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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Burton was wrongfully convicted and spent 19 years in prison for a
crime he did not commit before he was released on parole in 2009. Over
the course what is nearly 30 years since Burton was arrested, a
substantial body of scientific and scholarly research has been conducted
identifying dispositional and situational “risk factors” that can
produce false confessions, including youth and bereavement
(dispositional factors) and commonly used interrogation tactics that are
psychologically coercive (situational factors). After taking a hard
look at Burton’s confession during the joint re-investigation with the
assistance of experts, the Bronx CIU recognized the false confession
research was itself “newly discovered evidence” that, when applied to
the facts of the Burton case, required a finding that Burton’s
confession was false and unreliable, a product of a psychologically
coercive interrogation techniques used by the detectives. Burton’s
defense team believes this newly discovered evidence finding is unique
and extremely important to the future litigation of false confession
cases. The re-investigation also revealed that three of the detectives
from
the 47th precinct who interrogated Burton—Frank Viggiano, Stanley
Schiffman, and Sevelie Jones—used the same psychologically coercive
interrogation tactics to obtain false confessions from two other
individuals, Dennis Coss and Kelvin Parker, just three months before
Burton. Coss and Parker confessed to being look-outs and getaway drivers
for a man named Amonte, whom the detectives believed had committed a
robbery murder inside a grocery store."
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RELEASE: "Bronx Man’s 1991 Murder Conviction Vacated," published by The Innocence Project on January 24, 2019.
SUB-HEADING: "Huwe Burton of the Bronx exonerated of the 1991 murder of his mom."
https://www.innocenceproject.org/bronx-mans-1991-murder-conviction-vacated/
Read informative Registry of Exonerations entry by Ken Otterbourg at the link below: "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.
The Innocence Project referred Burton's case to Steve Drizin, an
attorney and expert on false confessions at Northwestern University's
Center on Wrongful Convictions in 2009. By then, considerable research
had been done about the causes and consequences 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.
Drizin brought in Laura Cohen, an attorney at Rutgers Law School’s
Criminal and Youth Justice Clinic to work on the case and in 2013, the
Innocence Project in New York joined Burton's legal team. In 2016, after
Bronx County District Attorney Darcel Clark formed a conviction
integrity unit, the team asked the unit to examine Burton's case. 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.”
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=5485
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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/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles
Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html
Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of
interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold
Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
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