How many innocent people has NYPD Detective Louis Scarcella framed for murder???
Yes, the question is how many innocent people has Detective Louis Scarcella framed for murder, not has Detective Louis Scarcella framed anybody for murder.
Of course don't count one Detective Louis Scarcella getting arrested for his crimes. If this is like other police crimes, he will get a slap on the wrist at most!
Detective Louis Scarcella seems to use the same technique for getting confessions as Phoenix Police Detective Armando Saldate who framed Debra Milke for murder. Make the confessions up out of thin air.
Phoenix Police Detective Armando Saldate who claimed Milke confessed to him had a history of lying to grand juries and extracting confessions even from unconscious suspects on hospital gurneys. There were no witnesses to the confession, it was not recorded, and Milke denied she ever confessed.SourcePhoenix Police Detective Armando Saldate had said a lot of things in the past that weren’t so. He had a long history of misconduct, including repeatedly lying under oath in order to secure convictions. He even accepted sexual favors from a female motorist in exchange for leniency and then lied about it. In tossing out Milke’s conviction and death sentence, the court’s chief judge said of the detective’s testimony: “No civilized system of justice should have to depend on such flimsy evidence.”
Review Ordered of 50 Brooklyn Murder Cases
By FRANCES ROBLES and N. R. KLEINFIELD
Published: May 11, 2013
The Brooklyn district attorney’s office has ordered a review of some 50 murder cases assigned to an acclaimed homicide detective, an acknowledgment of mounting questions about the officer’s tactics and the legitimacy of the convictions.
Robert Hill at Fishkill Correctional Facility in April. Mr. Hill, who was convicted of murder, and his family say they are convinced that he was railroaded by Mr. Scarcella, and that the detective had coached a witness. “I was kind of no good, but I wasn’t a killer,” Mr. Hill said.
The office’s Conviction Integrity Unit will reopen every murder case that resulted in a guilty verdict after being investigated by Detective Louis Scarcella, a flashy officer who handled some of Brooklyn’s most notorious crimes during the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s.
The development comes after The New York Times examined a dozen cases involving Mr. Scarcella and found disturbing patterns, including the detective’s reliance on the same eyewitness, a crack-addicted prostitute, for multiple murder prosecutions and his delivery of confessions from suspects who later said they had told him nothing. At the same time, defense lawyers, inmates and prisoner advocacy organizations have contacted the district attorney’s office to share their own suspicions about Mr. Scarcella.
The review by the office of District Attorney Charles J. Hynes will give special scrutiny to those cases that appear weakest — because they rely on either a single eyewitness or confession, officials said. The staff will re-interview available witnesses, and study any new evidence. If they feel a conviction was unjust, prosecutors could seek for it to be dismissed.
“People will look for blame,” said John O’Mara, who leads the Conviction Integrity Unit. “Our goal isn’t to look for blame. Our goal is to correct injustice.”
Mr. Scarcella’s name surfaced in March after a judge freed David Ranta, who had spent 23 years in prison after being convicted of murdering a rabbi. Prosecutors determined that Mr. Ranta’s conviction resulted in large part from flawed police work by Mr. Scarcella and a partner, including failing to pursue a more logical suspect. An investigation found they removed violent criminals from jail to let them smoke crack cocaine and visit prostitutes in exchange for incriminating Mr. Ranta. A witness also said Mr. Scarcella told him who to choose in a lineup.
Mr. Scarcella, 61, who retired from the police force in 1999, said he was surprised to learn of the review.
“Are you kidding me?,” he said Saturday in an interview.“Wow. This is quite a bit of a shock. Let them look at my convictions. I will help them if they need me. I don’t know what else to say. I expect he will find nothing,” he said.
He has maintained that he did nothing wrong.
“I couldn’t sit with my family the past 30, 40 years if I had hurt an individual,” he said in a previous interview. “I never fudged a lineup in my life. I never, ever took a false confession.”
He suggested that, following the Ranta news, those he put away believe that “Scarcella is the get-out-of-jail-free key.”
Pressed about specific cases, he said he could not recall many details and that he was being unfairly singled out.
“I have to be a pretty smart guy to lock someone up, get it through the D.A.’s office, get it through a trial and jury, and convict a guy,” he said. “I’m not that smart. It’s not a Louie Scarcella show.”
The questions about Mr. Scarcella stem from the sordid decades when the city saw as many as six homicides a day, and the police and the district attorney struggled to keep up.
Interviews with dozens of lawyers, prosecutors, witnesses and suspects, as well as a review of legal documents, suggest a detective who followed his own rules.
The new developments have proved embarrassing for Mr. Hynes, who is seeking re-election to his seventh term this fall. Although many of Mr. Scarcella’s cases date back to Mr. Hynes’s predecessor, Elizabeth Holtzman, his office has for years aggressively fended off appeals and denied public records requests from inmates who believe they were wrongly targeted by Mr. Scarcella.
Ms. Holtzman said Saturday, “I support a review of these cases.”
A Common Eyewitness
Teresa Gomez, a drug addict born in Trinidad who spent her nights on the streets of Crown Heights, seemed to have a knack for witnessing homicides Mr. Scarcella was assigned to, prompting lawyers to call her “Louie’s go-to witness.”
In the late 1980s, Ms. Gomez testified that she saw a drug dealer, Robert Hill, commit two separate murders. Both times, she was the only eyewitness.
In the first trial, she said she was hiding in a closet in a crack den, watching through a keyhole in the door, and saw Mr. Hill put a pillow over a man’s head and shoot him. Mr. Hill’s cousin said the family later hired an investigator and found no keyhole in the closet door.
Mr. Hill was acquitted.
In the second trial, Mr. Hill was accused of shooting a man on a Crown Heights street corner and then, curiously, putting the dying man inside a livery cab and ordering the driver to take him to the hospital.
Ms. Gomez’s testimony was so belligerent that the judge threatened to strike it in its entirety. She contradicted the evidence in several ways, including the direction the shot was fired and the color of the cab. She even admitted she lied during the first trial.
Yet Mr. Hill was convicted.
“I was kind of no good, but I wasn’t a killer,” Mr. Hill, now 52, said in an interview at the Fishkill Correctional Facility.
Mr. Hill and his family say they are convinced he had been railroaded by Mr. Scarcella, and believe the detective coached Ms. Gomez on her testimony.
They said in interviews that they were startled when Ms. Gomez surfaced again, this time at the trial of Mr. Hill’s stepbrothers, Darryl Austin and Alvena Jennette, who were accused of killing a man for his money.
Transcripts show Ms. Gomez, who claimed to see the killing from a nearby street corner and decided to follow the killers home because she was “nosy,” gave muddled answers that contradicted the other eyewitness.
Jurors were deadlocked and leaning toward acquittal, according to court records. They complained of moldy sandwiches, and the judge pressed them to try harder. Three hours later, they returned with a conviction. Mr. Austin died in prison of lung disease, while Mr. Jennette, 49, was released in 2007 after serving 21 years. “The whole neighborhood knows we didn’t kill that guy,” he said.
As for Ms. Gomez, he said, “I don’t know anyone who ever witnessed three, four or five homicides, unless you were doing them.”
The Legal Aid Society said recently that Ms. Gomez’s repeated role is so troubling that it plans to review homicide appeals of that era to see how many mention her.
Mr. Scarcella said she testified in at least six cases and had nothing but praise for her.
“God bless her,” he said. Though he said he did not recall many specifics of the cases that involved her, he “stood by her 100 percent.” She died years ago, in what acquaintances said was a hit-and-run accident.
Witnesses back then were elusive. Yet Mr. Scarcella could not explain Ms. Gomez’s verbosity and ubiquity. He said he would give her cigarettes and some food money, but that was it.
George Duke, a former supervisor of Mr. Scarcella’s who speaks highly of him, said he thinks Ms. Gomez was among several prostitutes whom the police paid $100 per murder for information. But when they were obviously lying, Mr. Duke said, he would not use them in that case.
A prosecutor’s view of Ms. Gomez is available in an Internet posting on a cigar-smokers forum. Neil Ross, a former assistant district attorney who is now a Manhattan criminal court judge, prosecuted the two Hill cases. In a 2000 posting, he reminisced about a cigar he received from the “legendary detective” Louis Scarcella as they celebrated in a bar after the Hill conviction.
In the post, Mr. Ross said that the evidence backed up Ms. Gomez but acknowledged, “It was near folly to even think that anyone would believe Gomez about anything, let alone the fact that she witnessed the same guy kill two different people.”
Mr. Ross declined to comment, citing judicial ethics rules. “That is horrible,” Mr. Scarcella said about the post. “I don’t know what else to say.”
His Own Way
Mr. Scarcella grew up in Bensonhurst and his father, Domenick, was a police officer. The young Scarcella served six years in the Navy, and joined the police force in 1973. He became a detective in 1981, and in 1987 transferred to the Brooklyn North homicide squad. During off hours, he moonlighted as a Coney Island carnival barker.
His day job was nonstop. All told, Mr. Scarcella estimates he was the lead investigator on around 175 homicides and had a role in at least another 175. After he left the police force, he served as a schools investigator and a dock builder.
Some lawyers who crossed paths with Mr. Scarcella said they thought he imagined himself a crusader who created his own rules.
“He had a gregarious, funny, wonderful personality,” said Martin Marshak, a defense lawyer who represented clients in several cases in which, he said, Mr. Scarcella threatened witnesses. “N.Y.P.D. and prosecutors thought he was one of the best homicide detectives. The only problem was he never followed the rules.”
He added, “I don’t want to say he manufactured witnesses, but he got people to say what he wanted them to say.”
The Police Department would not comment on Mr. Scarcella or make his personnel record available.
Jay Saltpeter, a former detective who worked with Mr. Scarcella and is now a private investigator, says Mr. Scarcella is being unfairly scapegoated. He said detectives back then often assembled sloppy cases that prosecutors accepted. But he also said people did harbor doubts about Mr. Scarcella. “All the questions and rumors we heard then are coming out now,” he said.
In the 1987 murder trial of James Jenkins, who was convicted, Judge Francis X. Egitto said that the witness identification procedures used by Mr. Scarcella were “a classic illustration of what not to do.” Witnesses were shown one photo rather than a gallery, the court records show. They were allowed to mingle together while making an identification of Mr. Jenkins, and Mr. Scarcella told them, “We have the guy who committed the murder.”
“That was wrong if I did that,” Mr. Scarcella said. “But I don’t remember.”
Questionable Tactics
When Shabaka Shakur was interrogated by Mr. Scarcella back in 1989, he said he told the detective nothing of consequence.
But when Mr. Shakur showed up in court for his double murder trial, he was confronted by an incriminating statement that Mr. Scarcella swore he had taken from him. Mr. Scarcella’s underlying interrogation notes were missing, a lapse that shows up in other Scarcella cases.
Mr. Shakur was convicted in what was characterized by prosecutors as a squabble over car payments. The key evidence was an eyewitness and the incriminating statement.
Mr. Shakur, 48, is at Auburn Correctional Facility, in his 26th year of a 40-year-to-life sentence. In a telephone interview, he said Mr. Scarcella fabricated the statement and “they ignored the evidence that shows I wasn’t the guy.”
Ronald Kuby, his current lawyer, said he believes further investigation will show that a vicious drug gang was responsible.
Mr. Scarcella said he did not recall the case.
He does readily acknowledge that he obtained confessions and witnesses that fellow detectives could not. But he ascribes it to his beguiling manner.
“You’re right,” Mr. Scarcella said, “there were cases where suspects talked to one detective and they got nothing, and they called me and I got statements. A lot of guys don’t know how to talk to people.”
At times, he would bang tables and belittle suspects, but he said he favored more delicate approaches.
“Sometimes I would cry with them. Sometimes I would pray with them. Sometimes I would sit with them for hours and hours and hours,” he said, adding, “One young man, after advising him of his rights, said I was the father he never had. He felt so good. Unfortunately, he killed his roommate.”
In 2007, Mr. Scarcella appeared on the Dr. Phil show as an interrogation expert to discuss false confessions. At one point, he said: “Are there rules when it comes to homicide? No. No, there are none. I lie to them. I will use deception. [This is pretty normal and it sounds like he uses the "9 Step Reid Method" to get confessions, which is used by most police forces in the USA] The bad guys don’t play by the rules when they kill Ma and Pop, shoot them in the head, ruin the lives of their family. I don’t play by the rules.”
He went on: “I would use a lie. I had a case, and I said: ‘I have your prints. You were there, and that’s it.’ He said: ‘No. No way. I wasn’t there.’ [Again this sounds like the "9 Step Reid Method", which is used by most police forces in the USA to get confessions] It’s like 4 in the morning. I take him into the bathroom, and he says to me, ‘Louis, you were right. I was there, but he kicked me, and I shot him by accident.’ I said, ‘Don’t you feel better now?’ And he’s now doing 37 ½ years to life.”
Few individuals feel as wronged by Mr. Scarcella as Derrick Hamilton. He spent nearly 21 years in prison for a 1991 murder, before being paroled in 2011. Now a paralegal, he continues to try to prove he was set up by Mr. Scarcella.
Prosecutors defend the conviction, but Mr. Hamilton has affidavits from four witnesses, including a former police officer, who put him in New Haven, Conn., when the murder occurred. None had originally testified. The sole eyewitness who testified said Mr. Scarcella coached her on what to say, and has since recanted.
Mr. Hamilton, 47, had earlier served seven years for manslaughter. When Mr. Scarcella came to arrest him at a beauty parlor, Mr. Hamilton said, the detective gave him a smart-alecky kiss, and then at the precinct “looked me straight in the eye and said he knew for a fact I didn’t do it, but said I didn’t do enough time on a prior case.”
Asked about that, Mr. Scarcella said: “He can drop dead. The man is an out-and-out liar.”
Accusations of Intimidation
Witnesses as well as suspects accused Mr. Scarcella of coercing false testimony from them.
In 1992, Ronald Pondexter was accused of murdering a man during a middle-of-the-night robbery in the vestibule of an apartment building. The victim was with another man, who survived. After first offering a description that did not match Mr. Pondexter, the survivor said Mr. Pondexter was the killer, though his consumption of 12 drinks undercut his reliability as a witness.
Mr. Scarcella, the arresting officer, produced one other witness, a 19-year-old girl.
Her testimony of what she saw outside her window implicated Mr. Pondexter. Her mother, however, swore her daughter was asleep. In court papers, it was suggested that the mother might have been intimidated by associates of Mr. Pondexter.
During the trial, Michael Baum, Mr. Pondexter’s defense lawyer, said the daughter told him that she had lied because Mr. Scarcella had threatened her.
The judge did not allow her to take the stand again or strike her testimony. Mr. Pondexter was convicted. In 1996, the Court of Appeals ordered a new trial. The girl did not appear, and Mr. Pondexter was acquitted.
Mr. Scarcella called it “ridiculous” that he would intimidate a person to testify.
“I have no recollection of that whatsoever,” he said.
Louis Scarcella frames innocent people for murder??????
How many people has Brooklyn homicide detective Louis Scarcella framed for murder??????I posted a previous article Louis Scarcella which said he may have framed as many as 50 people for murder.
Several Murder Confessions Taken by Brooklyn Detective Have Similar Language
By FRANCES ROBLES
Published: June 12, 2013
As the Brooklyn homicide detective Louis Scarcella told it, the suspect in a ruthless home invasion that left one man dead and two more people in a coma started talking after just a few minutes of questioning.
“You got it right,” the suspect, Jabbar Washington, said. “I was there.”
The phrase was straightforward and damning, introducing the central piece of evidence that sent him to prison for 25 years to life. At the 1997 trial, Mr. Scarcella told the jury that it was the easiest confession he had obtained in more than two decades working for the Police Department.
But if the interrogation was unique for him, the wording was not. In at least four more murder cases, suspects questioned by Mr. Scarcella began their confessions with either “you got it right” or “I was there.”
Mr. Scarcella, 61, was a member of the Brooklyn North Homicide squad who developed a reputation for eliciting confessions when no other detective could. But questions about his credibility have led the Brooklyn district attorney’s office to reopen all of his trial convictions.
The similarity of the confessions, which was discovered in a review of cases by The New York Times, raises new doubts about the statements that Mr. Scarcella presented and that the prosecutors used to win convictions in dozens of murder cases. One of the men, David Ranta, who had spent more than two decades arguing that he never made the confession attributed to him that began “I was there,” has already been released from prison.
Defense lawyers fighting the convictions say the resemblance of statements attributed to inmates who shared nothing in common makes it more likely that Mr. Scarcella fabricated evidence, laying the groundwork for cases to be dismissed and millions to be paid in wrongful conviction lawsuits.
“It’s sort of beyond belief that it would be coincidental,” said Steven Banks, chief lawyer for the Legal Aid Society, which is reviewing 20 cases handled by Mr. Scarcella.
Mr. Scarcella, a 26-year veteran who retired in 1999, stood by his record, saying he was one of the best detectives in the department. As for the similarities, he said: “I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. I will say this again: I have never fabricated a confession in my life.”
In a previous interview, Mr. Scarcella said that because of Mr. Ranta’s recent exoneration, inmates now considered him a “get-out-of-jail-free key.”
However, records show that in many cases, the allegations of misconduct and manufactured confessions are not new.
Mr. Washington, who is still in prison for the 1995 killing of Ronald Ellis, took the stand in his trial and testified that Mr. Scarcella provided the script for the confession. The detective, he said, grabbed him by the neck and testicles and forced him to sign his name to a document the detective wrote. “He always said the cop fed him what to say,” said Mark Pollard, who was Mr. Washington’s lawyer at the trial.
Mr. Washington, who was 23 during the trial, had an alibi, and the survivors of the shooting were unable to identify him in court, leaving the confession as the crux of the prosecution’s case. Mr. Washington’s claim of a forced confession was undermined, prosecutors wrote in response to his appeal, by a video of the confession that showed he did not appear to be looking to Mr. Scarcella for cues.
“The D.A. broke the confession down and tried to show it was extemporaneous,” Mr. Pollard said. “But I would not accept these similarities as coincidence. It definitely doesn’t smell right.”
By then the language had already appeared in several other cases. One of them centered on a 1994 arson in Williamsburg in which two people died. The suspect, Hector Lopez, had been entangled in a dispute with his former girlfriend and her new boyfriend, both of whom survived, and was accused of setting the man’s building on fire.
After about 12 hours in custody, Mr. Scarcella said that Mr. Lopez began to weep and said: “You guys got it right.”
Mr. Lopez, who was confronted with other evidence like a gas can in his car, is serving 25 years to life at the Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, N.Y. But his lawyer, William Loeb, wrote in an appeal that discrepancies between the confession and evidence suggested “the disturbing likelihood” that Mr. Scarcella had made up the confession.
Pierre Sussman, Mr. Ranta’s lawyer, said that was precisely what Mr. Scarcella did with Mr. Ranta, who in 1990 was an unemployed drug addict when the detective questioned him for the killing of a Hasidic rabbi. Mr. Scarcella testified that he was at central booking with Mr. Ranta when his prisoner did an about-face and decided to come clean about the robbery and shooting.
Mr. Scarcella said he scribbled the man’s exact words on the back of a manila envelope, starting with “I was there.”
Mr. Ranta, who has frequently said he never confessed to the detective, was exonerated in March after 23 years in prison. “If you take a look at statements given to Detective Scarcella, and they start out the same way — ‘I was there’ — and then follow with a narrative, that’s a huge problem,” Mr. Sussman said. “It’s a sign that it may be Scarcella’s words, and not the suspects’.”
Scholars who study police interrogations say it is not uncommon for confessions to include traces of the detective’s speech, particularly law enforcement jargon the suspect was unlikely to have used without prompting. In addition, sometimes a detective will prompt a person to admit being present at the crime scene, while still playing down the role in the crime, a technique known as minimizing, which has been cited as sometimes leading to false confessions.
“It’s hard to imagine all five people used the same exact words,” said Richard Leo, a University of San Francisco law professor who specializes in confessions. “It almost sounds like a template.”
The phrases still seemed etched in Mr. Scarcella’s memory. Even in spontaneous retellings of various confessions in recent years, he has reached for those exact words.
In an interview with The New York Post last month, he said he still remembered Mr. Ranta’s confession from a quarter century earlier: “I said: ‘You come from 66th Street. I come from 66th Street. We’re both Italian. Why don’t you tell me the truth?’ So he says, ‘Yeah, you’re right. I was there.’ ”
And talking about a different case during an appearance on the “Dr. Phil” television program in 2007, where he discussed the tactics he used to get suspects to admit their misdeeds, Mr. Scarcella recalled a similar conversation with a suspect. “He says to me, ‘Louis, you were right. I was there, but he kicked me, and I shot him by accident.’ I said, ‘Don’t you feel better now?’ And he’s now doing 37 ½ years to life.”
Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, has declined to publicly identify the 50 cases that are under review by the office’s Conviction Integrity Unit. So it is unclear how many more may have featured such language.
“We are looking for certain patterns,” said Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesman for the office. The wording “may be a pattern.”
An earlier examination by The Times also showed that Mr. Scarcella used the same crack-addicted prostitute as a witness in a series of unrelated murder cases.
The Legal Aid Society was informed by the office that 20 of the cases under review involved the agency’s clients. At the request of The Times, the organization’s lawyers reviewed those cases and found two with similar wording at the start of the confession. They declined to reveal the names but said both defendants served about 14 years in prison for shootings that took place in the 1990s, six years apart.
“One of the confessions includes ‘I was there’ and the other says, ‘I want to tell you the truth: you are right,’ ” Mr. Banks said. “Given the patterns that are emerging, clearly that gives great concern about the detective’s techniques.”
More on that Brooklyn pig who may have framed 50 people for murder!!!!
Panel to Review Up to 50 Trial Convictions Involving a Discredited DetectivePanel to Review Up to 50 Trial Convictions Involving a Discredited Detective
By FRANCES ROBLES
Published: July 1, 2013
A panel of former prosecutors, professors and retired judges has been appointed to review as many as 50 trial convictions involving a detective whose work may have sent innocent men to prison, Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, announced on Monday.
The review panel, which includes some of the most respected members of New York City’s legal community and several of Mr. Hynes’s closest friends, drew fire from a lawyer who represents several of those convicted.
Robert G. M. Keating, an adjunct law professor at Pace University who is chairman of the mayor’s Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, will lead the panel. In his 1990 book about the Howard Beach murder case, Mr. Hynes called Mr. Keating one of his “closest friends,” who jogged three miles daily with him.
The group also includes Joseph Bellacosa, a retired member of the New York State Court of Appeals and former dean at St. John’s University School of Law. Mr. Hynes and Mr. Bellacosa are godfathers to each other’s children, and Mr. Hynes was an usher at the former judge’s wedding some 50 years ago, according to the judge’s official biography posted on a court Web site.
Another member, Patricia L. Gatling, chairwoman of the New York City Commission on Human Rights, was Mr. Hynes’s first assistant district attorney for major narcotics investigations.
“It just seems like politics as usual,” said Pierre Sussman, whose client David Ranta was exonerated in March after questions were raised about the work of Louis Scarcella, a former Brooklyn North homicide detective who investigated the case.
Brooklyn prosecutors had asked a judge to dismiss a murder charge against Mr. Ranta, a former printer who served 23 years for the killing of a rabbi shot in a botched robbery. While holding out the possibility that Mr. Ranta participated in the crime, Mr. Hynes’s Conviction Integrity Unit acknowledged that Mr. Scarcella’s work was riddled with errors.
Mr. Scarcella failed to pursue a lead of another viable suspect, let jailhouse informants out to visit their girlfriends, and is believed to have told witnesses whom to choose in a lineup, the unit’s investigation found.
The district attorney opened a review of 40 criminal cases involving 50 defendants after The New York Times found, among other things, that several of the detective’s murder cases used the same witness, a crack-addicted prostitute.
Many of Mr. Scarcella’s cases dated from Mr. Hynes’s predecessor, Elizabeth Holtzman, but his office for many years had fended off inmates’ appeals.
Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesman for Mr. Hynes, said prosecutors would present the panel only with cases that appear problematic, along with prosecutors’ recommendations. He acknowledged that some critics might question the panelists’ ties to Mr. Hynes, but called them “esteemed individuals with the highest integrity.”
“The district attorney bears the responsibility of making the final decision on the cases,” Mr. Schmetterer said.
Mr. Sussman, who represents several people whose cases are under review, had several objections. First, he said, only those cases selected by prosecutors will be forwarded to the panel. And the panel itself, he said, is too stacked with former prosecutors and should have included more defense and appellate lawyers.
Mr. Bellacosa said his long friendship with Mr. Hynes would not affect his decisions on the panel, and added that as a member of the state’s highest court, he spent nearly 15 years reviewing his good friend’s work.
“We have through all of the years been very direct with one another. We have been very frank to say, ‘You’re really off base here,’ ” Mr. Bellacosa said. “The task is to lend an independent examination as to the process and to give it checks and balances: ‘Does this pass the smell test?’ ”
Other panelists include: Barbara Jones, a former federal judge and prosecutor; Roderick C. Lankler, a former special prosecutor; Susan Herman, an associate professor at Pace University; Steven M. Cohen, a former chief adviser to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo; Bruce Green, a Fordham law professor; Laura Brevetti, a former federal prosecutor and Patrolman’s Benevolent Association lawyer; William C. Thompson Sr., a former appellate judge and father of the mayoral candidate; John Walsh, a retired judge and former police prosecutor; and Telesforo (Ted) Del Valle Jr., a defense lawyer.