By Andrew Lawrence\The Guardian
Photos: YouTube Screenshots\Wikimedia Commons
Louis Scarcella (shown below) was your classic 70s New York City detective, a hard-charging renegade who lived for locking up bad guys. In 26 years on the beat, most of that time overlapping with New York’s crack era, he was famous for his ability to close cases and seal murder convictions. There was just one problem with his carefully crafted reputation: he was crooked.
It took a group of wrongfully convicted people who were imprisoned based on Scarcella’s overzealous policing to reveal the lie. “We pledged that whoever got out of prison first would spread the word that there were many men in jail for crimes they didn’t commit,” says the 58-year-old Derrick Hamilton, now a paralegal teaching at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law.
Hamilton (above) was part of that crack team of jailhouse lawyers – the term for the self-taught incarcerated people who take up the slack when public defenders fall short or can’t take clients who have already lost the first appeal. What they lack in academic credentials (most have little more than a high school degree), they make up for in time and determination. Also: they work a whole lot cheaper. “Basically, the system says, ‘We don’t care about your innocence,’” says Shabaka Shakur, a paralegal consultant for New York City’s department of education. “We’re just here to make sure you have a ‘fair trial’. You had a lawyer. You met the minimum standard of what you were supposed to get in court. Whether you’re innocent or not is not our issue.” READ MORE…
