THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Was Louis Scarcella a Robin Hood?

Was Louis Scarcella a Robin Hood?

There have always been cases where people see some good in criminal behavour, with the case of Robin Hood being the classic of that. In modern times Chicago cop Jon Burge is perhaps the best example of that. I have written at some length about him previously. Chicago whites were a lot safer when Jon Burge was around.

https://dissectleft.blogspot.com/2018/12/jon-burge-gottfried-wilhelm-leibniz-and_27.html
The case below could also be an example of that. These days I interest myself in police misbehavior only when it occurs in Australia. Example below:

https://australian-politics.blogspot.com/2024/01/man-acquitted-of-murder-seeks-5.html
But in the 80s and 90s I looked more widely. I followed crooked convictions in the USA and UK too. Being now aged 80, however, I have to limit my ambitions a bit these days

And NYPD detective Louis Scarcella was one whose name kept popping up in my reading. And as I recollect it, Scarcella nearly always targeted blacks who had "form": They had prior criminal convictions, were gang-bangers or were drug dealers. When however they came to attention for something serious Scarcella would spring into action. If there was insufficient evidence to convict the presumed offender, Scarcella would make sure that evidence was provided, often in the form of forced confessions. The result was that a lot of dubious citizens got a long holiday in a government building

So was that good or bad? Mostly bad it seems to me but taking a lot of hoodlums off the street was surely a silver lining. They might or might not have not been guilty of what sent them to jail but they were rarely innocents either

Australia had a notorious crooked cop too: Roger Rogerson, who has just died. He too put a lot of bad guys away but eventually went too far. There is a memoir of him here:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12981943/roger-rogerson-aneurysm.html

A Brooklyn man who served 14 years behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit – in a case investigated by disgraced ex-NYPD Det. Louis Scarcella – had his conviction overturned Thursday, prosecutors said.

Steven Ruffin, 45, choked up in court as his 1996 manslaughter case was tossed by Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Matthew D’Emic following an investigation that found several serious errors — including that he was pressured into confessing to the crime after having denied it several times.

“I lost 14 years of my life for a crime I didn’t commit, and today will help me to move on from that chapter of my life, cleared of any wrongdoing,” Ruffin said in a statement.

In court, Ruffin thanked the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office and its Conviction Review Unit for the “incredible amount of work” it did in reviewing his decades-old case.

He paused to compose himself, overcome with emotion, as he thanked his parents, noting that his mother hadn’t lived to see her son’s exoneration.

Ruffin was just 18 when he was convicted of killing 16-year-old James Deligny, who was shot on Kingston Avenue in Crown Heights around 9:10 p.m. on Feb. 5, 1996 in a case of mistaken identity.

Deligny was apparently targeted after robbing Ruffin’s sister Diana, a college freshman, of her earrings, the DA’s Office said.

Ruffin’s sister told her family about the mugging and a manhunt was underway to find the robber. Several members of a group eventually encountered Deligny and his sister a few blocks from Ruffin’s home, where a fight ensued and Deligny was gunned down.

Scarcella interrogated Ruffin, then 17, twice where he denied being the shooter, prosecutors said.

Ruffin’s estranged dad, a cop, was brought to the precinct to convince his son to confess to the slaying, saying he shot Deligny four times, according to the Conviction Review Unit report.

He was released on parole in 2010.

It would take more than a decade after Ruffin was out of jail for prosecutors to reexamine the case and find several errors in the investigation.

“The fact that they actively looked into my case, took the application and the amount of resources that they put in to exonerate me, it, it—that is what staggers my mind,” Ruffin said. “If they would have never said a word about Scarcella, I would have never known because I live in Georgia.”

Deligny’s sister had testified that the shooter had a cracked tooth, like Ruffin.

According to the investigation, Ruffin’s defense attorney at the time, botched the case by failing to tell the jury that the boyfriend of Ruffin’s sister also had a cracked tooth.

The boyfriend confessed to multiple people that he was the one who killed Deligny, the investigation found.

“After a full investigation by my Conviction Review Unit, we can no longer stand by this old conviction and will move to give Mr. Ruffin his good name back,” Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement.

Ruffin’s exoneration marks the 18th case that has been overturned involving Scarcella, according to the Legal Aid Society.

“The fact that they actively looked into my case, took the application and the amount of resources that they put in to exonerate me, it, it—that is what staggers my mind,” Ruffin said. “If they would have never said a word about Scarcella, I would have never known because I live in Georgia.”

“We will continue to correct miscarriages of justice and to learn from the mistakes we uncover to ensure that they never happen again,” Gonzalez said.

https://nypost.com/2024/01/18/metro/brooklyn-man-exonerated-after-14-years-in-prison-in-another-cased-investigated-by-crooked-nypd-detective/

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Was Louis Scarcella a Robin Hood?

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