As a member of the Brooklyn North Homicide Squad, he and his longtime partner Stephen Chmil built a reputation for obtaining convictions in difficult cases.

Since 2013, Scarcella has received extensive and sustained publicity for multiple allegations of investigative misconduct that resulted in false testimony against crime suspects, leading to innocent parties serving long prison terms and guilty individuals going free.

[4][5][6] Prosecutors and judges have explicitly cited evidence of his improper conduct, in criminal cases involving at least 12 wrongfully convicted defendants,[c] and legal settlements have surpassed $100 million.

[8] His uncle, Nicholas "Nicky Black" Grancio,[9] was the victim of a Brooklyn homicide that police attributed to a leadership struggle within the Colombo crime family.

[7][11] Under the spotlight of a high-profile New York Times investigation that went on to win a George Polk Award for Justice Reporting,[1][12] Brooklyn District Attorney Charles J. Hynes in 2013 reopened the cases of 56 people arrested by Scarcella.

At least another five cases of his partner Chmil were deemed "probably wrongful" by the nonprofit Exoneration Initiative of the Innocence Network, citing "the same pattern of cajoled and inconsistent witnesses".

[20] After Scarcella's retirement from the NYPD in 1999, he led a city investigation of public-school officials accused of inflating student scores on state-wide Regents exams in 2002 and 2003.

Then in 2007, an extensive review by the special commissioner of investigation for New York City schools concluded that Scarcella's work was deeply flawed, biased, and overly influenced by one disgruntled teacher who falsely accused Capra of directing a cheating scheme with "no credible evidence".

Capra's employment was re-authorized, George was appointed principal of another high school, Pelles's reprimand was rescinded, and the accusing teacher Philip Nobile was removed.

[23] Even so, the detective found her credible after she gave "good information" on two homicides in the 1980s,[18] given how "her living in a crackhouse in Crown Heights put her in close proximity to scores of murders each year.

[1] Finally in 2014, a prosecutor from the Kings County Conviction Review Unit described her in court as "hopelessly addicted to drugs, criminal in her conduct for the most part, increasingly erratic in terms of her accounts", and an "extremely problematic" witness.

Hynes's effort was met with skepticism, as he stocked the panel with close friends and campaign donors,[27] and he continued to employ Scarcella's daughter as a prosecutor.

In Hynes's sixth re-election bid, at age 78 in November 2013, he lost by nearly 50 points to Kenneth P. Thompson, who had expressed a willingness to widen the scope of the review.

Decades later, however, the Brooklyn DA's Conviction Integrity Unit began reviewing Ranta's case when a key witness, aged 13 during the original investigation, revealed that Detective Scarcella had provided him with a description of whom to pick in a police lineup ("the guy with the big nose").

[40] In vacating and dismissing the charges against the brothers, Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth P. Thompson highlighted that the reliance on Gomez's testimony "undermined the integrity of these convictions, and resulted in an unfair trial for each of these defendants.

After serving nearly 17 years, Logan was freed in 2014 at the request of Brooklyn District Attorney Thompson and his Conviction Review Unit, when they determined that Detective Scarcella's purported eyewitness Aisha Jones was in police custody on the day of the murder and never saw the events to which she testified.

Having befriended Shabaka Shakur in the Auburn Correctional Facility, after their release the two men used some of their settlement money to open a Downtown Brooklyn restaurant called Brownstone, and to help other wrongfully convicted inmates.

[8] John Bunn and Rosean Hargrave were wrongfully convicted for the 1991 shooting death of an off-duty correction officer, Rolando Neischer, in an apparent carjacking.

"[49] In 2015 and 2016, after nearly 24 years served in prison by Hargrave and 16 by the paroled Bunn, Judge ShawnDya Simpson vacated their respective murder convictions based on Scarcella's engagement in "false and misleading practices".

[8] Bunn has since started a program for troubled youth, "A Voice 4 the Unheard",[36] and filed a lawsuit for "malicious prosecution, denial of due process, and civil rights conspiracy",[51] which the city settled for $5.9 million in 2020.

[53] Vanessa Gathers was wrongfully convicted of manslaughter in connection with the 1991 robbery, assault, and subsequent death of 71-year-old Michael Shaw in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Presiding Justice Dineen Riviezzo maintained that Scarcella's use of "improper tactics" to send individuals to prison could have been persuasive to the jury that convicted Moses if those allegations had come to light at the time of trial.

[61] In 1994, teen-aged Shawn Williams was wrongfully convicted of murder, after Scarcella detained and allegedly coerced eyewitness Margaret Smith into falsely implicating him, based on her view from a sixth-floor window at midnight.

"[65] An appeals panel of judges agreed in 2021, ruling: "Based on Scarcella's and Chmil's significant involvement in the case, newly discovered evidence of their misconduct would have furnished the jury with a different context.

Del Giudice ruled that Christmas's recantation was credible, in contrast to Scarcella's "demeanor while testifying, his selective recollection, and pattern of minimization of his role in investigations under scrutiny.

"[69][70] Three teenagers, Vincent Ellerbe, James Irons, and Thomas Malik, were sentenced to 25 years to life for the 1995 arson murder of subway token clerk Harry Kaufman.

It was the worst of seven similar attacks citywide during the release of the film, whose fictional pyromaniac squirted gasoline into locked payment booths to torch the clerks.

As summarized by David Love, a journalist and former director of the Witness to Innocence organization for wrongfully convicted prisoners: "Dirty cops, corrupt prosecutors and unscrupulous judges join forces with ineffective defense lawyers and gullible juries to create this problem.

In questioning why the DA's Office has been reviewing his cases, Scarcella stated "Anyone who would put an innocent man in jail – especially on homicide – deserves the death sentence, as far as I'm concerned.

"[8] He has reported receiving death threats after adverse publicity for his case work,[11] and his brother's 2014 suicide note cited the "liars" conducting the DA's review.