Over the past decade, the group's director, Ann Blake Tracy, has become involved in several murder cases in which a defendant has been on antidepressants or other drugs.
The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, ordered a review of convictions that resulted from Mr. Scarcella's work after The Times revealed that the now-retired detective used the same crack-addicted prostitute as a witness in several murder cases.
The denunciation of the OCDA's office comes amid the unraveling of several murder cases in the county, following the discovery of violations in a jailhouse informant program and the emergence of shocking allegations that county prosecutors have been obstructing justice in multiple cases for some time.
This young age has been controversial in the past, particularly in several recent murder cases involving children, and, more recently, the spate of riots in August.
Clarke is a veteran of several high-profile murder cases, having defended the Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, and the Atlanta Olympics bomber, Eric Rudolph, both of whom were convicted but escaped the death sentence.
While attorney general he worked with the commission that established the border between Maine and New Brunswick, and prosecuted several high-profile murder cases.
Since its inception in May 2007, the Miami program has led to 264 arrests and the confiscation of 432 guns owned illegally and $2.2 million in drugs, and has solved several murder and burglary cases.
In several of the recent murder cases, though, court records show that the accused killers had already been charged with misdemeanors after violating protection orders or had been convicted of other crimes related to abusing the victim; one had been deported, only to return to the country illegally within weeks.
The district attorney opened a review of 40 criminal cases involving 50 defendants after The New York Times found, among other things, that several of the detective's murder cases used the same witness, a crack-addicted prostitute.
For example, several stories about homicide and murder cases in Canada mentioned the use of marijuana by the perpetrators, especially youth perpetrators.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have extradited several defendants from Trinidad in gang and murder cases in recent years, and one prosecutor in the Kennedy case, Jeffrey H. Knox, was involved in some of those proceedings.
