Jailed Unjustly in the Death of a Rabbi, Man Nears Freedom
In the wintry darkness 23 years ago on a back street in
Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a jewelry thief fleeing a botched robbery panicked and
shot a Hasidic rabbi in the head.
Four days later, the rabbi, Chaskel Werzberger, an
Auschwitz survivor, died of his wounds. Even in the New York City of 1990, as
homicides crested at 2,245, the murder stirred grief and outrage. The “Slain
Rabbi” was front-page tabloid news. Mayor David N. Dinkins traveled to
Williamsburg’s Satmar enclave to sit in mourning and to offer a $10,000 reward.
The new Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes,
stood shoulder to shoulder with fur-hat-wearing Satmars, watching as they
rocked back and forth and wailed as the pinewood coffin was carried out. He
vowed to bring the killer to justice.
Forty detectives worked the case, soon led by the
swaggering, cigar-chewing Detective Louis Scarcella. Working closely with an
influential Satmar rabbi, Detective Scarcella arrested a drug-addicted,
unemployed printer named David Ranta. Hasidic Jews surrounded the car that
carried the accused man to jail, slapping the roof and chanting, “Death penalty!”
Mr. Ranta was convicted in May 1991 and sentenced to 37.5
years in maximum-security prison, where he remains to this day.
He is almost certainly not guilty.
This week Mr. Hynes, after a long investigation by a unit
that he created to look into questionable convictions, plans to ask a state
judge to release the prisoner. Mr. Ranta’s lawyer, Pierre Sussman, who
conducted his own inquiry, said his client has been instructed to pack up his
cell.
Mr. Ranta could walk free as early as Thursday. In the decades
since a jury convicted him of murder, nearly every piece of evidence in this
case has fallen away. A key witness told The New York Times that a detective
instructed him to select Mr. Ranta in the lineup. A convicted rapist told the
district attorney that he falsely implicated Mr. Ranta in hopes of cutting a
deal for himself. A woman has signed an affidavit saying she too lied about Mr.
Ranta’s involvement.
Detective Scarcella and his partner, Stephen Chmil,
according to investigators and legal documents, broke rule after rule. They
kept few written records, coached a witness and took Mr. Ranta’s confession
under what a judge described as highly dubious circumstances. They allowed two
dangerous criminals, an investigator said, to leave jail, smoke crack cocaine
and visit with prostitutes in exchange for incriminating Mr. Ranta.
At trial, prosecutors acknowledged the detectives had
misbehaved but depicted them as likable scamps. Reached in retirement on
Tuesday, Mr. Scarcella defended his work. “I never framed anyone in my life,”
he said.
No physical evidence ever connected Mr. Ranta to the
murder.
He now sits in a cell at a maximum-security prison
outside Buffalo. He is a touch shy; his gray hair is fast thinning. His voice
still carries the slantwise intonations of working-class south Brooklyn. Asked
how he survived, he said he was not sure he had.
“I’d lie there in the cell at night and I think: I’m the
only one in the world who knows I’m innocent,” he said. “I came in here as a
30-something with kids, a mother who was alive. This case killed my whole
life.”
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