Episode 3 of 10
We meet Shabaka Shakur, Derrick Hamilton, and the rest of the law firm they founded in prison. They are the best jailhouse lawyers of their generation. They have roles: lecturer, writer, PR man, intern… They claim they were framed...by Louie Scarcella. They declare common cause: bring him down. That cause will change the history of New York state jurisprudence.
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All episodes will be available one week early and ad-free, along with exclusive bonus content on Orbit’s newly launched “True Crime Club House” subscription channel on Apple Podcasts.
The Burden is a production of Orbit Media in association with Signal Co. No1
Hi, Steve Fishman here, creator of The Burden as well as the number one true crime podcast My Friend The Serial Killer. For those of you who liked The Burden, I have good news. Season two starts August seventh. It's a series called The Burden Empire on Blood and it's the director's cut of the true crime classic Empire on Blood, which reached number one on the charts when it debuted half a dozen years ago. Then the fat cat funders abandon it. I wrangled it back and now I'm thrilled to share this story of a man who fought the law for two decades, fought against the Bronx's top homicide prosecutor and a detective sometimes known as the Louis Scarcela of the Bronx. It's all coming to you August seventh, wherever you get your podcasts.
Previously on The Burden, we get on.
The plane take off, and the plane it's air pocket. Holy Christ, gotta take your jackals off because.
We may go down and you gotta swim. He confessed.
This guy named Derek Hamilton, who's an ex con kind of like a jail house lawyer.
So he gives me shabacca chaqueurs for forty information that would substantiate that he was a crooked.
God, I believe everybody wants to confess.
Y'all understand I didn't commit a crime. So in my mind, I'm like, this is gonna be worked out. I came into the precinct. You asked me where I was. I told you where I was. You asked me if I had any proof. I gave you the numbers of the people who I was with. You call these people so and you have no witnesses saying that they saw me shooting anybody. So I should walk out the priest and right there incomes Detective Lewis Scarsella. He was young, hat, you know, his hair like one of Johnson Walter type looking. You know what I'm saying. He just struck me as somebody really flamboyant. He immediately comes in aggressive toward me, telling me, I know who you are. I know you're a drug dealer. I know they're drug dealers. I know all y'all involved together, and you killed them. I immediately was offended. I lost my temper and I cursed him out, told him fuck you, and he started banging on the table saying I came here to help you, but you're gonna go upstate.
Now.
You're gonna be in jail for the rest of your life because you're an asshole. Just remember I gave you this chance to help yourself. I ignored it and he left. The first time I'm before the judge, the lawyer says, well, because I was saying, Joe, we need to explain, and he's like, no, no, no talk because we already have a confession. And I said, I don't have no confession. And he said, you made a statement to the police. I said, yeah, I told the police where I was. I told him I wasn't there. I never confessed with no murder. And he said, oh no, no, not the first police, but the second police. You confessed to him. And I was like, are you crazy? I never made no confession.
Shabacca Chicord was found guilty of a double homicide and received two terms of twenty to life to run consecutively.
Feel your body shaking.
You're gonna turn me. I'm gonna turn on you. Welcome to the Burden. I'm Dax delan Ross and I'm Steve Fishman.
In this episode, the actual Innocence Team.
So what's the detective's.
Job to do everything he can under the law with the tools he has given to get the confession.
He could be a gentle soul, he could be an understanding soul, and he could be a gorilla too. It takes a hell of a detective to know how to do that.
Yore.
Imagine if all of us was in the law library together. Imagine what we could do. We'd be able to run it like it's a real law firm. And that's when it hit me, we got to expose him.
You gotta hold old time.
There's a jail house folklore right that says that the best jail house law clerks or lawyers can never get themselves out. They will get everybody else out, but they can never get themselves out right, And it's true. That was one of those myths that I wanted to break. I was like, I bet I got to be able to get myself out.
Sabacca Chakor had a problem. He was twenty three years old and on the hook for two life sentences for a double homicide. He insists he didn't commit. For him, studying the law would become a necessity.
But being in jail is not generally conducive to the contemplation of a subject as complicated as the law.
I went through Rikers Island in the eighties and the nineties, it was like, could you even survive full to capacity? It might be a week before you got to a cell. In between that time, you were sleeping on the bullpen on the floor because if you didn't know how to fight, you wasn't going to get a bench. So the environment was extremely violent.
Chabaca was sent to Auburn Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in upstate New York where only the most dangerous criminals are sent. He was put in solitary, but for Shabaka it was a blessing in disguise. It actually gave him the chance to work on his first appeal.
I really believed on my first appeal, I was going to get out.
But at that time, Shebaca just didn't have what it took.
After I blew my appeal, I felt like, Okay, they don't want to let me go. They're gonna keep me here. I'm gonna be a territory. You've seen how Rodney King got beat that that's an everyday occurrence in prison. I'm not gonna be a victim to that. From the very first time that an officers struck me, I retaliated immediately. I swung back. I just went ballistics, swinging on everybody, trying to disarm them, take their stick swinging back. Instead of wanting to beat me up, they just wanted to put me in the cell, Like, put in the cell and close the door, like this guy's crazy. Like I wanted them to have that fear, and it worked. I purposely was just angry at the world that I was here. I felt like I had been red roaded, which I had, but I also felt like helpless.
Time passed, things calmed a bit. Sabaki's reputation as a fighter, it got around. Everyone left him alone, including the guards. But fighting that's only one side of Shabaka. Really, He's an intellectual, an introvert, kind of a bookworm.
When I was a solitary, I read fantasy books, novels, technical books, so I was always good by myself.
Shebaca was in solitary for a while, but once he got out, he did what anybody does. He started to build a life for himself. He got a job in the mess hall, he joined the boxing and football teams, and he even made some friends. I mean, after all, even when you're in prison, you still have to live a life. But then one day, another prisoner just a few cells down, struck up a conversation with.
Him, talking to him, and I'm like, hey, what's up? He said to me, Yo, man, I'm getting ready to go home. Right. Of course, part of me is happy for him, but part of me is miserable for me, Dax.
At that moment, Chabaca's been in prison how long?
Ten years?
I don't know what if the word jaded is right, but because here are guys who actually committed a crime and are going home, and I'm a guy who didn't commit a crime, and I'm not going home. And he kind of like left me feeling a little depressed, feeling like how do I beat this? How do I get out?
It was around this time that Schabacca remembered the conversation he'd had about a decade before with another prisoner. His name Derek Hamilton. You met him in episode one.
Derek is one of the first people that I met when I first got arrested.
When Derek and Schabacca met, Derek started making one point very clear.
And I'm telling him fuck your lawyer man. These guys don't work hard.
Derek was known as a genius when it came to the law, completely self taught and very motivated. At that moment, he's fighting his own.
Murder conviction, and Derek he had some words of advice for Shabaka.
You gotta go to lay library, you gotta study. You got to be the most smartest guy in that court. When where you're going, you better work on you better work, you better work.
I remember him telling me you can't trust lawyers. Lawyers are doing a job. They don't care whether you get out or not, because they're going to get paid either way. You are the only one who cares if you're getting out.
As clearing director as Derek's message was, it still took a while for it to sink in. But now years later, Shebaka is ready.
I said, Okay, I want to get out of jail. So I'm going to work in the law library where I can be around a book set all the time.
And lucky for Shabaka, every New York prison has to have a law library. It's a state mandate. So Shebacca became a law clerk at Auburn.
Every morning Shebacca went off to study. On his way to the law library, he would walk through the yard wearing his state greens, carrying his papers in a net bag. Eventually he even enrolled at Cornell University. It wasn't long before as professor took a liking to him. One of them even offered him a teacher's assistant position. But for Shabaka, there was always only one goal freedom.
I always thought I was with a couple hole, even when everybody else gave up. And I remember writing people and they was like, when you come at home, and I said, probably another two years, because I always felt like I'm right on the verge of getting out.
The factory. Means that with all of his appeals denied, he's running out of legal options. And it just so happens that at that exact moment, whispers start to spread through the yard, whispers of someone knew who's arrived, someone special.
That's when Derek came to Auburn.
Derek Hamilton, that's the guy who urged Shabaka to take the law into his own hands.
Even before Derek arrived at Auburn, he had quite a reputation among the inmates. Nelson Cruz he'd heard of Derek, this.
God like god when it comes to criminal law.
Nelson's another prisoner at Auburn.
Everybody loves him and knows him, and people that don't know him hears about him, and everybody want to just work with him because all they think about is freedom. Freedom, freedom, freedom, and especially if you're here for a crime you didn't commit.
So Nelson's thinking freedom. But I imagine that Shabaka, He's got to be thinking relief. At last, he has a partner as devoted to the law as he is.
The Lord was my girlfriend. It was all I had. It was all I had. I had to love it.
This is the ang way the freedom coming up. Sabacca and Derek reunited at Auburn. Get busy in the law library. Stay with us, Okay, Steve, Let's pause for a moment. Sabacca, as we've learned now, is adamant about his innocence. But let's take a moment and look at the crime he says he didn't commit.
Here are the essentials. So Schebacca was convicted of a double homicide. There were no fingerprints, no murder weapon. There was supposed lee and I witness, but his story turns out to be a bit changeable. Still, the cops aren't backing off. They like Shabaka for the crime. After all, he had a rap sheet, he'd been a drug dealer, he'd been in prison for a violent crime. You don't need to be Sherlock Holmes. For the cops, Sabacca fit the profile.
And Steve there is another key piece of evidence against Schabacco. Remember Scarcella claimed that Sabacca did confess to him. That's right.
It turns out it's not exactly a confession, but it is a very incriminating statement, and it is possible that's what sealed his fate. Here's what Scarcella claimed, Shebacca said to him, you know what happened, You have it all. They were going to kill me. They deserve to die.
That would be what would convince me if I now know that this person was a drug dealer who's already served time for a violent offense. All I would really need to hear is a statement provided to me by a very reputable detective. And this is it.
They are really powerful words. Listen, they provide a motive, and yeah, maybe that sealed his fate. What we know for sure is that nobody gets up to present Shobacca's side. Shobacca doesn't testify, his alibi witnesses don't testify, but Scarcela does testify, and he reads that incriminating statement to the jury. Of course, from Schebaca's point of view, its awn nonsense. Remember, Sabacca claims he never made any statement. He didn't even know there was a statement until his lawyer told.
Him, And that was the first time that I realized that there was a statement from Scarcella, because I had never made any statement.
It's now twenty years into his sentence. In Schebacca, he's at Auburn and still insisting that he never gave a statement that he's innocent.
Meanwhile, we'd just gotten out that Auburn now hosts brilliant legal minds. Another prisoner, Danny ringcon He immediately sees the potential.
We all have something in common, which was that we were wrong by a system.
Danny was convicted of four murders, which he says he didn't do. One day in the yard, he approaches Shabaka.
So Danny says, yo, imagine if all of us was in a law library together, Imagine what we could do. We'd be able to run it like it's a real law.
Firm, a real law firm in prison. Well, the firm's office, that's the law library. Let me set the scene for you, Steve, a corrections officer sits on a raised platform looking down over the prisoners, not unlike a judge surveiling them. There are a few worn out computers, no Internet, of course, and then there are the legal books, and there are lots of them. They line the walls. So what happens is when they come into the law library, these convicted murderers, they push together four wooden desks and they huddle around this makeshift conference table and they get to work. They've got their own filing cabinet, a whiteboard, and lots of open law books scattered all around them. And joining them at the table a young man named Nelson Cruz, the one who called Derek a god. When it comes to criminal.
Law man, you gotta be serus. This is servious. There's no game there, this is freedom there.
Like everyone else around that table, Nelson is also in for murder, and like everyone else, he claims he didn't do it.
And of course, the firm's intellectual leader is there at the head of the table, Derek Hamilton.
Don't tip the kool aid.
They're gonna come back in August, some ridiculous, stupid stuff.
Don't go at it.
I can imagine Derek scribbling rules of procedure on that whiteboard.
If you want to know how to do it, I'm gonna show you. This is how you write emotion. This is how you respond to something. This is how you tack something. This is how your mindset be. How do you get a hearing? How you don't get a hearing.
We would sit there like we was in class, going over everything. We analyzed every piece of evidence, We analyzed cases. This is how no Derek cases how know Danny's case. This is how they know my case because we would pick it apart.
Then Schabaca recalls that one they had a visitor with his own legal problem.
He was a guy from upstate who natural life with no possibility of parole, so he was never coming home.
Shabaka, Danny and Derek, they all liked e.
We sat down with him and we said, okay, let me see your paperwork. And we looked at me and said, wow, this has to be in in three days and you don't have nothing done. He had three issues argued on his appeal, so we each took an issue. Danny did one, Derek did one, and I did one. And it took us probably all day and all night, or one day, and then the next day all day and all night. But by the third day we all came in. We clamped it all together into one appeal, put a table of contents with it, and said here, here's your emotion, because we knew if he didn't get that in, his chances of getting out was forever going to be closed.
You can hear the excitement in Schebacca's voice. Maybe they could really do this, Maybe they can use the law to fight the law. It's like they realize at that moment they have skills, maybe even power. This case didn't work, he lost his appeal, but it's like this is an inspiration to these budding law partners.
And that's when I really started to say, like, wow, we didn't even plan that. So I knew that if we did plan we would get a lot more done. And that's when we really started saying, Yo, look we can do this actual innocystem. Let's start really putting this together.
This actual innocence thing. So the team's timing extremely lucky. Shebaca has all but exhausted in his state appeals in terms of getting out of jail. He's basically in a hopeless situation. But then Derek files emotion and the appeals court rules in Derek's favor. It says that a credible claim of actual innocence can't be ignored even if all appeals are exhausted. The ruling gives Shabaka one last shot in state court. If he can make a credible claim of actual innocence, the merits of his case must be heard.
Look, man, this is our team right here, just the AI team. We're gonna work these cases and we're gonna get out.
Let's think about what's happening here. You've got this ragtag group of convicted murderers, not a college degree among them, and they're fighting the Brooklyn District Attorney's office. This is in office with an entire division devoted to beating back any appeal and inmate makes. It's in office with five hundred highly trained prosecutors.
And this AI team. They don't have much in the way of technology, they don't have Google, but what they have is something you cannot buy. They are a group of people who are dead, dedicated to a singular cause to win their freedom, and this is a life or death situation for them. So I don't know about you, but I wouldn't count them out.
So back to the AI team. Everyone naturally found their role. Derek, he was the law professor. Stick to what your burden of proof is. Everybody knows how.
To make emotions, but how many times do you really know what your burden is?
Chabacca was a natural an expert at drafting legal documents.
I really understood the law like I can interpret it and say, okay, this is right, boy, look.
At this, and you might call Danny the public relations officer. He was reaching out to anyone who might help reporters, lawyers, family members.
I'm not going to coward. I'm not gonna sit down and cry because I'm going to rise up. And if I said I didn't commit this crime.
And then there's Nelson Cruz. Nelson did whatever was necessary, sort of like an intern. He was the youngest. He drew crime scenes. He also made the coffee in his cell and to do it, he used to sock as a strainer.
I got a brand new stock. Right. What I do is I poured a coffee in it, and then I poured the water inside the sock. And after I make the coffee, I'll call it. I'm like yo, Bush, I'm done.
Bush is Derek's nickname. Together he and Nelson, they m Agui rit the Pulley system to deliver the coffee back and forth.
A line is made out of our bass sheets. We throw the line and then well, I'll grab it and the hook hook the coffee onto it real nice and be careful he don't spill it, and he'll be pulling the line easily into a cell.
So Nelson, the intern, his job is to keep Derek fueled. Picture it Derek midnight in his cell. He rolls up his mattress, puts it on the floor, sits on it like it's a chair, and he places his typewriter on the metal frame of his bed and he starts typing his motions. He types his own motions and one for Nelson.
We had to be drinking all night, no shit or nothing. A straight black cowboys stout.
Yet the AI team, it was now like a brotherhood, and they made a promise to one another. Nobody from the team was going to be left behind. They'd all fight for each other's freedom, and that's going to be very important to one team member, Nelson Cruz.
The team was growing, flexing its muscles. They even started the clinic on the DL. The administration had no idea what they were up to.
People were dying to get in the class. We had twenty five and a wait unless of seventy five more. Administration was like, what kind of class is this?
They never had weight lisses like this Derek Danny Shebaka. They analyzed the student's cases. One person Shobacca helped was his friend Tone.
Tone was always getting extra time for minor infractions. Once, when he was on parole, he was fifteen minutes late for curfew. That landed him back in prison for two years. And when he was almost done with those two years, he got into a fight and he got two more years.
This guy did two years for being fifteen minutes late on a curfew, Like that makes no sense, and now he's got another two years for a fight.
Remember, Danny is the firm's pr rep. He's also an expert in writing letters.
I said, Danny, write it up. He wrote a nice letter to this guy, sent it to the superintendent the superintendent dismissed the ticket, right, So I said, this is step one to a watch. And then I took that letter and sent it to his parole officer and said there's no more basis for the two years he shouldn't be in jail. The parole officer that I was cool with, he said, you're right, you gotta be released. Probably a month after we started doing his thing, he was released, and Tone came in and crying. He's like, yo, I can't believe it. They gonna let me go.
The prison law firm was starting to get results, but.
The question is can they beat the curse of the jail house lawyer and get themselves out of jail.
Which means can they beat Scarcella.
That's after the break.
All right, Dax, Let's go back in time.
Long before the AI team was formed, Robert Hill was transferred to Auburn Correctional He's another important character. You met him in episode one. It's from talking to Robert Hill that Chabaca learned a crucial piece of information.
Robert Hill had been charged with two murders committed on two separate occasions, but there was just one witness. One witness for both murders. Her name Teresa Gomez.
The same witness that Frenchy discovered in that online cigar form, the same witness that Louis used over and over.
A prosecutor wrote that Teresa had a terrible drug addiction. His actual words quote, it would be near folly to believe anything she said, let alone that she saw two murders in two different places. Shabaka is shocked by his discovery, and he turns to Robert Hill.
And I tell him, I said, Scarcila's the officer in your case. And he's like, yeah. I said that's the same officer in my case and he said yeah. I said he's in my brother's case too. So I said, oh what, I said, your brother's your coat of finn He said no, no, no, no, my brother got his own case. Well, Scarcella was all sort of copy in his case. So I said, you know he's a crooked cop. He said, you ain't got to tell me. He used the same witness in my case and my brother case and in you know what I'm saying. So I was like, you gotta be kidding me. At the time, I still didn't know what to do with the information. It really wasn't until me and Derek had the conversation.
That's when Derek dropped a bomb. He had been reading Shabaka's legal papers when he noticed that Detective Louis Garcela had played a crucial role.
Damn, man, it's the same fucker that frame me.
After all the time they'd known each other, Shebaca and Derek had no idea that Louis Garcela was in each of their cases, the same.
Cop in the bottom of the report that has its attective Scarsella, Louis Scarsella.
It turned out that Scarcella was also a detective in Nelson's case, and.
The stuff that I read it was kind of like day Ja Vos all over again, Like, damn, this guy doesn't stop.
And Derek said, well, I know about this case in that case, and he started naming cases and that's when it hit me. We got to expose him. And that's when Derek said, Yo, you might be right.
Going after any cop is delicate, but when you've got one like Scarcella, who's high ranking, who's got accolades, who's really got a reputation citywide, that's even more delicate.
I said, Look, we can't attack him directly, because, of course, don't like when you just call cop a crooked cop.
So Gabacca devised a different strategy. In his four to forty motion, he denied that he made the confession to Scarcella. But remember Scarcella was widely respected for getting confessions. It was kind of considered like his superpower. So Schobacca couldn't just come out and call him a liar.
So I said, he isn't worthy of credibility, and I started showing a pattern of his misconduct. I showed that anything he said had to be scrutinized.
Chabacca put together evidence gathered from his AI teen colleagues. He cited the cases of Derek and the case of Robert Hill, and for the first time he showed what he called a pattern and practice of corrupt police behavior. It was a breakthrough.
He was particularly proud of the way he expressed his concerns about Scarcela.
Detective Scarcella's a to procure incorporating evidence may not be entirely the result of Christine police work.
I gotta say that's impressively understated.
Schabacca's motion claimed actual innocence, and it worked. The court granted him a new hearing. Sabacca was going to have his day in court, but there is still a huge challenge in front of him. Being a jailhouse lawyer, even one as good as Shabaka is one thing. Standing up in a courtroom with confidence and arguing the intricacies of courtroom procedure, that's quite another.
My only fit was that I didn't know courtroom etiquette.
So Sabacca needed help. But he wasn't going to engage just any lawyer. He demanded one who degree to a key point.
I came in there telling him, I don't care who you are. I know my case and we're going to do this my way. You know what I'm saying.
And what he meant was that there was one thing that he wasn't going to negotiate with anyone about. Scarcella needed to be confronted with evidence. It had taken him years to a symbol of his past misdeeds.
We're going to call Scarsela like he needs to.
Be put on a stand.
Schabacca would have to show that Scarcella is not worthy of credibility, that he had a quote unquote pattern and practice of cheating, and he had ammunition to start with Remember the witness who had been Scarcella's secret weapon in so many cases, the witness who claimed she saw Robert Hill commit two different murders. I mean that sure did seem fishy, and then suddenly it seemed even fishier. Turned out she witnessed a lot of murders, or said she did.
She was telling the truth.
What more do you want me to tell you?
This would have been eleven murders. That's next time on The Burden.
Your body shaking.
You, you're gonna tell me, I'm gonna turn on you. The Burden is created by Steve Fishman. It's hosted and reported by Steve Fishman and myself, Dax Devlyn Ross. Our story editor is Dan Bobkoff. Our senior producer is Simon Rittner. Our producer is Snon Skelly. Our associate producer is Austin Smith. Our fact checker is Sona Avakian. A production coordinator is Davon Paradise. Mixing and sound design is provided by Mumble Media. Our executive producers are Fisher Stevens, Steve Fishman, and Evan Williams. Additional production help has been provided by Josie Holtzman. Isaac Kestenbaum, Naomi Brauner, Lucy Souchek, Drew Nellis, Micah Hazel, Priscilla A. Labbi, Saxon Baird, Katie Simon and Katie Springer. We want to give us special thanks to Ellen Horn, Zach Stuart Pontier, Lizzie Jacobs, Nathan Tempe, to buy a Black, Rachel Morrissey, Mark Smirling and Lila Robinson. Special thanks to Marcy Wiseman. We want to thank our agents, Ben Davis and Marissa Horowitz. Legal support has been provided by Mona Hook at MKSR LLP. And a very special thanks to Evan Williams, one of our executive producers and the person who made this podcast possible. We are honored to feature the song black Lightning from the Bell Rais is our theme music. The Burden is a production of Orbit Media and association with Signal Company.
Number one, Season two of The Burden Empire on Blood will be available everywhere you get your podcasts on August seventh. All episodes will be available early and ad free, along with exclusive bonus content on Orbit's newly launched True Crime Clubhouse, our subscription channel on Apple Podcasts. It's only two ninety nine a month,