Sunday, November 3, 2019

Huwe Burton: The Bronx: New York: Momentous Event: Today, Sunday November 3, Huwe Burton will run the 26.2 mile New York City marathon as "a truly free man," alongside Susan Friedman, one of the Innocence Project lawyers who were with him through the final chapters of his long legal battle and stood beside him in court when the judge cleared his name. Dear Huwe and Susan. I hope you can hear these cheers which are coming all the way from Canada. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog. PS: The following release - published by the Innocence Project on January 24, 2019, when Supreme Court Justice Steven Barrett vacated the 1991 murder conviction - explains why his case has been of such interest to the readers of this Blog.


PUBLISHER'S NOTE ONE: Today, Sunday November 3, Huwe  Burton will run the 26.2 mile New York City marathon as "a  truly free man,"  alongside with Susan Friedman, one of the  Innocence Project lawyers who were with him through the final chapters of his long legal battle and stood beside him in court when the judge cleared his name.  Dear  Huwe and Susan. I hope you can hear these cheers which are coming all the way from Canada. 

Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.

PS: The following release - published by the Innocence Project  on January 24, 2019, when Supreme Court Justice Steven Barrett vacated the 1991 murder conviction- explains why Huwe Burton's  case has been of such interest to  this Blog.
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PUBLISHER'S NOTE TWO:  PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This Blog is interested in false confessions because of the disturbing number of exonerations in the USA, Canada and multiple other jurisdictions throughout the world, where, in the absence of incriminating forensic evidence the conviction is based on self-incrimination – and because of the growing body of  scientific research showing how vulnerable suspects   are to widely used interrogation methods  such as  the notorious  ‘Reid Technique.’"

Harold Levy: Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog:
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PASSAGE ONE OF THE DAY: From Innocence Project release published on  January 24, 2019 - the day Huwe Burton was exonerated of  the 1991 murder of his mother. (Conviction vacated).
"Burton’s legal team and the Bronx CIU (Conviction Integrity Unit)  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."




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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."

SUB-HEADING: "Investigation Reveals Innocent Man was Wrongfully Convicted after Career Detectives Used Flawed Interrogation Techniques that Produced Unreliable and False Confessions"

GIST: "Today, Bronx Supreme Court Justice Steven Barrett vacated the 1991 murder conviction of Huwe Burton. Justice Barrett based his decision on findings by the Bronx District Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) that detectives from the 47th precinct had coerced Burton into falsely confessing to murdering his mother when he was just 16 years old. Burton’s legal team includes Susan Friedman and Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, which is affiliated with the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University; Steven Drizin of Northwestern Pritzker School of Law’s Center on Wrongful Convictions; and Laura Cohen of Rutgers Law School’s Criminal and Youth Justice Clinic. 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. “Huwe Burton is an extraordinary individual. The injustice he endured is unimaginable—to be wrongly convicted of murdering his mother, whom he adored. Today, Mr. Burton will finally get some measure of justice. The defense team is extremely grateful to District Attorney Clark and the Bronx CIU for their extraordinary work. We hope this tragic case can serve as a learning moment about the value of new scientific research on false confessions and steps that can be taken to avoid dangerously coercive interrogation techniques,” said Innocence Project Attorney Susan Friedman. “Based on the three false confessions revealed during this investigation, we also hope and expect that the CIU is open to reviewing other cases handled by these detectives if the parties can develop a mechanism to identify them.” In the early evening hours of January 3, 1989, Burton came home to discover his mother Keziah Burton stabbed to death. Burton, who had been in school during the day, had no criminal history and a close-knit relationship with his parents and extended family. Burton’s conviction was based largely on a confession he made to three detectives—Frank Viggiano, Stanley Schiffman and Sevelie Jones—from the 47th Precinct who used psychologically coercive techniques that were standard practice at the time. The techniques included isolating Burton from his father, threatening him with additional criminal charges and, ultimately, offering leniency if he confessed to killing his mother. Sleep deprived and traumatized by his mother’s death, Burton provided a written and recorded statement that he’d accidentally stabbed his mother during an argument when she would not give him money to pay a debt to a drug dealer. He told detectives that he left the key to the family car on the floorboard after the murder and the drug dealer took it. The car was missing when her body was found. Burton immediately recanted his confession. The conviction was also based on false statements from Emanuel Green who was renting a downstairs apartment from the Burton family. Five days after detectives obtained Burton’s confession, Green was arrested by the police. He was driving Keziah Burton’s car, which had been stolen the day of the murder. The same detectives who obtained Burton’s false confession questioned Green. They secured written and videotaped statements from him claiming that Burton asked Green for help after stabbing his mother and Green complied (saying his “criminal mind” took over) by staging the crime scene to look like a rape and robbery, telling Burton to dispose of the murder weapon, and promising to sell the family car and split the profits. Green was killed in a lover’s triangle incident before Burton’s trial and never testified. At trial, Burton maintained his innocence, testifying that the officers coerced his false confession and argued that Green was, in fact, the man who killed his mother. His defense attorney, William Kunstler, attempted to call an expert to testify on the unreliability of Burton’s confession, but to no avail; the court denied his request. 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. Soon after the confessions, it was discovered that Amonte was in jail the day of the murder. Nonetheless, Coss and Parker were tried for murder. They both testified the detectives “fed” them a story about being lookouts for Amonte, had them use specific words, carefully rehearsed the statements and assured them they would be rewarded for their co-operation, that as lookouts they were not responsible for the homicides, and they would be able to see their families as soon as their confessions were complete. After awaiting two years to be tried, Coss and Parker were acquitted in less than an hour. Significantly, the Bronx CIU found that “even assuming that the police acted above board in every respect and did not knowingly engage in coercive tactics, the false statements that they obtained independently from Coss and Parker establish that, at the time Burton confessed, the detectives were using techniques that produced false statements.” Finally, the joint re-investigation produced new information about Emanuel Green’s criminal history that strongly supported Burton’s defense that Green had murdered Keziah Burton. Green had two prior convictions—one for an attempted knife-point robbery and a second for a violent rape of an acquaintance. Police reports in the rape case showed he repeatedly lied to investigators and changed his story in a way similar to how he lied in the Burton investigation. A psychologist who evaluated Green determined he had a “schizoid personality disorder of adolescence, with depressive and aggressive trends, and underlying trends toward explosiveness.” Huwe Burton’s father, Raphael Burton, was in Jamaica visiting family on the day his wife was murdered. Burton’s father spent his life savings on his son’s defense, however he passed away prior to Burton’s release from prison. Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark said, “Mr. Burton served 19 years in prison and since his release in 2009 has led a law-abiding life. He has maintained his innocence for almost 30 years and now we will clear his name of this brutal killing. The interests of the community are best served by dismissing this indictment so he can move on with the rest of his life."

The entire release can be read at:
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;