It might be difficult to understand why someone would falsely confess to a crime. But under certain circumstances, anyone can end up doing so, according to Laurie Roberts, state policy advocate for the Innocence Project.
Roberts spoke during the recent Rudman Center event: The Innocence Project: Correcting and Preventing Wrongful Convictions. Watch the full conversation here. (Panelists’ quotes have been edited slightly in this story for clarity.) The discussion was moderated by Laura Knoy, Director of Community Engagement for the Rudman Center.
The Innocence Project is a national organization that works with local partners, including the New England Innocence Project, to pass laws and implement policies that prevent wrongful convictions and to help exonerees rebuild their lives.
“We know that there are a lot of risk factors that would lead someone to falsely confess, like being really exhausted or not being fed, or being interrogated for 14 hours straight, mental limitations, mental incapacities, substance abuse, fear of reprisal if you don’t say what the cops want you to say, or the inference that if you say what they want you to say, then you’ll get to go home,” Roberts said.
Age is also a factor: 50% of false confessions involve someone under the age of 21, and 30% involve someone under the age of 18.
Huwe Burton was 16 when his mother was found murdered in his Bronx home. Not long after, Burton found himself under interrogation by detectives who used psychologically coercive techniques, including threatening additional criminal charges, and offering leniency if he confessed to killing his mother.
Another suspect emerged after his false confession – the Burtons’ downstairs tenant who had an extensive criminal history and had been found driving the car owned by Burton’s mother after her murder. But he was murdered before he could be cross-examined at Burton’s trial. Burton, who had recanted his confession, was convicted in 1991 of the murder of his mother. He spent nearly 20 years in prison before he was released on parole. He was exonerated in 2019.
Now, Burton is a public speaker, an advocate for the Innocence Project, and a real-estate investor.
Recording Interrogations: A Common-Sense Measure
For decades, 30 states, Washington, D.C., and federal agencies have required recording of police interrogations, Roberts said.
“It’s a really common-sense way to not just have a record of what happened inside of an interrogation room,” Roberts said. “But also, so we have an opportunity in those instances when someone is alleging a wrongful confession, to go back and look and see if we see the risk factors that would lead us to believe that this was a false confession.”
Although Burton’s false confession was recorded, his full interrogation was not. “If these things had been done correctly, I wouldn’t be sitting here today,” he said.
Recording the entire interview also helps police, said David Thompson, a certified forensic interviewer and president of Wicklander-Zulawsky & Associates, Inc., an international training firm that specializes in nonconfrontational interview and interrogation techniques. “It changes the pressure that’s on the investigator to not just get a confession – that’s the wrong approach. The interview should be about gathering as much intelligence as possible to further investigate.”
Burton also describes feeling isolated during his interrogation. “They wanted to make sure that I didn’t have access to anyone. My family was being told I didn’t want to see them. I wasn’t told that they were downstairs,” he said.
“U.S. Supreme Court case law says that if your father had gotten an attorney and the attorney had shown up, police are under no obligation to tell the person who is being interrogated that there’s a lawyer for you,” said Anthony (Buzz) Scherr, who teaches criminal law and procedure at the UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law and serves as a police commissioner in Portsmouth. The New Hampshire Supreme Court came to a different conclusion, he said, requiring police to inform anyone in custody of a lawyer’s presence.
Scherr recently testified in favor of a bill in the N.H. state Senate requiring police to record interrogations.
Other factors in wrongful convictions: mistaken witness identification, misapplication of forensic science, and testimony of jailhouse informants who have been given incentives, including favorable plea bargains, to lie. Race, also, plays a role. Among the findings of a 2022 National Registry of Exonerations report: Black people are 13.6% of the American population but 53% of the 3,200 exonerations listed; innocent Black Americans are seven times more likely than white Americans to be falsely convicted of serious crimes.
Asked if he felt he would have been treated differently by the detectives if he were a white teenager, Burton’s answer was unequivocal: Yes.
The Personal and Societal Costs of Wrongful Convictions
“For a very long time the criminal justice system didn’t believe that wrongful convictions happened,” said Laurie Roberts.
The Innocence Project was established in 1982 by public defenders Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, who had realized that just as DNA has the power to convict, Roberts said, it has the power to exonerate.
Wrongful convictions also compromise public safety. “In 50 percent of our exoneration cases, we have identified the real perpetrator,” she said. “And 50 percent of those real perpetrators went on to commit additional violent crimes, including over 80 rapes and 30 murders.”
For Huwe Burton, sharing his story in public settings has been therapeutic. “For the 20 years I served, I couldn’t pay anybody to listen to me,” he said. His father’s advice helped him keep bitterness at bay. “He used to tell me things like, don’t allow this place to make you black-hearted, don’t allow it to make you so bitter where you can’t see beautiful things around you, or you can’t function. If you do that, even after they let you go, they would have won.”
