A Brooklyn teen accused of setting a mattress on fire in the hallway of his Coney Island apartment building because he “was bored” — a blaze that killed a police officer responding to the scene and critically injured his partner — is claiming detectives somehow coerced his handwritten and oral confessions by threatening to evict him and his mother from the city housing project.
And he even won $2,500 in taxpayer money on Thursday to hire an expert in false confessions.
“They broke him the same way prisoners of war are broken. Marcell’s not a soldier. He’s a scared little kid in that room,” defense attorney Jesse Young outrageously claimed after a brief pretrial hearing for Marcell Dockery, 16, who faces a murder rap for lighting the blaze that killed Officer Dennis Guerra on April 6, 2014.
“It was a direct threat. They said, ‘We’ll evict her if you don’t confess.’”
Young asked in court papers for money to hire false confession expert Richard Ofshe and repeated the request in court Thursday, adding that he wants Ofshe to review case records and speak with Dockery.
“Right now I can’t send him that material because I can’t ask him to review it without being paid,” Young said in court.
Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun approved the $2,500 so false confession expert Richard Ofshe – a professor at the University of California at Berkeley – could begin reviewing court papers but said he has not yet decided whether Ofshe would be allowed to testify at trial.
Judges most often approve $1,000 for defense attorneys to hire experts or private investigators but regularly bump the number higher if they deem it necessary, defense attorneys and court staffers said.
“I understand this is not a normal or average case so I’ll go beyond the amount usually assigned,” Chun said.
Young even raised the specter of the Central Park 5, holding aloft an iPad with a photo of the teens in court as he said, “We don’t want this to keep happening. We know now that these five people, their confessions were coerced.”
A city Housing Authority spokeswoman declined to comment about the Dockery family but said misdemeanor and felony offenses can be grounds for eviction — as is anything that presents “a danger to the health and safety of the tenant’s neighbors.”
Indeed, a NYCHA eviction letter written to Dockery’s mom on May 27, 2014 cited the charges against Dockery.
Young said he postponed eviction proceedings by writing a letter back to NYCHA that said the charges against Dockery were only alleged.
Court papers, meanwhile, detail Dockery’s confession, including his statement that, “I started the fire by using a lighter to set a mattress on fire.”
Officer Guerra, 38, a married father of four, and his partner Officer Rosa Rodriguez, 36, were the first two cops on the scene of the April 6 fire.
They were overcome by thick smoke as they stepped off a 13th-floor elevator and into a hallway where a mattress was set on fire.
Guerra was declared brain-dead after he was rescued from the fire and died at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx on April 9, 2014.
Rodriguez was critically injured by the fire and spent over a month recuperating before she was released from New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center on May 19, 2014.