From death row to 30 years jail life, these blacks were wrongfully incarcerated

Derrick Hamilton

Derrick Hamilton was wrongfully imprisoned for 23 years.

It followed the fabrication of evidence against him by police officers in the trial that would send him to jail.

One of those officers is Louis Scarcella, a retired New York detective who in recent years emerged as a symbol of wrongful convictions, as several cases he had handled fell apart. 

Hamilton was 28 and living in New Haven when he was arrested in 1991 by Scarcella and the local police on the accusation that he murdered a Brooklyn man named as Nathaniel Cash. 

Cash’s girlfriend, Jewel Smith was the only eyewitness against Hamilton at his trial in the State Supreme Court and despite her accounts of the murder found to be conflicting, the jury reached a conviction and Hamilton was thrown into prison in 1992.

But in 2007, Smith went to the authorities and backtracked on her accounts, asserting Hamilton’s innocence. According to her, she was coerced into testifying against Hamilton by Scarcella. 

Eight years later, the Conviction Review Unit of the Brooklyn district attorney’s office would ask a judge to quash Hamilton’s guilty verdict.

According to prosecutors, Smith had been “unreliable, untruthful and incredible in her testimony.”