PUBLISHER'S NOTE: On Friday 25 January, 2019, I ran a post (link below) centered on the Huwe Burton Case - a false confession case - under the heading, "Huwe Burton exonerated today in the Bronx after 30 years," Innocence Project reports in a release.
https://www.lohud.com/story/news/local/putnam/2019/03/04/judge-allows-anthony-dipippo-wrongful-conviction-lawsuit-josette-wright/3051093002/
Following the heading I noted: "Burton’s legal team and the Bronx CIU jointly conducted an exhaustive two-year re-investigation that uncovered newly discovered evidence, including: (1) scientific and scholarly research confirming that the psychologically coercive techniques used by the detectives produce false confessions; (2) the same detectives who elicited Burton’s false confession also obtained false confessions from two other individuals three months earlier; and (3) the background and prior criminal history of the alternate suspect, Emanuel Green, that strongly supports the defense team’s contention that Green committed the crime alone. Based on these findings, the Bronx CIU recommended that Burton’s conviction be vacated and the charges be dismissed." By way of publisher's note, I then added: This tragic case - decades seized from an innocent man's life - is a classic example of a pressing theme of this Blog - the need for courts to welcome new scientific research on false confessions - and for police and prosecutors to be aware, and adhere to, the steps that can be taken to avoid dangerously coercive interrogation techniques." This important aspect is stressed in the following U.S. National Registry of Exoneration entry by author Ken Otterbourg. HL:
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY:
"Burton recanted his confession and said it was coerced by the police. In pre-trial motions and hearings, he tried unsuccessfully to have it suppressed. When Burton’s trial began in 1991, his attorney, William Kunstler, wanted to offer an expert witness to testify about false confessions, and why a 16-year-old boy who was all alone, raised to be respectful of authority, and grieving over the death of his mother would be particularly susceptible to police interrogative tactics. At the time, there was only limited research on the phenomenon of false confessions, and the trial judge didn’t allow that testimony.A jury convicted Burton on September 25, 1991 of second-degree murder and fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon. He was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.
By the time attorneys with the Innocence Project of New York began representing Burton in 2009, considerable research had been done in the area of false confessions. The research had firmly established that they exist, and that the situation that Burton found himself in as a young, scared teenager could produce a false confession.
Eventually, attorneys with Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions and Rutgers Law School’s Criminal and Youth Justice Clinic joined Burton's legal team. They brought the case to the conviction integrity unit of the Bronx District Attorney’s Office in 2016. The parties then spent two years studying Burton’s confession, the means by which it was obtained, and the apparent contradictions between his confession and what the evidence suggests happened in the apartment.
First, the investigation showed the detectives who interrogated Burton had produced false confessions before in a homicide case three months earlier. While those two suspects were acquitted at trial, the coercive techniques were similar to those used on Burton.
The initial examination of Mrs. Burton’s body at the time of her son’s confession suggested that there was a single fatal wound, so violent that it had gone through one side of her neck and out the other. And in his confession, Burton said he stabbed his mother once with a serrated knife and then she fell to the bed. But a later, more extensive examination showed she had been stabbed twice, with a smooth-bladed knife. She had also been beaten, which is not mentioned in Burton’s confession. Burton said that after he stabbed his mother, he dropped the knife on the floor. But the knife recovered at the scene was behind the bed, and testing revealed no traces of blood.
In his confession, Burton said that he bound only one of his mother’s wrists, which is how she was found. But binding a single wrist – although it conforms with the crime scene -- would not restrain a person.
Finally, Burton’s confession was filled with police jargon as opposed to descriptions a boy would use. He said he was “stimulated” on cocaine, “associating with a friend,” and “proceeding” up a road."
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POST: National Registry of Science entry for Huwe Burton, by Ken Otterbourg: (1919);
GIST: When the police in the Bronx, N.Y., arrived at the apartment of Keziah Burton on January 3, 1989, the 59-year-old woman was already dead. She had been stabbed in the neck and was face down in a nightgown on her bed. Her underwear had been removed, initially suggesting a sexual assault. There was a telephone cord wrapped around one wrist, and the contents of her purse were strewn on the living-room floor.
The 911 call had been made by Burton’s 16-year-old son, Huwe Burton, who
told police that he had come home from school just before three. While
he noticed that the TV was on and his mother’s belongings were on the
floor, he said he thought she had just run to the store. He said that
before he had a chance to look more carefully around the apartment, the
phone rang, and a friend invited him over to her apartment. It was only
after he arrived home at about 5:40 that he looked in his parents’
bedroom and found his mother’s body.
The police never established a time of death, but they believed that Keziah Burton knew her killer. There was no sign of forced entry and no forensic evidence of a sexual assault. Investigators quickly focused on Huwe. They were initially suspicious because he said he knew the exact time, 2:47 p.m., that he had come home from school. That, the investigators thought, seemed like he was trying to establish an alibi. Second, he said that he had been at school all day, but his first-period teacher told police he was not in her class that morning.
The police brought Burton in for questioning on January 5. They interrogated him for three hours. Twice, he asked to speak to his father, who was out of the country. Those requests were denied. They told him he was lying about when he was at school. The friend Burton had visited the afternoon of his mother’s death was a 13-year-old girl, and she and Burton had had sex. The officers told him that was statutory rape, and he could go to jail for that.
While the interrogation itself wasn’t recorded, Burton would produce a written and videotaped confession in which he said he was high on crack cocaine and had killed his mother during a fight. He was arrested and charged with murder.
Six days after Burton’s confession, police in Westchester County, N.Y. stopped a man named Emanuel Green. He was driving Mrs. Burton’s Honda, which had been reported stolen on the day of her death. Green lived downstairs from the Burtons. He had been interviewed early in the investigation, but at that time, police didn’t know he had an extensive criminal record that included convictions for rape and robbery. He was interrogated by the police, and he signed a statement that said Burton had come to him for help after he had killed his mother. Green said it was his idea to make the killing look like the work of an intruder. Although charged with larceny, possession of stolen property, and hindering prosecution, Green was not charged as an accomplice in Mrs. Burton’s murder. He died before Burton’s trial.
Burton recanted his confession and said it was coerced by the police. In pre-trial motions and hearings, he tried unsuccessfully to have it suppressed. When Burton’s trial began in 1991, his attorney, William Kunstler, wanted to offer an expert witness to testify about false confessions, and why a 16-year-old boy who was all alone, raised to be respectful of authority, and grieving over the death of his mother would be particularly susceptible to police interrogative tactics. At the time, there was only limited research on the phenomenon of false confessions, and the trial judge didn’t allow that testimony.
A jury convicted Burton on September 25, 1991 of second-degree murder and fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon. He was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.
By the time attorneys with the Innocence Project of New York began representing Burton in 2009, considerable research had been done in the area of false confessions. The research had firmly established that they exist, and that the situation that Burton found himself in as a young, scared teenager could produce a false confession.
Eventually, attorneys with Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions and Rutgers Law School’s Criminal and Youth Justice Clinic joined Burton's legal team. They brought the case to the conviction integrity unit of the Bronx District Attorney’s Office in 2016. The parties then spent two years studying Burton’s confession, the means by which it was obtained, and the apparent contradictions between his confession and what the evidence suggests happened in the apartment.
First, the investigation showed the detectives who interrogated Burton had produced false confessions before in a homicide case three months earlier. While those two suspects were acquitted at trial, the coercive techniques were similar to those used on Burton.
The initial examination of Mrs. Burton’s body at the time of her son’s confession suggested that there was a single fatal wound, so violent that it had gone through one side of her neck and out the other. And in his confession, Burton said he stabbed his mother once with a serrated knife and then she fell to the bed. But a later, more extensive examination showed she had been stabbed twice, with a smooth-bladed knife. She had also been beaten, which is not mentioned in Burton’s confession. Burton said that after he stabbed his mother, he dropped the knife on the floor. But the knife recovered at the scene was behind the bed, and testing revealed no traces of blood.
In his confession, Burton said that he bound only one of his mother’s wrists, which is how she was found. But binding a single wrist – although it conforms with the crime scene -- would not restrain a person.
Finally, Burton’s confession was filled with police jargon as opposed to descriptions a boy would use. He said he was “stimulated” on cocaine, “associating with a friend,” and “proceeding” up a road.
The police had focused on Burton because his teacher had said he wasn’t at his first-period class, and during the interrogation, they had used that apparent lie to break him down and induce the confession. But shortly after the confession, the teacher told the police she had checked her records. Burton was in class that morning.
Separately, the CIU investigation found significant inconsistencies in Green’s statements to police. Green told police that he had bound both of Mrs. Burton’s wrists with the telephone cord. Burton’s confession only mentioned a single wrist, which is how the body was found.
In one statement, Green told police that he removed the knife from Mrs. Burton’s neck. In another, he said Burton removed the knife. Green said he told Burton to get rid of the murder weapon and then Green put a steak knife near the body. “A more likely scenario,” the CIU noted when filing for charges to be dismissed against Burton, “is that Green got rid of the knife because it was his knife and it linked him to the crime as the actual assailant.”
The problem, the CIU investigation noted, was that Burton had already confessed by the time police arrested and interrogated Green. Rather than seeing the new evidence for what it was – a neighbor with a history of violence driving a car stolen from a murder victim, the police used Green to confirm their theory of the crime with Burton as the killer and Green as an accessory.
Burton was paroled in 2009. At his parole hearings, he said he had stabbed his mother. The CIU did not view this as an admission of guilt, but rather as a necessary step toward being paroled, and said it had no bearing on whether his initial confession was true.
On January 16, 2019, the Bronx District Attorney’s Office submitted a recommendation for dismissal of charges against Burton. On January 24, the three innocence organizations filed a motion to vacate the charges and join the DA’s recommendation. The charges against Burton were dismissed by Judge Steven L. Barrett of Supreme Court for Bronx County that day. Barrett was the judge in the earlier homicide case where the detectives who interrogated Burton had coerced false confessions out of two innocent young men.
Burton now works for an elevator repair company, and he spoke in the courtroom after the ruling. “It’s been a long, long journey and I’m thankful we’ve reached this point,” he said. “I stand here for that 16-year-old boy who didn’t have anyone to protect him, and the adults didn’t protect him at that time.”
The entire entry can be read at:
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Read the phenomenal Lope Magazine article on Huwe Burton at the link below: (It's a massive seventeen part article called "Innocent people don't run: The Huwe Burton Story," by Liam Boylan Pett. (Lope magazine, founded by author Liam Boylan Pett, is devoted to: 'Eye-opening stories from the track, road, and trail, told monthly.')...Here's a taste:
SIX: "The trial took place in 1991, over
two years after Keziah’s murder. Huwe had been released on bail and
spent time with his father during those years. Even in the lead-up to
the trial, there were questions of whether the “crack-crazed teen” had
killed his mother. The Village Voice ran a feature with the headline: DID HUWE BURTON KILL HIS MOM? The piece, written by Peter Noel,
highlighted the many discrepancies in Emanuel Green and Huwe’s
statements, and stated point blank: “Although Emanuel Green, a convicted
felon, gave several conflicting statements about his role in the
slaying, police and the D.A., perhaps anxious to cross one more murder
off the crime blotter, apparently snatched the nearest warm body: Huwe
Burton.” William Kunstler and Ronald Kuby were
Huwe’s lawyers. The two were some of the best civil rights defense
attorneys in the game—Raphael Burton did everything he could to defend
Huwe. Huwe’s team focused on the coerced confession, which, at the time,
was not a usual means of defense. While the science and knowledge about
unreliable confessions has grown recently, in the late 1980s and early
’90s, no one could wrap their head around someone confessing to a crime
they did not commit. Huwe admitted he had done it—what else was there to
discuss? Kunstler and Kuby urged jurors to
look further into the confession, and they harped on Emanuel Green’s
role in the crime. How, they asked, could both confessions be true when
so little could be corroborated between them? Indeed, Kunstler attempted
to call an expert to testify on the unreliability of Huwe’s confession,
but the court denied the request. The jury believed Huwe was guilty.
Charged as an adult, Huwe was convicted of second-degree murder and
weapons possession. He was sentenced to fifteen-years-to-life in prison.
He was 18."
The entire article can be read at:
https://lopemagazine.com/2019/02/20/huwe-burton-interview-new-york-marathon-innocence-project-run/
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PUBLISHER'S
NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue. Keep your eye on the Charles
Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my
previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put
considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith
and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's
forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section
which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can
be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/The entire article can be read at:
https://lopemagazine.com/2019/02/20/huwe-burton-interview-new-york-marathon-innocence-project-run/
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