Brenton Butler didn't do it: but he did confess. And so do a surprising number of innocent people--teenagers in particular. Studies show that teens are especially vulnerable to making false confessions with terrible consequences.

On May 7, 2000, Brenton Butler was walking to Blockbuster video store to fill out a job application when he was picked up by police as murder suspect. The slight 15-year-old from Jacksonville, Florida, had never been in trouble before, and he told police that he had nothing to do with the murder. Still, for almost 12 hours, detectives kept Butler locked in an interrogation room with carpeted walls, refused to let him see his parents or speak to a lawyer, gave him just a cup of water and a couple of pieces of stale Chex mix to eat, and insisted that he had shot and killed a woman. To Butler's repeated pleas of innocence they spat back: "You're lying."

"I was scared," recalls Butler, now 18 and since cleared of any connection in the case. "I had no business being there, and I felt trapped at their mercy."

Though police deny it, Butler says at one point a detective punched him in the stomach and then in the eye. And, Butler says, when an officer wrote out a "confession" and he still refused to sign, the cop unstrapped his holster. "I said, 'What you gonna do? Shoot me?'" Butler recalls. "And he said, 'You guessed right.'" Butler signed the confession.

How could this happen? How could an innocent person admit to doing something he didn't do? It turns out that under the right stressful set of circumstances, people do confess to crimes they did not commit. In some cases, false confessions have landed innocent people behind bars for years. Some justice experts say false confessions are a terrible problem that calls into question the very integrity of the justice system. Teenagers, many believe, are particularly susceptible to being coerced into confessing to crimes they didn't do.

"Teenagers tend to place too much faith in the ability of the legal system to ferret out the truth," says Steven Drizin of the Children and Family Justice Center, which has compiled a list of 40 verified cases of juveniles falsely confessing. "They may decide to confess because they're tired of the interrogation process, thinking that once this matter ends up in court, everything will be cleared up."

Law-enforcement officials say the problem of false confession is tiny when taken in the context of the entire justice system Robert McColloch, president of the National District Attorneys Association, says those who enforce the law take great pains to avoid prosecuting the innocent.

"From the police and prosecutorial perspective, we're interested in having the right person in the courtroom and in jail not the wrong guy," McColloch says. "We're always looking for something in the statement that can be independently verified."

Indeed, the number of false confessions by teenagers uncovered so far is miniscule compared with the mote than 2 million teens arrested a year (See graph below). Regardless of numbers, however, justice experts say the horrific consequences--innocent people languishing in prison--justify serious attention.

"We are convicting innocent people, and it's time to take a good look at that, critique our system, and implement some institutional changes," says Sarah Tofte of the Innocence Project, a group that works to exonerate the wrongfully convicted.

How do these disasters happen? Sometimes, critics say, police interrogate too aggressively; but mostly, it's because teenagers are developmentally different in a number of ways that make them more vulnerable, experts say. "Kids are much more likely to focus on the short-term consequences of their decision and not pay attention to long-term consequences," says Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University. "So when a cop says, 'If you tell me you did it, I'll let you go home' that will be much more important ha the mind of 16-year-old."

QUESTIONED FOR 27 HOURS

Take the case of Michael Crowe, of Escondido, California. In 1998, Crowe, then 14, was accused of murdering his 12-year-old sister in the middle of the night. Police questioned Crowe with out his parents or a lawyer present for 27 hours over the course of three days. They convinced him that he killed his sister and blacked it out, and coerced him into signing a confession.

"The only police officer I had ever met was my DARE officer at school," says Crowe. "I was completely out of my element. I just had blind faith in them."

Now 20 years old, Crowe sarcastically refers to his interrogation as "my crash course in police misconduct." Police told him they had forensic evidence that implicated him--a lie they are allowed to tell. They also told him he had the right to remain silent and to talk to a lawyer, but Crowe waived those rights. "The way they made it feel was that if I told them I didn't want to talk to them anymore, I'd be in trouble," he recalls.

Teenagers are more likely to defer to authority and less likely to understand that police can lie during an interrogation. Some of the tactics police regularly use, such as questioning throughout the nigh t or depriving suspects of food, are particularly devastating to adolescents. And some of the nonverbal cues that police look for as a sign of guilt, such as slouching or failure to make eye contact, are typical adolescent behaviors.

Perhaps most important, teens are less likely to understand their Miranda rights--their constitutional rights to refuse to answer questions and to have a lawyer present--and they're more likely to waive them. Like Crowe, 95 percent of teens waive their Miranda rights, compared with 80 percent of adults (See "Should the high court restrict a suspect's right to remain silent?" page 29).

Experts say it's often hard for teenagers to know when to talk to the police and when it's not in their best interests. Jorge Hernandez was 18 when he falsely confessed to raping a 94-year old woman at a Palo Alto, California, senior citizens' home. "They asked me to describe the place [where the rape happened]," he says. "I thought I was helping them. I didn't know I was getting myself in trouble." Prosecutors later dropped the charges against Hernandez.

USING THE SAME "BAG OF TRICKS"

In most states, police interrogate juveniles the same way they interrogate adults. A Supreme Court decision requires courts to take "special care" when evaluating juvenile confessions, but it's largely up to police to decide how to treat juveniles during interrogations. There are 17 states that require some kind of parental involvement in juvenile interrogations, but law-enforcement experts say some police departments interpret that involvement merely as having a parent present in the building, not in the interrogation room.

"Police only know how to interrogate one way, so when they do an interrogation they use the same bag of tricks that's used in the interrogation of an adult," says Richard Ofshe, a sociology professor at the University of California at Berkeley and an expert in false confessions.

Most justice experts advocate three interrogation reforms to better protect teenagers:

* Mandate the videotaping of the entire interrogations of all juveniles. Alaska and Minnesota require electronic taping of all police interrogations, regardless of a suspect's age; Illinois requires that all homicide interrogations be taped. In Michael Crowe's case, his entire interrogation was videotaped, and seeing it prompted the prosecution to deem his confession coerced and drop the murder charges.

* Require a parent and/or an attorney to be in the room during a juvenile interrogation. "If you're trader the age of 18, you can't enter into a contract," says Crowe. "The way I see it, Miranda rights are a contract with the police. I really think your parents or a lawyer or a legal guardian should be involved with any interactions with the police."

* Teach the police how to question juveniles without suggesting what happened as--they now do with child victims and child witnesses.

AT LONG LAST, A HAPPY ENDING

In court, confessions are powerful evidence; juries tend to believe innocent people would never confess (See "Why Would They Falsely Confess?" page 11). Calvin Ollins spent 15 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, because of a false confession he signed when he was just 14. In a nine-hour interrogation, Ollins says, he insisted he knew nothing about the murder, but the Chicago police fed him details about the crime and implied that he could go home if he admitted being there. Finally, he signed.

"They took me downstairs and I thought I was going home, but instead they handcuffed me," recalls Ollins, now 31. He was tried as an adult, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. In 2001, DNA evidence proved his innocence. Walking free after 15 years in prison was "like a kid being born again," he says.

In Brenton Butler's case, the system eventually worked: A jury found him not guilty. But he had "already spent six and a half months in jail--including his 16th birthday. Not long thereafter, the teal killer was caught. Butler sued the city of Jacksonville over his treatment. The case was settled for $775,000.

"To be honest with you, I try not to think about it," Butler says of his ordeal. "It was messed up, everything that happened to me."

A SNAPSHOT OF TEEN CRIME

Of the 2.4 million juveniles arrested
in 1999, only 1.7 million entered the
courts. Here's breakdown of what those
teens were arrested for:

property crime [burglary,
theft, and car theft]                       21.9%

drug-abuse violations                          8%

vandalism                                    4.8%

assaults                                     9.6%

liquor-law violation                         6.7%

various other offenses such as loitering,
drunk driving, and disorderly conduct       44.7%

violent crimes [murder, rape,
robbery, assault with a weapon]              4.2%

Note: Table made from pie chart.

WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS

Using DNA evidence, the Innocence Project has so far
prevent the innocence of 130 wrongfully convicted people.
Here are some of the factors contributing to those convictions:

false confessions          35

mistaken eyewitness IDs   104

faulty or discredited
scientific evidence        46

jailhouse snitches         25

Note: Table made from bar graph.

RELATED ARTICLE: Why would they falsely confess?

Why on earth would an innocent person falsely confess to committing a crime? To most people, it just doesn't seem logical. But it is logical, say experts, if you understand what can happen in a police interrelation room.

Under the right conditions, people's minds are susceptible to influence, and the pressure put on suspects luring police grillings is enormous. "It's a little like somebody's working on them with a dental drill," says Franklin Zimring, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. "The pressure is important to understand, because otherwise it's impossible to understand why someone would say he did something he didn't do. The answer is: to put an end to an uncomfortable situation that will continue until he does confess."

Developmental psychologist Allison Redlich recently conducted a laboratory study to determine how likely people are to confess to things they didn't do. In her experiment, participants were seated at computers and old not to hit the "alt" key, because doing so would crash he systems. The researchers then intentionally crashed he computers and accused the participants of hitting the "art" key to see if they would sign a statement falsely taking responsibility.

Redlich's findings starkly demonstrate how easy it can be to get people to falsely confess: 59 percent of the young adults in the experiment immediately confessed. Redlich also found that the younger the participant, the here likely a false confession. Of the 15- to 16-year-olds, 72 percent signed confessions, as did 78 percent of the 12- to 13-year-olds.

"There's no question that juveniles are more at risk," lays Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at Williams College, who has done similar studies with similar results. But the baseline is that adults are highly vulnerable too."

Both Kassin and Redlich note that the entire "interrogation" in their experiments consisted of a simple accusation--not hours of belligerent questioning--and still, most participants falsely confessed.

Because of the stress of a police interrogation, they conclude, suspects can become convinced that falsely confessing is the easiest way out of a bad situation. "In some ways," says Kassin, "false confession becomes a rational decision."

--Patricia Smith

What Are Your Rights?

The Fifth Amendment protects your right against self-incrimination. The Supreme Court's Miranda ruling specifies that:

[right arrow] You have the right to remain silent. [This means you do not have to answer police questions.]

[right arrow] You have the right to consult a lawyer. [If you ask for a lawyer, police are obligated to let you talk to one.]

[right arrow] If you can pay a lawyer, the state must provide one.

How You Can Get Involved

The Innocence Project works to exonerate wrongfully convicted inmates, it has offices around the country, and they welcome high school volunteers. To get involved, check out their Web site to find an office near you: www.innocenceproject.org

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

* Should police be allowed to interrogate suspects in the absence of defense attorneys?

* Should police who coerce confessions face punishment? If so, what type of punishment would you recommend?

TEACHING OBJECTIVES

To help students understand the controversy over coerced confessions, specifically the charge that police sometimes pressure teens to confess to crimes they did not commit.

CRITICAL THINKING/WRITING: Have students write brief essays--either in class or as homework assignments--in which they theorize why the police used the methods they did in the three cases described in the article. Students should explain why they regard the police tactics as violative of Miranda and the Fifth Amendment, or as an acceptable strategy for interrogating suspects.

ROLE-PLAY: Students might also write and act out a brief one-act play based on information in the article. In the first half of the play, half the class takes turns playing police interrogating another student who plays a "suspect." Students must use knowledge gleaned from the article to formulate questions and answers. How might they perform if they were interrogating in a manner similar to that described in the Brenton Butler, Michael Crowe, and Calvin Ollins cases?

"Interrogators" should pay special attention to "Why Would They Falsely Confess?" on page 11. They must make specific promises designed to persuade the suspect that the most logical choice at the moment is to confess to the crime in question.

Next, switch gears. Replace the police with a new team from the rest of the class. Repeat the interrogation with each student taking a turn, but this time using the reforms favored by the experts. How would police now interrogate--without suggesting what happened? What would a parent or lawyer (played by students) say to the suspect during interrogation?

At the conclusion of the exercise, students should discuss the effectiveness of each method.

WEB WATCH: Go to the Innocence Project at www.innocenceproject.org/. For a quick summary of the Miranda v. Arizona ruling see www.factmonster.com/ce6/history/A0833372.html.

Upfront QUIZ 1

MULTIPLE CHOICE > NATIONAL > PAGES 8-13. DIRECTIONS: Circle the letter next to the correct answer.

1. Why are teenagers more likely than adults to make false confessions?

a Police usually have some evidence against teens.

b Most teens feel guilty about something.

c Teens are more likely than adults to defer to authority.

d Many teens can't differentiate between the truth and lying.

2. A police tactic that is illegal in court, hut legal in the interrogation of suspects, is

a questioning suspects about their personal lives.

b asking whether the suspect committed the crime.

c asking about suspects' school or employment records.

d lying.

3. The organization that works to free those who have been wrongfully convicted of crimes is

a Amnesty International.

b the Innocence Project.

c the Red Cross.

d the Legal Defenders office.

4. Which are rights under Miranda? The right during questioning to

a refuse to answer questions and have a lawyer present.

b have a parent present.

c have a friend present.

d ask police about their knowledge of the crime.

5. Experts favor three reforms to protect teens during interrogations. Among these is videotaping, having a parent and/or lawyer present, and

a religious counseling.

b prohibiting police from suggesting what happened.

c banning interrogation at night.

d avoiding direct questions about the teen's guilt.

6. Teen suspects often miscalculate the importance of consequences. What are these teens miscalculating?

a They don't understand the length of their sentences.

b They miscalculate the suffering of their families.

c They don't understand the effect of acting guilty.

d They focus on short- not long-term consequences.

1. (c) teens are more likely to defer to authority during interrogation.

2. (d) lying.

3. (b) the Innocence Project.

4. (a) refuse to answer questions and have a lawyer present.

5. (b) prohibiting police from suggesting what happened.

6. (d) they focus on short not long-term consequences.