they zeroed in on me
and they ignored everything else. Um So I knew these
(08:36):
guys and we had a really close relationship. Um So
at that time I had driven one of them over
to the black where we were selling drugs and Gates
Avenue and um in the Bushick section of Brooklyn, and
we was having a conversation about a car. So I
(08:56):
was trying to sell them my car because was at
the time I was working in Queen's Queen's County Registers Department,
and I was trying to have a more calm life
when I at one point, to be honest with you,
I was selling drugs with you know what I'm saying, UM,
I needed money. They they you know, came to me,
(09:19):
they said, listen, help us out with this. And I
made runs. I did errands. I did didn't work for
them to um to make money for myself. But it
got to the point where I had a decent job.
I really didn't want to do it no more. I
didn't want to take a chance on going to prison,
so I was backing away from that. But I still
had a good report with them, So I went around there.
(09:41):
I had met a girl that I was dealing with
that lived in that neighborhood, So I went around there
to where their drug spot was. Their brother who didn't
live in New York, who actually lived in Florida. Uh.
He was the brother of Fitzgerald Clark, the guy that
we used to call see and he was the older brother.
(10:02):
He didn't know what he didn't know me. He had
just barely Uh, he had just met us because he
didn't live in New York, and he started becoming involved
in their drug trade, bringing drugs from Florida New York.
So this is like one of the few interactions that
he had with with me personally. That night, UM, me
(10:25):
and Steve had made an agreement about the car. He
wanted to buy my car. He was gonna give me
a certain amount of money. Um. He wanted to give
me some money from the drug spot that night and
then owe me the rest. See who was his friend
and minds. But we used to always argue. We we
just had that type of relationship where we was always
(10:46):
arguing about everything, but not a violent relationship or aggressive
relationship trade each other. We just grew up together and
we was always um on opposite sides of everything. So
me and him would argue at about the car and
sees brother witnessed this argument. So later on, when when
(11:11):
c and Stephen were murdered, his brother, recalling that I
was arguing with his brother, went to the police and
implicated me in the murder, and the police um that
stip me came and get me to take me to
the priest and to question me. I answered all the questions,
(11:32):
told him where I was, told him I wasn't nowhere
in Brooklyn at that time, explained to them the whole situation,
gave him the name of alibi witnesses that they could
contact right there. They contacted him that same night and
verified my alibi. Uh. But when they went to Detective
Scarcella and said, we got a guy that was pointed
(11:52):
out by the brother of the deceased, but the guy
has an alibi and he's saying he wasn't there and
we really don't have anything. Scarcella took it upon himself
two Um join into the interrogation and then fabricated a
confession against me, right and that's you know, it is interesting,
(12:14):
you know you talk about how you had alibi witnesses
more than one. Uh. There was no physical evidence connecting
you to the crime. They found the gun that was used,
but it didn't trace back to you in any way.
There were no fingerprints, there was no there was nothing
for them to go on. There's nothing to point the
finger at you, but they didn't care. Um and Scarcella.
(12:35):
People who are fans of the show listen the show
have heard his name before because we've had other ex
honorees on who were framed by the same guy. And
you know, Ron, this is where I want to turn
to you, because you have probably as much experience as
anyone in the country going after police who are on
(12:56):
the wrong side of the law. So I'd love to
get your take on as part of the story, because
obviously you have intimate knowledge of it as well as
knowledge of the entire world of of you know that
that that that blew wall, so to speak. So I
had first met Detective Scarcella in the nineties when he
(13:16):
was still working as a detective, still doing the things
that we we know now that that he did, and
I had cross examined him in a in a very
high profile case which itself is now under or no.
This was the token booth bombing case. And he amazed
me at just how good he was at lying, how charming,
(13:42):
how how avuncular, how we would look at the jury
and bond with them. And I knew he was lying
because I knew the facts of the particular case. But
but it didn't matter. People really liked Luis Scarcella. Juries
liked him, Judges loved him. Prosecutors thought he is you know,
the greatest thing on earth, because he would literally make
(14:03):
their cases. So I had a lot of experience with
him from that time before he became famous in the
public with the rant A case. Shabaka had written to
me he had done his own post conviction motion was
all put together and and the singular witness against him
(14:23):
was the Scarcella confession. And this was a remarkable confession
because it was not witnessed by anybody else. Scarcella was
not the case detective. There was no audio tape me,
there was no video tape made, there was no signature
of of Shabaka's. The whole confession existed only out of
(14:45):
Scarcella's mouth, and it was almost the stereotypical conviction. It
started out like so many of Scarcella's convictions did, and
the confessions he obtained, with a shout out to the
cleverness of Scarcella. That is to say, in Shibaka's confession, Uh,
Scarcella had Sebaka saying, you know what's going on? You
(15:08):
know the story? Other cases, Uh, you got it right,
I was there. I mean this that. Phrases like that
come up in close to a dozen different cases. So
the confession always starts out with congratulations, Mr detective, You're
such a smart guy. You got me. Uh. And in
(15:29):
this case, there was no corroboration, which is unheard of,
especially since Scarcella was not even the case detective. The
case detective question Sebaka for hours, and all he got
was Shabaka's alibi, which by the way, proved to be
completely correct. Eventually get him out of prison. Eventually comes,
you know, twenty eight years later though. And so Scarcella
(15:51):
walks into the cell and then walks out twenty minutes
later with this confession and didn't even call the case
detective and say, hey, hey, hey, detective Mahoney, come on in,
this guy's got something to say. Nothing. It's the only
place this confession occurred. And and the paperwork showed that
(16:12):
Scarcella really wanted Mahoney, who was the case detective, to
take responsibility for the confession. He was willing to give
it up. Mahoney could say that he got it. Mahoney
didn't trust it. So Mahoney wrote the statement down but
never attributed to anybody in any fashion. And and that
you know what we called the orphan statement, Like Mahoney
(16:32):
could remember where it came from, who said that he
knows that Shebaka didn't say that to him, and there
was a key piece of evidence that got Sbaka convicted.
Let's go back to that conviction. Because you were arrested.
I'm assuming on that day after Scarcela came in and
magically produced this confession in twenty minutes, that this other
(16:55):
experience detective couldn't get from you in hours and hours
of questioning. Well, well, I was um. The murder happened
one night. The next day, I was at work and
they came to um get me at work to tell
me that they wanted to take me to the priests
and to ask me questions. Um. Now, of course I
didn't know about the murder at the time, So I
(17:15):
went to the precinct and I answered the question because
I didn't know what was going on. They didn't take
take me to the priest and say, oh, we want
to talk to you about the murder. They just said
we want to ask you some questions about where you
were last night. So I'm answering the questions because I
didn't want to get in trouble. Were you're thinking that
they knew something about your past drug stuff? For um?
(17:38):
On the way to the priests and one of the
cops asked me if I owned a green BMW, which
I did, right, So that was the car that I
had given to Steve the night before, so I knew
who had the car, and I know that they were
drug dealers. So in my mind, I'm thinking, did they
get caught with drugs in the car? And now it's
(17:59):
coming back to me, you know, I'm trying to figure
out what it is, but I don't want to lie.
So I'm going to the priests and when they asked me,
do you know these guys, I'm saying, yeah, I know
these guys. Is this your car? I'm saying, yeah, that
is my car. Um, But I didn't have my car
last night. I wasn't with them last night. I was
in Queen's. I was with this person. I was with
(18:21):
that person. So I didn't want to lie, but I'm
telling them exactly where I'm at so that they would
realize that whatever happened, I wasn't involved. It wasn't until
the end of nearly nearing the end of that conversation
with Detective Mahoney that he tells me about their murders.
So now I'm like, okay, I don't know nothing about that.
(18:44):
I had nothing to do with nobody being murdered. Um,
I already told you where I was. And that was
the gist of my conversation with with Detective Mahoney. I
had no previous knowledge prior to him telling me about
what was going on. Um. When Detective Scott Sella came in, UM,
like Ron said, he had nothing to do with my case.
(19:04):
He wasn't assigned to my case. He was just in
the precinct. And when he came in, they came to
him and said, look, we got a guy who was
saying he wasn't there, but he's the only suspect that
we have. Remember, I was like, I'll take care of this, right,
and that's exactly what he did. He came in and
(19:24):
he said, Okay, I got it, I'll handle this, and
he came in there to talk to me. But as
soon as he came in there, he came in there
aggressively accusing me. I know you did it. I know
who you are. You were selling drugs with these guys.
These guys are drug inners, all of y'all involved you
You uh, you murdered them so that you wouldn't have
(19:46):
to share the block with dumb or whatever. Right. So
I looked at him and I said, you know why,
I don't even want to talk to you, you know,
and he got aggressive, started banging on the table. I'm
trying to help you, but instead you're gonna go up
north for a long time. You're gonna go down for
these murders. So I was telling them, you know, very politely,
(20:09):
go f yourself because I didn't want to deal with that,
and he left. At that point, I had no idea
that he was going to fabricate a confession. I thought
that was the end of the conversation. I didn't even
know about the confession until um I was arrested and
I was given a quarter pointed attorney and uh, the
(20:33):
quarter point attorney tells me, you confessed, And I said,
are you crazy? I didn't confess. I told the people
where I was. I gave him the alibi witnesses. They
verified my alibi witnesses, and the quarter point he said, yeah,
that's what you told this detective, but you confess to
the other detective. And that's when I realized that this
guy had fabricated a confession. And this is an important
(20:54):
time to mention that the confession is the most powerful
evidence that there can be. Um, it's really hard for
any jury or jurist or juror, I should say, it's
hard for any juror to understand why someone would confess
to a crime they didn't commit. And you know, as
people listen to the show and they hear these stories
(21:16):
over and over again, they start to understand many cases
their course confessions. In your case, there was no confession.
And let's not forget this. Carcela was a guy who
used the same witness in six different murder cases, who
was a drug addict, um, part time prostitute, I think
who he was supplying with drugs and was you know,
and he she he was so lucky that she having
(21:36):
to witness six different murders. I mean, that's kind of
a miracle. But I do want to take this opportunity
because Ron's here too, um and maybe he could ask
(21:58):
something of this. But I often tell people on the show,
and Shabaka would have benefited from this advice. I think
right that if you get arrested for something you didn't do,
and you get taken in the only thing you should
say is your name, your address, And I want a lawyer.
Would you agree with that without a doubt? And whenever
I debate with cops about this, I always say, let
(22:22):
me ask you this if if your son called you
from a precinct and said, Dad, I've just been arrested,
what should I do? What are you gonna tell? And
the cops invariably say, I said, don't say anything, We'll
get you a lawyer. Don't say we're without a lawyer.
And we know that's true. Now, now, Sebaka had some
experience in the criminal justice system, so and he knew
(22:42):
he didn't do anything, so he felt comfortable giving his alibi,
which was ultimately born out decades later, and he felt
comfortable telling Scarcella, get the f out of here, I'm
not going to talk to you. What nobody anticipated was
that Scarcella would simply make up a confession. So you've
(23:06):
got the made up confession. You have the brother of
the dead guy, originally telling a muddled story but thinking
Shabako was involved, But through a period of time with Scarcella,
his story changes, evolves, morphs until he saw Shabaka shoot
both of them, you know, one in the back and
(23:29):
another in the back as he was running the things
that he could not have seen because because physically impossible
because he wasn't there. Well, he wasn't here, but had
he been there, uh, just the location of the bodies
was all wrong. But but okay, so now you've got
your eye witness kind of, you've got your confession, not really,
and you stop looking for anybody else. Now, had they
(23:52):
spent all another day or two, they would have discovered
that one of the guys who got made dead at
night had been the subject of a previous murder attempt
just two months earlier by the Rankers. Actually both of them, right, yeah,
both of them, right right, yes, okay, let me because
(24:15):
this one came with instructions, right right right. It's like, okay,
they missed the first time, and they shot up the club,
but they missed the guys the first time, so and
everybody knew it was the Rankers, which is a Jamaican
drug dealing group, particularly violent even by the standards of
the time. And they're not sort of forgive and forget
kind of people there, and they weren't like, okay, well
(24:36):
we missed him the first time. We'll give you a pass.
There was every reason to think that they had fallen
into conflict with the rankers over drug turf uh, and
that that's what this murder was, but nobody cared at
the time. I will note that they continued to look
at the rankers after Shabaka was convicted. After he was convicted,
given his forty life and sent up state, there were
(24:59):
still other detectives who weren't entirely comfortable, and we're pursuing
those leads, which ultimately went mad. They've done it. At
the beginning, this whole thing would have been different. Like
Ron said, the the confession, the alleged confession, Um, nobody,
nobody would have predicted that, you know what I'm saying. Um,
(25:22):
it was it was just beyond my thinking that this
guy was going to say that I confessed to something. Um.
The situation around it was suspicious from the from the
get go because you're in a precinct with at least
thirty forty police officers and not one, not one police
officer heard the confession. Right, There's no notes, there's no
(25:47):
there's nothing, there's no proof of it. There's no you know,
any time you take a confession, any time you see
a police officer interview anybody, they write it down. There
was nothing in there. There was no signing of the fashion.
They didn't even call the prosecutor and say this guy
just confessed. They didn't take a videotape. There was absolutely
(26:07):
no proof of a confession other than that detectives car
seller just saying it out of his mouth, even though
we're in a precinct full of people. So there was
no proof that a confession ever existed. Now what Ron
said about, um, the previous attack on these people. Two
months prior to that, there was an attempt on both
(26:30):
of these same guys. So what's the odds that somebody
tries to kill two guys and then two months later
those same two guys actually get killed. Have been really unpopular.
I mean, look, it's happened, but but those would be
the likely suspects to begin with. So so what you
have here, Okay, you've got a bad detective, no question
(26:53):
about it, but he's not the only person involved. You
have an allegedly not bad detective, the actual case detective,
who does nothing. You have a prosecutor who decides to
go ahead and believe this stuff or at least put
it in front of the jury. You have a judge
who who has seen Scarcella before, and we'll see Scarcella
(27:17):
again and allows this whole case to go forward. And
ultimately you have a jury that has never seen Scarcella before,
but gosh, you know, he seems like a much you know,
dapper dude. Then then the black guy here and and convicts,
and appeals court after appeals court after appeals court affirms.
And this has been the pattern, not just in Shabaka's case,
(27:40):
but but in in over a dozen other cases that
this detective got involved in. And I want to point
out that the only winners in this scenario were the rankers, right, Um,
which is uh, society loses, um. Obviously, Shabaka gets his
life taken away from or you know, most of it,
(28:00):
and um, you know, the victims don't get justice. Um.
And these guys are free to go out there and
shoot the next guy that crosses their their path. Those
guys actually ended up going to federal prison for I believe,
like twelve different murders. Um. But the the amazing thing
is that how they discovered this um. One of the
(28:22):
guys in my case, fitz Gerald Clark, had got arrested
in a shootout with a machine gun against the rinkers
drawing that previous attempt. So when he ends up dead
from the case that I'm in jail for, he has
an open case that he doesn't show up for. When
he doesn't show up, the judge access okay whereas he at.
(28:44):
So the family has to go and say, oh, he's dead.
He's no longer alive. So the judge access for, well,
let me see some type of proof. You can't just
come in here and say he's dead. So the proof
that they give him was the death certificate in my case.
So at that point, the district attorney's office has connected
the two cases. Right, They know that this guy had
(29:06):
a previous attempt on him and then he's dead. They
know who did the previous attempt, yet their tunnel vision
prevented them from investigating that this is a suspect. You know,
here's here's a story that just that the brothers saying, oh,
this guy had argue with my brother. But here's a
guy who here's some guys who actually attempted to kill
him just recently. So their suspects. But because of the
(29:30):
tunnel vision of the police and the prosecutor, they ignored
that evidence. If they had searched just a little bit,
they would have found out that the attorney who bailed
out fitz Gerald Clark, the guy who got killed in
my case, was the same attorney who worked for the
Rankers who got this bar for fraud in working with
(29:53):
the rankers in fraudulent paperwork that he did for them. Like,
the connections are all in, So there was a lot
of stuff there. It could have been investigated, that should
have been investigated, but Scarcella, like so many of his colleagues,
decided to short circuit this entire process because he was
convinced Shibaco was guilty. I have actually never known a
(30:16):
cop who went out and deliberately framed a person who
he knew was innocent, planted evidence and somebody he believed
to be innocent, or lied about a person who believed
to be innocent. Uniformly. Uniformly, when the police engage in
this kind of activity, it's because they think the person
is guilty, and that guilty person they think is going
to get off because there's not enough evidence against him.
(30:39):
So it falls to the Scarcella's of the world, of
whom there were many and remain many. He was just
better at it than anybody else, it falls to them
to to put some extra frosting on the cake to
make sure that the guilty guy gets convicted. Stay tuned,
will be right back. So you go to trial with
(31:04):
your public defender, UM, having been held in jail, I'm
assuming pretty trial for what for about a year? For
I think it was fourteen months? Did how First of all,
how long was the trial? The trial was like two
days a day and a half something like that. Pretty
question trials when you don't have any of it. You
(31:26):
have your alibi witnesses and they were never called. What
happened was, Um, I had uh a public defender who
did not believe I was innocent, and like you said,
he just like most people thought, this guy confessed he's guilty.
So he came to me and tried to say and
(31:48):
told me, I'm going to get you a good plea.
And I told him I don't want to plea. I'm
going to go to trial. I didn't commit this murder.
And he said, listen, you can't win a trial. I'm
going to get your good plead. So he never investigated
my case at all. Um, I wrote to the judge.
Six months in, I wrote to the judge and told
(32:10):
the judge, listen, I need a new lawyer. This guy
does not believe I'm innocne. He's not doing any investigative work. Um,
he's not gonna be able to prove my innocence. The
judge ignored it. Six months later, a year in, I
write to the judge again and file of motion to
have him dismissed as my um as my attorney because
(32:32):
he's done no investigation. I've given him the name of
alibi witnesses. I've given him everything that I can give him.
You know, I've told him people that I remember that
live on that block who he could go um interview.
He does none of this. So right before I'm getting
ready to go to trial, I go back to the
judge and the judge on record tells me I'm not
(32:54):
gonna give rid of your lawyer now you're getting ready
to start trial. But I'm telling the judge he hasn't
investigated anything. The day I start trial, I have to
write a summary of the facts because he didn't even
know the facts of the case. Did he ever visit
you in jail? He never visited me. He after court
(33:15):
that um court dates he would go in the back
and talk to me, and we would argue, um, because
I told him, you're not investigating I'm innocent. Um. He
tried to get me to take a plea. When I
wouldn't take the plea, and I kept pushing to go
to trial, he said, Okay, we're gonna go to trial.
Like I said, I had to write him a summary
of the facts because he didn't know the facts of
(33:36):
my case. We went to trial, um, and he did
terrible because he hadn't he hadn't investigated, he hadn't talked
to none of the alibi witnesses. I had to get
on the phone and core one of my alibi witnesses
and tell him come to court because the lawyer had
never reached out to her. And she came to court.
(33:56):
And when she came to court, she stepped in the
courtroom and told basically the judge, I'm the out of
our witnesses, you know. And he still did not use
the out of our witness at try have heard that
story more times than I would like to have heard it.
So so take a quick pause. Here, what are the
elements we have so far? We have a a corrupt detective. Uh,
(34:17):
we have a system that believes Shakur is guilty, uh,
and is not looking at any other suspects. We have
a prosecutor who's more than willing to to put a
highly dubious story before a jury, and we have a
judge who's willing to allow it. And now sort of
the last piece of this is in place an utterly
incompetent defense lawyer who not only doesn't believe his client
(34:41):
is innocent, but is unwilling to even prepare a defense
for the client he believes is guilty. All he wants
is to plea He hasn't done any work, he's underpaid, uh,
and just doesn't care. So this is the storm. And
I was going to say that if you didn't already.
I mean, the worst part of it, really, the most
excuseable part, is that he doesn't care. I mean, you know,
(35:05):
he's sitting there and I think everyone listening is probably
feeling the same way I'm feeling. That that the the
feeling of helplessness that you must have had as a
person who's literally facing spending the rest of your life
in prison, um and nobody's helping you. That that word
(35:25):
is exactly how I felt helpless because I brought it
to the judge's attention, and the judge said, no, you
have to go on with disattorney. Even though I'm telling
the judge he's not doing anything. He's not investigating the case.
He hasn't spoken to any of the witnesses. There are
gaping holes in this story, right. The brother of fitz
(35:48):
Gerald Clark, his initial statement to the police was, um,
I know who did this? Right, He never said I
saw it. And then he in his statement that night
in the precinct, when he did speak in detail to
the police, he still didn't say he saw me commit
(36:09):
the crime. A year later, he's not saying, oh, I
know who did this because he had an argument. He's saying,
I actually saw the murder. I've seen Shabaka sneak up
behind my brother and shoot my brother twice in the back.
Amazing how the memory comes back. Here's the thing. His
brother died from a single gunshot wound to the chess.
(36:33):
So the account that he gave a trial didn't even
match the ballistics or the or the autopsy or anything. Right.
And and after we got the case and we did
some reinvestigation. I mean this, the witness had long since died,
but we did speak to his brother uh and his
(36:55):
brother was convinced that he was convinced that Shabaka had
done it. It's not as though he got on the
witness stand deciding to implicate somebody he thought was innocent.
He got on the witness stand with the encouragement of
Scarcella and the district attorney and the judge and and
embellished a story again because he thought the guy was guilty.
(37:19):
And if I don't tell these things the way I'm
supposed to tell them, this guilty guy is going to
get off. So you were fucked. I mean, basically, the odds.
If I was a bookie and I was watching this proceeding,
I wouldn't have taken any money from anybody who wanted
to be guilty. There would have been no odds that
I would have accepted because it was it was a lock.
(37:41):
I mean, you were done right. The what jury is
possibly going to watch that proceeding and come up with
any other conclusion other than that you're going when he
has something funny? The jury took longer in deliberation than
the trial. Wow. The jury took two and a half
days of deliberation. The trial was only a day a
(38:02):
day and a half the jury even hearing these stories
and having no defense because no Alabama was presented, no
defense at all. The jury had problems because they kept saying,
this confession doesn't make sense, and this guy's story doesn't
make sense. So they took two and a half days
(38:24):
of deliberation before they found me guilty. So they come
back in and obviously they found you guilty. And that moment.
Can you paint a picture of that moment? Like was
the courthouse? Was it a hot day? Cold day? Were
who was there? Was it noisy? Was it? This? Was
it that? Um my mother was dead. That's what I
(38:48):
remember because I remember turning around and looking at her
and she had tears in her eyes, and I just
kept thinking to myself, like, wow, I can't believe you
know that this is actually happening. Um it's it's funny
because to a certain extent, you know, even then, I
(39:08):
considered myself like conscious, like understanding that the system doesn't work,
but I still have some faith that it was gonna work.
I figured they can't find me guilty. They how can
somebody say they saw me shoot somebody in the back
and he was never shot in the back. You know,
how can somebody say, okay, he confessed and they don't
(39:30):
even have the confession, you know, they have nothing but
his word. So all of these things was running through
my mind, and I'm saying, there's no way that that
these guys can't realize that this is a set up.
And I was praying for the best, and then I
was just praying that it would be manslaughter. Um. And
(39:51):
when they convicted me a murder, I remember the judge.
I don't know if it was then all my senses enough,
but I remember the judge giving me an opportunity to
say something, and my lawyer basically saying, to be remorseful,
you know, And and I remember me telling the judge
I started to say, you know, I'm sorry about these
(40:12):
guys deaths. And I remember I said, I'm sorry about
these guys deaths, but I didn't do it. That's all
I can say. I said, I I really didn't do it,
and that was all I can say. And you know,
like my lawyer was kind of like pushing me say something,
be a be remorseful, try to you know, but I
just I was stuck because all I kept telling was
(40:34):
I didn't do it, and that was it. You know,
it's shocking to me that I don't think any maybe
there's one state that has mandatory videotaping of witness statements, right,
(40:57):
because the witnesses, as you said, can be led very easily.
They can be influenced, they could be fed information, and
I wouldness identification is such a tremendous factor. It's it's
the number one cause of right because even though we
know how how frequently witnesses eyewitnesses are wrong, even though
we have a zillion studies that has shown this, when
(41:21):
somebody gets up there in the courtroom and looks at
the defendant, points at the defendant, said it's him, I'll
never forget his face as long as he lives. People
believe that, just like people believe that only guilty people
make confessions, um and and so they believe the false confessions.
They believe the bad eyewitness identification. So that's what I
(41:43):
think people should. And obviously, if you have no forensic evidence,
especially these days where you know there's d n A,
there's cell phone, cell phone towers, Google searches, we all
leave these electronic signatures. If all of that is kind
of missing, then you should be really skeptical about this
in this country, if I was redoing the justice system,
(42:06):
I might put in a rule that says that if
there's no corroborating evidence other than a cross racial identification,
the case is not going identification of a stranger. Yeah,
I mean, if it happens to be your wife or something,
then that's right, fair enough, But that's that's not the
that's not the common Uh. Let me say also that
(42:29):
I think that there has to be open discovery also,
um because in in my case specifically, like I said,
the prosecutor knew that a previous attempt had been made
on these guys. They noticed a month after my arrest,
you know, so they if they had turned that information
(42:53):
over to the defense, you know. And assuming that the
defense lawyer would have investigated, because he did invested anything else,
but assuming that he had that information he would investigate it.
That was reasonable doubt. That's what I needed. And people
don't realize that even in place like New York, which
is fancied as a progressive state, we have trial by ambush.
(43:15):
And by that I mean you don't get the witness
statements against you until the day of jury selection, or
maybe a day earlier. Just so we don't have to
disrupt jury selection. All of that material, all of the
things the witnesses said they saw you do. You don't
(43:35):
get that until your trial is just about to begin,
which of course makes taking an intelligently impossible because you
have no idea what it is they have against you.
It makes investigation impossible, especially if you're innocent, you don't
have any idea who the witnesses are. If you're guilty,
it's easier because oh, yeah, yeah, Joe and Snappy they
were there. You know, I can tell you all about
(43:56):
him what's wrong with them. But if you're totally isnes
and you have no idea who these people are, then
there's no investigation that can take place. Right. Trial by
ambush with dates back to hundreds of years ago in
England where they used to think that, you know, this
was the best way to get to the truth was
by ambushing people so they wouldn't have time to get
a defense together. Um so, Shabaka, you end up getting
(44:17):
sentenced to forty years two sentences of twenty to life
running consecutively fourty years of life. You were twenty two
years old at the time, right, so we know that
when you hear these sentenses fifteen to life, twenty to
life for your life. It really means life unless you're
willing to take a plea to something you didn't do.
So because the parole board doesn't want to hear that
same story you told in the courtroom. I'm innocent, I
(44:39):
didn't do it. I'm sorry these people that nobody wants
to hear that. Ship So you go to prison. Um,
which prison were you sent to? Uh? First prison I
was sent to was sing sing and sing sing back then? Was?
I mean, it's still a very intimidating place just to visit, um,
and to go there as young man, uh two years old,
(45:03):
you must have been scared out of your wits. I
think that at the beginning, I went through a whole
transition of emotions at the beginning, Like I said, it
was my faure to accept what had happened. I just
kept believing that the best outcome was gonna happen. UM.
When my appeal started getting denied, UM, there was a
time of anger in which you know, I ended up
(45:24):
getting in trouble going to to the box solitary confinement
for years, you know, because I was just so angry
that my mind was thinking you know, these guys put
me in here, I'm gonna give them health, you know.
And it wasn't until I think I was in solitary
confinement that UM. I met other brothers in there that
have been in there for years, and they would ask me,
(45:48):
you know, what are you here for? And I would say,
I'm innocent, but I've been charged with two murders, and
they would tell me, you can't give up, you know.
And I started to see guys that I had came
to prison with who were doing five years, ten years,
and they were going home. And it started to dawn
(46:10):
on me that I would never go home, that this
was going to be my life from now on unless
I seriously got into trying to find a way out
and and it and it became a revelation that it
wasn't gonna be through somebody else helping me, that it
had to be me. So I started to go to school. UM.
(46:32):
I went to college, I got a college degree. I
started to learn law, started taking law classes UM. At
the time, Cornell was giving law classes inside of the prison,
so I started signing up for law classes. I got
a job in the law library. UM started learning by
working through with other people's cases, helping them with their cases,
(46:53):
and it happened to be the best thing that could
have ever happened to me, because working in the lower library,
I kept running into cases that had to do with
Detective Scarcella, you know. So as I'm reading people's cases
and I'm saying, this is the same detective in my case,
and I'm asking them questions about the case, and he said, yeah,
(47:13):
he set me up. And then I'm saying, yeah, he
set me up too. But then when he became like
two people, three people, four people, I started to see
the pattern and I said, wow, he didn't just do
this to me. He did it to a lot of people,
you know. And I started to formulate in my own
mind that the only way I was going to get
(47:37):
out was to expose Scarcella. We had to show that
this guy was a cricket cop um I think it was. UM.
I had started working on my motion and I met
up with Derek Hamilton, who was also a Scarceller case.
He had already put in his motion, so he was
(48:00):
waiting for his response, and I told him, I said, look,
we need to expose this guy. We need to really
concentrate on Scarcella. He's the key, you know. I told him,
I said, I know about three or four guys who
he set up. And he told me, well, I know
about three or four guys too, and we started comparing
our notes. So, like I said, he had already pushed
(48:21):
his motion. So in my motion, I started focusing on Scarcella.
Even though I started arguing the actual innocence claim, a
portion of it was saying that Scarcella should not be
believed because if his suspicious actions in all these cases.
And I started in numerating cases in which it was
(48:43):
very suspicious of confessions and evidence that, you know. So
as I did that, we're having to luck up. That
Derek Um was paroled, and because he was paroled, he
was outside. And by then we had started um gathering people,
me and him and Danny vinkoone who was another guy
(49:03):
that was innocent. We all worked in the law library
and we started working together as a group, and we
formed our own group which we call AI, which was
to us meant the actual innocence guys, and we would
work on actual innocence cases, Like if somebody came and
say we're innocent, we would sit down with them and
really grill them to see, if you know, go over
the evidence, go over their case to see if they
(49:25):
were really innocent, and if we believed it, we would
take them in and we would work with their case too.
You actually had a law firm in prison, yes, which
is pretty incredible. You know, all three of us were
law clerks and we knew the law, but our specialty
was really the actual innocence. So we started working on
people's cases like that. It's incredible. I mean they're just visualizing.
(49:48):
The law firm in president is just so. And I
know Derek very well as you know I know Derek,
and he's he's a brilliant guy, I mean, an incredible,
incredible legal mind. Um and uh. And his story is amazing.
Of course he's been on the podcast as well on
wrong for Conviction. So that was your moment where you
actually sort of found this you know, inner strength and
(50:08):
this desire to to to better yourself and in the
process find a way to get yourself out, which you did.
Um and the same for a number of other guys
that are still then there. And that's you know, and
that's so inspiring to people like me who are in
this movement realize that we don't have endless amounts of time.
I do want to get to the conclusion and Ron,
I want to get back to you, and then we're
(50:29):
gonna finish up with you. UM, so you get involved.
And what was the magic bullet? What was the silver
bullet here? How did you manage to help um Shabaka
find his way out of this morass twenty seven years later?
There wasn't a magic bullet. Uh. There there were a
lot of numerous small, non magic bullets that eventually perforated
(50:55):
the target sufficiently. Uh. Shabaka sent me his out of
papers and and you know, it was an amazing set
of papers. Uh. It was amazing. If a lawyer had
done it was even more impressive that it was. It
came from people who have the fewest resources uh and
the least formal legal education, although they did have a
(51:16):
lot of time and they a lot of motivation. And
I recognized Scarcella from from the earlier days and recognized
this is exactly the kind of stuff he did, and
I felt we could win this uh, and so I
agreed to take the case. Shabaka made it very clear
that Okay, he's happy that I'm taking the case. But
(51:36):
he remains in control of strategic decisions. He had had
enough lawyers telling him what was best for him, and
I agreed with that and agreed to work under those conditions.
And then it just became a very long process. The
judge granted a hearing. Before we went to hearing, all
(51:57):
of the stuff about Scarcella emerged. New information was found.
Shabaka had managed to find a couple of witnesses who
were there with Um Harley Young, the star eye witness
who were in the building with him at the time
the shooting took place. They came forward, the alibi witnesses
(52:17):
whoever the lawyer saw back then, the young women he
saw back then that he didn't want to put on
the stand, the the middle aged women right now were
extremely impressive, regular citizens, hard working, smart, very very persuasive,
and and over a series of I guess about a
(52:40):
year of hearings, finally the judge wrote a very strong
decision vacating his conviction and stating for the record that
there was a significant likelihood that Scarcella had fabricated the confession.
And at that point the d a's office, under new leadership,
now under Ken Thompson, called me and said we're done,
(53:03):
We're not appealing, we're not retrying. Charge will be dismissed,
and Shabaka walked out. In in June of how did
you get the news that that that the conviction was
being verytated after this crazy ordeal? When where were you?
I was in prison in Chowanka Correctional facility. At my
(53:24):
job I used to work um at that point, I
was working at the grievance department because they would no
longer let me work in the law library. So uh,
I was working at the grieve's department and the officer
came and said, you got a phone call from your wife.
So I went and got a call and I called
(53:48):
her and she said, uh, they reversed your case. So
initially I wasn't sure if she was correct, because you know,
she could have got it confused, and so I wanted
to hear from somebody officially. So I hung up and
I called Leah Busby, who was uh the attorney with
Ron Coolby on my case. And Leo was like excited.
(54:10):
She said, they reversed your case and you're gonna come home,
you know, And I was shocked. But my first question,
like when is it now? Tomorrow. Win. So they was like,
as soon as the paper were clear, you're you're getting out.
And it took a few days, but no, it was
(54:33):
the shortest time ever because I knew I was getting
out soon. Did you sleep during those three days? Yes, um,
everybody thought, and and that's the question that people always ask,
the anxiety of those last few days. But to be
honest with you, it was the most common days of
the whole bit. The anxiety comes when you don't know
(54:54):
what's happened. But when you know, okay, I'm getting out
of here in the next couple of day, is like
all my stress was gone. I was wondering about that
because there's people people follow me on Instagram, which I'm at.
It's Jason Flower, of course, but people find me know
that yesterday I walked the guy out of prison in Virginia,
Lenny Singleton, after twenty three years, and I was wondering.
I forgot to ask him that, but I was wondering
(55:15):
whether he had got any sleep the night before, knowing
that he was gonna get out the next day. But yeah,
I guess it's one or the other. You don't sleep
at all, you sleep like a baby. And now shabaka. Um.
The best part of the show every week is when
Um everyone stops talking and lets you well in this
case you, but whoever the featured UM guest on the
(55:36):
show is just have the mike to say whatever it
is you want. UM. One thing I am interested in
knowing is whether you feel bitter about what happened to
you and and what and how you're how you're processing
all this and moving forward. But uh, this is UM,
this is that time. So the mic is yours. Okay, UM.
(55:58):
I don't feel better. I feel uh, I feel sad
that the people having taken that there's been no accountability,
you know, like he said that Scarsella is still UM
basically has gotten away with what he's done. He's ruining lives, Uh,
not just minds, but normal so others. And then people
(56:19):
don't even realize that it's not just a defendant. It's
the families. It's the my mother and my father. My
mother died while I was in prison, and I never
got a chance to spend no time with her. My
father died within the year of me coming home, and
even when I came home, he was suffering from dementia.
Didn't even though I was home, so they never got
(56:41):
to see me as a free man. Um. It's it's
it's families that get destroyed because of the situation that
he created. And it's and like I said, it's not
just me, it's doesn't so far. Uh that saddens me
because they were people who could have stopped it. Not
only Detective Scarcella, but everybody who allowed it to go
(57:04):
on is complicit. You know what I'm saying. The district attorneys,
the other police officers, Uh, the judges who looked at
this case and seeing all of these gaping holes in
the story, continue to allow it. Everybody is responsible for this.
And until we actually take personal responsibility to say, Okay,
I'm gonna do something to not let this go on,
(57:27):
it's going to continue because that's the way the criminal
justice system has been created to protect people like Detective Scarcella. UM.
That's like I said, I'm not better. I'm just satting
that we haven't realized that and done something more about
that situation. Um. Since I've been home now, I continue
(57:49):
to work with certain cases. You know. Um, Danny Rnknen
is one. Uh, Stephen Brathway is another, James Jenkins. These
are people who I know are and sending who are
incarcerated and continue to work with them. I've been able
to put my life back in order to some extent
as far as you know, to reconnect with my family,
(58:12):
my brothers, my sisters, my nephews, my nieces, people who
you know, I have nephews and nieces who never even
saw me. You know, they was raised hearing about their uncle,
but never having an opportunity to see me. So it
gives me a time to put back my family. Uh,
I'm working now. I own a restaurant in Brooklyn and
(58:32):
Best Side Live eleven fourteen Forton Street and definitely come
then and eat with us and enjoy it because not
only is he a restaurant, but it's an event space
where we do things to give back to the community.
Like we are always having some type of event in
which we interact with the community and we try to
(58:54):
give back. You know. Um, I spent most of my
life in prison, so I want to be able to
really interact with the world now that I'm home and
to be some type of example for that even in prison,
you can come out and do something positive that because
(59:15):
there's a fear of of guys in prison and the
fear is purposely promoted so that people can do what
they want to do without anybody having any empathy for
those guys in prison. Well, I'm really happy to see
you out here doing good things. Um. If people want
(59:36):
to reach out to you, if they want to learn
more about these cases that you just talked about, if
they want to get involved and help, um, how can
they do that? Do you do? Do Facebook? Because we
want to get prick my Facebook pages Shobako shakoor, Um,
they can go up there. I'm always posting stuff about
these cases and about stuff that we're involved in and
(59:56):
stuff that we're doing. So if you follow me on Facebook,
you you could catch up on everything that we're doing. Okay,
Shabaka Sakar and of course as s h A b
A k A and Shako like Tupac shakur. Everybody knows
how to spell that. So um yeah, I please do
get involved, follow Shabaka and let's get these other guys
(01:00:19):
home and keep this momentum going. So UM, I want
to thank both of you for coming and dropping some
knowledge with everybody here on Wrong for Conviction, Ron, thank you,
thank you, Ron, kuby uh stars the wrong Man is
the show, and Shabaka Shakur is the right man for
(01:00:40):
the job, and he's gonna go get these other guys
out and I'm gonna help and your everybody get involved.
So Shabaka, thank you so much for being here, Thank
you for having me. Don't forget to give us a
(01:01:00):
fantastic review wherever you get your podcasts, it really helps.
And I'm a proud donor to the Innocence Project and
I really hope you'll join me in supporting this very
important cause and helping to prevent future wrongful convictions. Go
to Innocence Project dot org to learn how to donate
and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team,
Connor Hall and Kevin Wardis. The music on the show
(01:01:23):
is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be
sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and
on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason
Flam is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in
association with Signal Company Number one
Hosts And Creators
Lauren Bright Pacheco
Maggie Freleng
Jason Flom
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