3 Imprisoned for 1995 Subway Murder to Be Exonerated

The killing was shocking even for a New York City awash in violence at the time.

Around 1 a.m. on Nov. 26, 1995, two men approached a subway token booth in Brooklyn, poured gas through the slot and lit a book of matches. The resulting explosion leveled the structure and sent the clerk inside flying, his body in flames. He died two weeks later.

Three teenagers, Vincent Ellerbe, James Irons and Thomas Malik, subsequently confessed to the crime, were convicted of second-degree murder and were sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

On Friday, a state court judge cleared the three, much older now, at the request of the Brooklyn district attorney, who said his office had determined the confessions were false and had been coerced by detectives whose work in dozens of other cases has come under scrutiny.

“The findings of an exhaustive, years long re-investigation of this case leave us unable to stand by the convictions of those charged,” the district attorney, Eric Gonzalez, said in a news release, adding that there were “serious problems with the evidence on which these convictions are based.”

In vacating the convictions, the judge, Matthew J. D’Emic, freed Mr. Irons and Mr. Malik, both 45, from prison. Mr. Ellerbe, 44, was released on parole in 2020.

Speaking to a courtroom packed with relatives and supporters, Mr. Ellerbe delivered an emotional account of his life behind bars. He said he has a 26-year-old daughter who grew up without him, and that he had developed epilepsy while in prison.

“Twenty-five years I had to look in the mirror knowing that I was in prison for something I had nothing to do with,” he said in a quiet, sometimes halting voice. As he spoke, Mr. Malik’s wife, Michele, wept openly.

“The penitentiary breaks you or turns you into a monster,” Mr. Ellerbe added, “and I had to become something I’m not just to survive.”

Mr. Ellerbe was 17 when he was arrested; Mr. Irons and Mr. Malik were 18. In addition to pressuring them into confessing, Mr. Gonzalez said, the lead detectives, Louis Scarcella and Stephen Chmil, failed to divulge the shaky nature of witness identifications and ignored factual inconsistencies in evidence and in the young men’s confessions.

For Mr. Scarcella, who retired in 1999, the dismissal of the convictions was another blemish on a career during which he led a unit that handled some of the most high-profile crimes and investigated more than 500 homicides a year.

His reputation began to crumble in 2013 after one of his most celebrated investigations — into the murder of a Hasidic rabbi in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood — unraveled amid defense claims that he had framed a suspect.

Despite Mr. Scarcella’s insistence that he had done nothing wrong, the district attorney’s office began a review of about 70 of his cases. The inquiry has so far resulted in more than a dozen exonerations — roughly a third of the 33 the district attorney’s office Conviction Review Unit has spawned since 2014 — and New York City has paid tens of millions of dollars to settle lawsuits stemming from cases in which he was involved.

Richard E. Signorelli, a lawyer who has represented Mr. Scarcella in such suits, said the retired detective had “an exemplary career with the Police Department” and “unequivocally denies all accusations of wrongdoing in this case.”

Police officials did not respond to a request for comment on the exonerations or to a question about whether it planned to reopen its investigation into who killed the clerk, Harry Kaufman, a 22-year transit veteran.

The killing of Mr. Kaufman, 50, reverberated well beyond New York, in part because it occurred several days after the opening of the movie “Money Train,” which featured a scene depicting a similar crime.

The deadly assault, at the Kingston-Throop Avenues station in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, was one of seven such fire attacks on token booths in the days after the movie’s release.

Bob Dole, the Senate majority leader at the time and Republican presidential candidate, called for a boycott of the film in the wake of the attack, although the authorities never established whether it was inspired by the fictional crime.

Speaking in court on Friday, Lori Glachman, an assistant district attorney, said Mr. Kaufman had been “working overtime to earn money to send his son to college” when he was killed in what she called “a heinous, heinous crime.” Still, she said, investigators had reached the “inescapable conclusion” that the convictions “cannot stand.”

Mr. Irons’s lawyer, David Shanies, said the police had subjected his client to “threats, lies, sleep deprivation and physical violence.” And, while he thanked the district attorney’s office for its work, he also criticized it for a “carefully tailored” set of conclusions that discredited only the police, remaining silent on the prosecutors’ conduct.

A spokesman for Mr. Gonzalez, Oren Yaniv, said the review had found no violation of rules requiring that prosecutors share exculpatory information with defense lawyers.

Ronald L. Kuby, who represented Mr. Malik at trial and in his quest for exoneration, said on Friday that coerced confessions of the type Mr. Scarcella and Mr. Chmil were accused of extracting in the case would be unlikely now because such interviews are videotaped.

That and other criminal justice reforms in the intervening years, he said, would have spared his clients, so “the actual people who murdered Harry Kaufman may have been captured.”

Reached by phone on Friday, Mr. Kaufman’s widow and son expressed a range of emotions about the turn of events, which they said they had only been made aware of on Thursday.

“If they didn’t do it, who did?” Mr. Kaufman’s son, Adrian, said, adding that he was skeptical that anyone else would be charged in the killing. “I don’t think there will be justice brought for his family.”

His mother, Stella Kaufman, echoed that sentiment.

“Everybody wants to know how I feel,” she said. “I feel like there’s no justice for Harry.”

Kirsten Noyes contributed research.