I've never been in trouble in my life. I didn't even have a parking ticket, you know what I mean. I was brought up with 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 know I'm innocent. I know I had nothing to do with this. How is this possible?
I grew up trusting systems. I've grew up believing that every human being should do the right thing. And that's why, even though I knew I was dealing with corp people, I wasn't going to break anyone to get me out of prison because I wouldn't live with the fact that I break my way out of my wife's death.
I'm not innocent, too proven guilty. I'm guilty until I prove my innocence. And that's absolutely what happened to me. Our system. Since I've been out ten years, it has come a little ways, but it's still broken.
I totally lost trusting humanity after what's happened to me.
This is wrongful conviction. Welcome back to wrongful conviction with Jason flamm that's me and today we have a very interesting and unusual show planned for you. Our two guests today are Shabaka Shakur, who served twenty seven years in prison for a double murder that he had nothing to do with. And Chabaca. Welcome to the show.
Thank you, 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. Ron Kooby, welcome to the show.
Thank you.
Jason, Ponytail and all still there. He's still a hippy. It's unbelievable. We got Ron who's got as much hair as you can imagine, and Chabacca who's got absolutely none. So I'm just giving everybody a visual, so thank you. I want to mention quickly the fact that you are a TV star now right you have your own show on Stars.
I wouldn't go that far, but Stars is doing a fantastic series called Wrong Man, directed and produced by Joe Berlinger, who had been the Paradise Loss series, and basically they take three cases of people all homicides around the country who claim they were innocent, have done many years in prison, and they put resources into the case. They hire me detective's former States attorney, Detroit homicide detective, FBI cold case consultant, and they have us reinvestigate these cases scratch.
So they're doing this right.
They're absolutely right. They're providing the resources that defense lawyers didn't have originally and most of us don't have now 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 friend at Stars, and the whole crew and Joanna who's here. 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 Shebaka. This story
is as terrifying as it is typical. And what I mean by that, and we'll get into it, is that you were a victim of someone who was detective who was one of the most notorious detectives in terms of framing people in the history of our country, the world. It's a very dubious distinction, and we'll get into all of that, but let's go back to the beginning. Did you grow up in Brooklyn?
Yes, I was born and raised in Brooklyn, lived most of my earlier life in Brownsville and Bedford Stuvestant areas of Brooklyn.
And Shabaka Shakur is not your birth name.
No, I was named after my father, Lou Holmes.
But going back to your childhood, so did you have a 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.
Yes, well, I lived in browns but I lived in the projects.
I grew up in the projects, 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 normal you know routine that they try to say. I had parents, I went to good schools, have brothers and sisters.
We were a solid family.
So you grew up around this environment that's you know, well known to anyone who's you know, familiar with New York. And it's interesting because the time we live in now, you know, contrary to what people would have you believe, is a 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 this stuff was. It was crazy in those times.
And then one day in nineteen eighty eight, everything went haywire. Your world got turned well, got turned completely upside down sometime between eighty eight and eighty nine, right when you were wrongfully convicted. But in nineteen eighty eight, there was a double murder in your neighborhood. And it was a couple guys that you knew right right.
It was guys that I had known them for almost a decade. I had went to school with one of them, but I knew both of them. They were close friends who hung out all together, so I met one through the other. But Stephen Hewitt 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 what we called c was Steven's best friend and they lived in Flatbush, but 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.
Mines and they were they were in the game. They were yeah, drug game.
They were drug dealers. Uh.
At the time that we're 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 aggressive police because with crack came not only the destruction of people physically from the drug, but also an increase of violence. You know, Crack was one of the most lucrative drug trades at the time, and people were killing for neighborhoods, you know.
Right. And it's interesting when we're going back to this because I've spent you know, twenty five years working to decriminalize drugs and you know, restore some sanity to our drug policy. And the only distinction I want to make there is that crack didn't make people violent. The money made people violence, right. They people who were committing the violence weren't high, they were they were they were ones
who weren't high. They were ones who wanted to get everybody else high, and they were competing and fighting and killing for the right to have that that income stream. So I just want to make that clear to our audience who may not be as familiar, since it shows, you know, we don't spend a lot of time talking about drugs. But that being said, so these two guys get murdered in what seems like it was a drug hit, right, yes, And how did they end up focusing on you? You know?
Was it just laziness? Was it?
Well, it was it was partly laziness and it was partly, I would say, a tunnel vision by the police. Once I became a suspect, they they zeroed in on me and they ignored everything else. So I knew these guys and we had a really close relationship. So at that time I had driven one of them over to the block where we were selling drugs and Gates Avenue and in the Busherk section of Brooklyn, and we was having
a conversation about a car. So I was trying to sell them my car because at the time I was working in Queen's Queen's County Register's 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 them. You know what I'm saying. I needed money. They they you know, came to me. They said, listen, help us out with this, and I made runs. I did errane. I did do the work for them 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. I had met a girl that I was dealing with that lived in that neighborhood, so I went around there to where the drug spot was. Their brother who didn't live in New York, who actually lived in Florida. He was the brother of Fitzgerald Clark, the guy that we used to call See and.
He was the older brother. He didn't know us, he didn't know me.
He had just barely 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 to New York. So this is like one of the few interactions that he had with with me personally. That night, me 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. He wanted to give me some money from their drug spot that night and then owe me the rest. See who was his friend
and mins, But we used to always argue. We we just had that type of relationship where we was always arguing about everything, but not a violent relationship or aggressive relationship to each other. We just grew up together and we was always on opposite sides of everything. So me and him were arguing about the car, and SE's brother witnessed
this argument. So later on, when she 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.
Arrested me, came and get me to take me to the priest and to question me.
I answered all the questions, told him where I was, told him I wasn't nowhere in Brooklyn at that time, explained to him 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. But when they went to Detective Scarsella and said, we got a guy that was pointed 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 to join into the interrogation and then fabricated a confession against.
Me, right, and that's you know, it is interesting. You know, you talk about how you had alibi witnesses, more than one. 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. And Scarcella, people who are fans of the show listen to the show, have heard his name before because we've had other exoneries 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 the wrong side of the law.
So I'd love to get your take on this part of the story because obviously you have intimate knowledge of it, as well as knowledge of the entire world of you know that that blue wall, so to speak.
So I had first met Detective Scarcela in the nineteen nineties when he was still working as a detective, still doing the things that we know now that he did, and I had cross examined him in a very high profile case, which itself is now under no This was the token booth bombing case. And he amazed me at just how good he was at lying, how charming, how avuncular, or 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 it didn't matter. People really liked Luis Scarcela. Jurys liked him, Judges loved him. Prosecutors thought he would, you know, the greatest thing on earth because he would literally make their cases. So I had a lot of experience with him from that time before he became famous in the public with the Rantic case.
Shabaka had written to me he had done his own post conviction motion was all put together, and the singular witness against him 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 made, there was no video tape made, there was no signature of Sabacca's. The whole confession existed only out of Scarcella's mouth, and it was almost a 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 Shebacca's confession, Scarcella had Shabacca saying, you know what's going on, you know the story. Other cases, 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, mister detective, you're such a smart guy.
You got me.
And in this case there was no corroboration, which is unheard of, especially since Scarcella was not even the case detective. The case detective questioned Sheabaka for hours and all he got was Shabacca'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 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 the paperwork showed that Scarcelo 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 that, you know what we call the orphan statement, Like Mahoney could remember where it came from. Who said that he knows that Shebacca didn't say that to him, And that was the key piece of evidence that got Shebacca 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 experienced detective couldn't get from you in hours and hours of questioning.
Well, I was The murder happened one night. The next day, I was at work and they came to get me at work to tell me that they wanted to take me to the preescint to ask me questions. Now, of course I didn't know about the murder at the time, so I went to the precinct and I answered the questions 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 a 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 thinking that they knew something about your past drug stuff or.
On the way to the preescint, 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 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're asking 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. 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 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. I had nothing to do with nobody being murdered. I already told you where I was, and that was the gist of my conversation with Detective Mahoney. I had no previous knowledge prior to him telling me about what was going on when detectives Scott Sella came in, like Ron said, he had nothing to do with my case. He wasn't
assigned to my case. He was just in the prisint 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.
And remember I was like, I got this, I'll take care of this, right, And that's exactly.
What he did.
He came in and 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 dealers, all of y'all involved. You murdered them so that you wouldn't have to share the block with them 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 going to go up north for a long time.
You're going to go down for these murders.
So I was telling them, you know, very politely, 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 I was arrested and I was given a quarter pointed attorney and the 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 them the alibi witnesses. They verified my alibi witnesses, and the quarter pointed said, yeah, that's what you told this detective, but you confessed to the other detective. And that's when I realized that this guy had fabricated a confession.
And this is an important time to mention that the confession is the most powerful evidence that there can be. 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 over and over again, they start to understand many cases are coerse confessions. In your case,
there was no confession. And let's not forget this. Scarcella was a guy who used the same witness in six different murder cases, who was a drug addict, part time prostitute. I think who he was supplying with drugs and was you know? And he was so lucky that she having no witness six different murders. I mean, that's kind of a miracle. I do want to take this opportunity because Ron's here too, and maybe he can ask me 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 me ask you this. If your son called you from a precinct and said, Dad, I've just been arrested. What should I do? What are you going to 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, Shabaka had some experience in the criminal justice system, so and he knew he didn't do anything, so he felt comfortable giving his alibi, which was ultimately born out decades later, and he felt comfortable telling Scarcela, 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
got the made up confession. You have the brother of the dead guy, originally telling a muddled story but thinking Schabacca was involved. But through a period of time with Scarcela, his story.
Changes, evolves, morphs, until he saw Shabaka shoot both of them, you know, one in the back and another in the back as he was running things that he could not have seen because physically impossible.
Because he wasn't there, well he wasn't there, had he been there, just the location of the bodies was all wrong. But okay, so now you've got your eyewitness kind of, you've got your confession, not really, and you stop looking for anybody else now had they 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, yes.
Steve, Okay, let's just pass this. So this one came with instructions, right right.
Right right, It's like, Okay, they missed the first time. I mean, 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 forgiven for that kind of people. They weren't like, oh okay, well we missed them 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 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 was still other detectives who weren't entirely comfortable and were pursuing those leads which
ultimately went nowhere. But had they done it at the beginning, this whole thing would have been different.
Like Ron said, the the confession, the alleged confession, nobody, nobody would have predicted that, you know what I'm saying.
It was It was just beyond my thinking that this guy was going to say that I confess to something. The situation around it was suspicious 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 there's nothing, there's no proof of it. There's no you know, anytime you take a confession, anytime you see a police officer
interview anybody, they write it down. There was nothing written there. There was no signing of the confession. They didn't even call the prosecutor and say this guy just confessed. They didn't take a video tape. There was absolutely no proof of a confession other than that Detective Scartsella just saying it out of his mouth. Even though we're in a priestinct full of people, so there was no proof that a confession ever existed. Now what Ron said about the
previous attack on these people. Two months prior to that, there was an attempt on both 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.
It must have been really unpopular.
I mean, look, it's happened, 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 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 will see Scarcella again and allows
this whole case to go forward. And ultimately you have a jury that has never seen Scarcela before. But gosh, you know, he seems like a much you know that dude. Then the black guy here and convicts, and appeals court after appeals court after Appeals Court affirms. And this has been the pattern, not just in Schabacca's case, but 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, which is, uh, society loses obviously, Sabacca gets his life taken away from or you know, most of it, and you know, the victims don't get justice, and these guys are free to go out there and shoot the next guy that crosses their path.
Those guys actually ended up going to federal prisident for I believe, like twelve different murders. But the amazing thing is that how they discover this. One of the guys in my case, Fitzgerald Clark, had got arrested in a shootout with a machine gun against the Rinkers during 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 acts is, okay, where is he at?
So the family has to go and say, oh, he's dead. He's no longer alive. So the judge actses 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.
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 a story that the brother's saying, Oh, this guy had arguing 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 tunnel vision or 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 Fitzgerald Clark, the guy who got killed in my case, was the same attorney who worked for the Rankers who got disbarred for fraud in working with the Rankers in fraudulent paperwork that he did for them. Like, the connections are all there.
So there was a lot of stuff there that 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 Shebaca was guilty. I have actually never known accoup who went out and deliberately framed a person who he knew was innocence, planted evidence and somebody he believed to be innocent, or lied
about a person he 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. So it falls to the Scarcellas 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 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 your public defender having been held in jail. I'm assuming pre trial for what for about a year?
For I think it was fourteen months.
Did you how first of all, how long was the trial?
The trial was like two days, a day and a half something like that.
That's a pretty question.
You don't have any evidence, right, you.
Have your alibi witnesses, and they if they.
Were never caught.
What happened was I had 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 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. I wrote to the judge. Six months in, I wrote to the judge and told the judge, listen, I need a new lawyer. This guy does not believe him in his saying, he's not doing any investigative work. He's not going to 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 as my attorney because 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.
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 going to get rid of your lawyer. Now you're getting ready to start trial. But I'm telling the judge he he hasn't investigated anything. Today 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 court dates, he would go in the back and talk to me and we would argue because I told him, you're not investigating. I'm innocent. 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 going to go to trial.
Like I said, I had to write him a summary of the facts because he didn't know the facts of my case. We went to trial 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 call 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.
And when she came to court, she stepped in the courtroom and told basically the judge, I'm the alibi witnesses. No, and he still did not use the alibi witness at try.
I've heard that story more times than I would like to have heard it.
So take a quick pause here. What are the elements we have so far? We have a corrupt detective. We have a system that believes Shakur is guilty and is not looking at any other suspects. We have a prosecutor who's more than willing 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 is innocent, but is unwilling to even prepare a defense for the client he believes is guilty. All he wants is a plea. He hasn't done any work, he's underpaid, 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 excusable part, is that he doesn't care. I mean, you know, he's sitting there and I think everyone listening is probably feeling the same way. I'm feeling that the feeling of helplessness that you must have had as a person who's literally facing spending the rest of your life in prison and nobody's helping you.
That that word 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 this attorney, 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 Gerald Clark, his initial statement to the police was I know who did this, right, He never said
I saw it. And then 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 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 seen Shebacca sneak up behind my brother and shoot my brother twice in the back.
Amazing how the memory comes back. Here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
His brother died from a single gunshot wound to the chest. So the account that he gave a trial didn't even match.
The ballistics or the autopsy or anything.
It wasn't even close.
No, right, 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, and his brother was convinced that he was convinced that Shabak had done it. It's not 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 Scarsella and the district attorney and the judge and embellished a story again because he thought the guy was guilty.
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 bet guilty. There would have been no odds that I would have accepted because it was a lock. I mean, you were done, right. What jury is possibly going to watch that proceeding and come up with any other conclusion other than that You're getting to.
Want to hear some 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 and a half. The jury even hearing these stories and having no defense because no alibi 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 of deliberation before they found me guilty.
So they come back in and obviously they found you guilty. Yes, and that moment. Can you paint a picture of that moment? Like was the courthouse? Was it a hot day? A cold day. Well, who was there? Was it? Noisy?
Was it?
This? Was it?
That my mother was dead?
That's what I 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. It's funny because to a certain extent, you know, even then, I 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 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 these guys can't realize that this is a setup.
And I was praying for.
The best, and then I was just praying that it would be manslaughter. And when they convicted me of murder, I remember the judge. I don't know if it was then or my senses, but I remember the judge giving me an opportunity to say something, and my lawyer basically.
Saying to be remorseful, you know, And.
I remember me telling the judge I started to say, you know, I'm sorry about these 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 really didn't do it, and that was all I can say it, you know, Like my lawyer was kind of like pushing me say something, be remorseful, try to, you know, but I just I was stuck because all I kept telling was 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, because the witnesses, as you said, can be led very easily. They can be influenced, they could be fed information, and eyewitness identification is such a tremendous factor. It's the number one cause of wrongful company.
Right because even though we know how frequently witnesses eyewitnesses are wrong, even though we have a zillion studies that has shown this, when somebody gets it up there in the courtroom and looks at the defendant and points at the defendant and 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, and so they believe the false confessions. They believe the bad
eyewitness identification. So that's what I think people should. And obviously, if you have no forensic evidence, especially these days where you know there's DNA, there's cell phones, 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, 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 well.
At least a cross racial 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.
Let me say also that I think that there has to be open discovery also because in my case specifically, like I said, the prosecutor knew that a previous attempt had been made on these guys. They knewice a month after my arrest, you know, so.
They if they had.
Turned that information 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. 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 get that until your trial is just about to begin, which of course makes taking an intelligent plea 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 them, what's wrong with them. But if you're totally innocent, you have no idea who these people are, then there's no investigation that can take place.
Right. Trial by ambushers 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. So, Shabaka, you end up getting sentenced.
To forty years two sentences of twenty to life running consecutively.
Forty years life. You were twenty two years old at the time, right, so we know that when you hear these census fifteen to life, twenty to life, forty to 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 didn't do it. I'm sorry, these people are dead. Nobody wants to hear that shit. So you go to prison. Which prison were you sent to?
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, and to go there as young man at twenty two years old, 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 failure to accept what had happened. I just kept believing that the best outcome was gonna happen. When my appeals started getting denied, there was a time of anger in which, you know, I ended up getting in trouble going 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 hell, you know. And it wasn't until I think I was in solitary confinement that I met other brothers in there that had been in there for years, and they would ask me, 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 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 it became a revelation that it wasn't going to be through somebody else helping me, that it had to be me. So I started to go to school. I went to college, I got a college degree. I started to learn law, started taking law classes. At the time, Cornell was giving law classes inside the prison, so I started signing up
for law classes. I got a job in the law library, started learning by working through with other people's cases, helping them with their cases, and it happened to be the best thing that could have ever happened to me, because working in the law library, I kept running into cases.
That had to do with Detective Scarseller. 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 their case, and he said, yeah, he set me up. And then I'm saying, yeah, he set me up too. But then when it 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.
Out was to expose Scarsella.
We had to show that this guy was a crooked cop, I think it was.
I had started working on my motion.
And I met up with Derek Hamilton, who was also a scar Seller case.
He had already put in his motion.
He was waiting for his response, and I told him, I said, look, we need to expose this guy. We need to really concentrate on Scarseller. 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 his motion. So in my motion, I started
focusing on Scarseller. Even though I started arguing the actual innocence claim, a portion of it was saying that Scarsella should not be believed because of his suspicious actions in all these cases. And I started enumerting cases in which it was very suspicious of confessions and evidence that, you know. So as I did that we happened to look up that Derek was paroled, and because he was paroled, he was outside.
And by then we had started.
Gathering people, me and him and Danny Mincom, who was another guy 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 said we're innocent, we would sit down with them and really grill them to see, if you know, go over their evidence, go over their case to see if they were really innocent, and if we believed it, we would take them in and we would work with their case too.
Now 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 that actual innocence. So we started working on people's cases like that.
It's incredible. I mean, just visualizing the law firm in prison, it's just so. And I know Derek very well, you know, I know Derek, and he's he's a brilliant guy. I mean an incredible, incredible legal mind, and his story is amazing. Of course he's been on the podcast as well on
wrongful conviction. So that was your moment where you actually sort of found this, you know, inner strength and this desire to better yourself and in the process find a way to get yourself out, which you did the same for a number of other guys that are still in 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 going to finish up with you. So you get involved. And what was the magic bullet? What was the silver bullet here? How did you manage to help Shebaka find his way out of this morass? Twenty seven years later?
There wasn't a magic bullet. There were a lot of numerous small, non magic bullets that eventually perforated the target sufficiently. Shebacca has sent me hist of papers, and you know, it was an amazing set of papers. It was the amazing if a lawyer had done it was even more impressive that it was. It came from people who have the fewest resources and the least formal legal education, although they did have a lot of time and they had
a lot of motivation. And I recognized Scarcella from the earlier days and recognized this is exactly the kind of stuff he did, and I felt we could win this, and so I agreed to take the case. Shebaka made it very clear that Okay, he's happy that I'm taking the case, but 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 of the stuff about Scarcella emerged. The new information was found. Shabaka had managed to find a couple of witnesses who were there with 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 whoever the lawyer saw back then, the young women he saw back then that he didn't
want to put on the stand. The middle aged women right now were extremely impressive, regular citizens, hard working, smart, very very persuasive, and over a series of I guess about a 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 Scarcela had fabricated the confession. And at that point the DA's office, under new leadership now under Ken Thompson, called me and
said we're done, We're not appealing, we're not retrying. Charges will be dismissed, and Shabaka walked out. In June of twenty fifteen.
Yes, how did you get the news that the conviction was being vacated after this crazy ordeal? Where were you?
I was in prison in Shriwanka Correctional Facility. At my job I used to work at that point, I was working at the Grievance Department because they would no longer let me work in the law library. So I was working at the grievance 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 her and she said they reversed your case. So initially I wasn't.
Sure if she was correct, because you know, she could have got it confused and wanted to hear from somebody officially. So I hung up and I called Leah Busby, who is the attorney with Ron Cooby on my case. And Leah was like excited. 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 now tomorrow? When?
So they was like, as soon as the paperwork clear, you're getting out. And it took a few days, but no, it was the shortest time ever because I knew I was getting out soon.
Did you sleep during those three days?
Yes, everybody thought, and that's a 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 what's happened, but when you know, okay, I'm getting out of here in the next couple of days, 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 Flommer, of course, but people follow me know that. Yesterday I walked a 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 whether he had got any sleep the night before, knowing that he was going to get out the next day. But yeah, I guess it's one of the others. You don't sleep at all.
You sleep like a baby. And now shabaka. The best part of the show every week is when everyone stops talking and lets you well in this case you, but whoever the featured guest on the show is just have the mic to say whatever it is you want. One thing I am interested in knowing is whether you feel bitter about what happened to you and what and how you're how you're processing all this and moving forward. But uh, this is this is that time, So the mic is yours.
Okay, I don't feel bitter. I feel.
I feel sad that the people haven't taken that there's been no accountability, you know, like he said that Scarcella is still basically has gotten away with what he's done. He's ruined lives, not just minds, but noumerous others, and then people don't even realize that it's not just a defendant, it's the families.
It's 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 and didn't even know I was home, so they never got to see me as a free man. 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. That saddens me because they were
people who could have stopped it. Not only Detective Scarseller, but everybody who allowed it to go on is complicit, you know what I'm saying. The district attorneys, the other police officers, the judges who looked at this case and seeing all of these gaping holes in the story, continue to allow it. Everybody's responsible for this, and until we actually take personal responsibility to say, Okay, I'm gonna do something to not let this go on, it's going to continue.
Because that's the way the criminal justice system has been created to protect people like Detective Scarseller. That's like I said, I'm not bitter, I'm just saden that we haven't realized that and done something more about that situation. Since I've been home now, I continue to work with certain cases. You know, Danny wyn Kong's one, Stephen Brathway is another, James Jenkins. These are people who I know are and a centing 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, 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 the opportunity to see me. So it gives me a time to put back my family.
I'm working now. I own a restaurant in Brooklyn and Bedstine seven one eight Live eleven fourteen Forton Street and definitely come there 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're always having some type of event in which we interact with the community and we try
to give back. You know, 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 there's a fear 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. If people want 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 in help, how can they do that? Do you do Facebook? Because you want to get paid at.
My Facebook page is shabakakor they can go up there.
I'm always posting stuff about these cases and about stuff that we're involved in and stuff that we're doing.
So if you follow me on Facebook, you can catch up on everything that we're doing.
Okaybacca Shakur and of course that's s h A b A k A and Shakour like Tupac Shakur. Everybody knows how to spell that, So yeah, I please do get involved, follow Shabaka and let's get these other guys home and keep this momentum going. So 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, Kooby stars the wrong Man is the show and Shabacca Shakur is the right man for the job, and he's going to go get these other guys out and I'm going to help him. Everybody get involved. So Shabaka, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for having me.
Don't forget to give us a 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 Innocenceproject dot org to learn how to donate and get involved. I'd like to thank our production team, Connor Hall and Kevin Wartis. The music in the show 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