Since J.D.B. v. North Carolina was decided, judges must take into consideration the age and circumstances of confessions of juveniles when deciding whether they should be considered as evidence. Before J.D.B however the practice of interrogating juveniles was very different, and often coercive. It remains to be seen how police practices will change in response to J.D.B., but it is clear that the law recognizes that juveniles are more susceptible to coercion and trickery in police encounters and are more likely to not understand their rights.
Two murder cases in Chicago from the 1990's have startling new developments thanks to modern DNA testing that is far more advanced than the technology available when the investigation and trials took place. Both cases involve the supposed confessions and subsequent incarcerations of juveniles. In both cases DNA testing using current technology has indicated that another person was responsible for the murders. Despite this new knowledge, six of those convicted as juveniles are still in prison, serving lengthy adult sentences (up to 30 years) imposed on them while they were teenagers.
Oddly, at the time of the trials in both cases, the DNA evidence at the time excluded every juvenile charged in both cases. In both cases prosecutors and police knew there was another person involved, but were uninterested or unable to determine who those unknown people were. The teenagers, some as young as were subjected to hours of interrogation using high pressure tactics (including telling one juvenile that he could go home if he would just tell police what they wanted to hear). Presumably police would have had to known that the supposed confessions were unreliable if they did not account for the presence of one other person in each case. Each of those child defendants would have been under enormous pressure to give police the name of those unknown parties, prosecutors would probably have offered very fair treatment for their cooperation.
In both cases the person identified by DNA analysis was not connected to the juveniles who were convicted for the crime. The Dixmoor case involved the horrible sexual assault and murder of a 14 year old girl. The DNA results identified a man who was 32 years old at the time of the murder with a record of sexual assaults and armed robberies. Englewood involved the rape and murder of a 30 year old woman who was raped and strangled. The victim in Englewood was a prostitute. The DNA found in her body identified a man who had been implicated in a number of other assaults and murders, including the strangulation death of two prostitutes and assaults on at least five others.
The supposed confessions should have led to physical evidence at the crime scenes and on the victims. In the Englewood case, the supposed confessions included details that all of the children had sex with the victim, yet no evidence of that was found. The supposed crime scene, a basement of one of the juveniles, had no physical evidence that a brutal murder had taken place there. It is not likely that 5 teenagers would be able to execute a violent murder and leave a completely clean crime scene behind them. It is less likely that after accomplishing that feat, they would then confess to the crime. THe Dixmoor case had conflicting statements among the juveniles, and a complete lack of physical evidence implicating any of them in the murder. Besides DNA that belonged to someone else, investigators in Dixmoor found hairs that belonged to an unidentified (at the time) individual.
Unfortunately the prosecutors in these cases have chosen to fight the exoneration of those convicted children, who are now adults in their 30's. To do otherwise would be to acknowledge that the confessions were coerced and that the police and prosecutors did not meet their responsibility to ensure that justice was carried out. It is nothing less than a lack of moral and ethical values that cause prosecutors to continue to defend their convictions in the light of overwhelming evidence that they were wrong in the first place. The lesson they and police should be learning is that confessions, especially ones given under pressure and given by juveniles, can be very unreliable. In these cases, instead of continuing to investigate or even to apply logical analysis to the holes in their cases (the unknown parties later identified by DNA) led to innocent children spending their later childhood and early adult lives behind bars, and the real killers were free to live their lives and commit more crimes and victimize more people.
When the real killers found out that these children had been convicted and jailed for the crimes, they must have felt a great deal of relief. The sad reality is that the police and prosecutors helped those killers escape justice. The police by their incomplete investigation and reliance on confessions they should have questioned, and prosecutors for not demanding better evidence before taking the cases to trial. If a citizen were to help a killer escape punishment for his crime, they would face criminal charges for their actions. These police and prosecutors get away with it, just like the real killers did.
Prosecutors in both cases need to do the right thing, swallow their pride and support the efforts to overturn those convictions. To do less is to continue to protect the guilty and to punish the innocent.
Innocence Project: Background of Dixmoor and Englewood cases
Northwestern Law: Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth