Opinion: By Donald E. McInnis
In this era of massive protests against police, Americans struggle to understand why police resort so quickly to deadly force when dealing with minorities, in particular the youth of our nation. It is easy to say that such actions are based solely in racial prejudice. The problem lies deeper than the skin color of those the police brutalize.
At the root of all police action, there is a fundamental flaw in the American justice system — an institutionalized disrespect for the rights of the individual, and a belief that the police can tell when a suspect is lying. This is especially true of youths under 18 who are least equipped mentally to cope with the rigors of interrogation. Our justice system allows the police to bully, lie to, psychologically manipulate, and even kill those it suspects of having committed a crime. And for every person killed by the police, thousands of innocent people, including juveniles, are arrested and coerced through a psychological method of interrogation to confess to crimes they did not commit, all because of the way police investigate crime.
Los Angeles District Attorney George Gasćon is to be applauded for saying he will not prosecute juveniles in adult court (Los Angeles Times, “Inside George Gasćon’s justice revolution, a debate over what it is to be a crime victim,” May 16, 2021), and Bronx District Attorney Darcel D. Clark is to be applauded for leading an inquiry into detectives tactics (New York Times: “3 Detectives Obtained a False Murder Confession. Was It One of Dozens?” Feb. 15, 2021). However, neither of those actions will fundamentally change what is wrong with how police interrogate juvenile suspects.
In the United States, police use an adversarial form of interrogation based on the Reid Technique of psychological questioning. This method of interrogation, coupled with the immaturity of a juveniles mind, leads to a very high rate of false confessions.
This is why I propose a separate Miranda rights warning specifically worded for juveniles so they can better understand their rights, as well as a Children’s Bill of Rights to protect juveniles when questioned by police.
No better example can be found in how the police disrespect individual rights and apply their own views and prejudices than the manner in which the police investigated, and a district attorney prosecuted, three 15-year-old boys for the murder of 12-year-old Stephanie Crowe in Escondido, CA, in 1998. This was similar to how the New York Central Park Five juveniles — and later in the case of another juvenile, Huwe Burton — were unjustly interrogated. However, the distinction between these three cases is that in the Crowe murder case the three accused boys were middle class and white. Thus, the racial bias element is eliminated, exposing in its rawest detail the abusive techniques of the police when interrogating youths.
These three cases illustrate why children should never be interrogated by police without the presence of a parent or an attorney. My reform proposals have been published in the Spring 2020 edition of the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review and in a separate piece to be published in the forthcoming 2021 Dartmouth Law Journal, as well as in my recently released book on the Crowe case, She’s So Cold: The Stephanie Crowe Murder Case — A Defense Attorney’s Inside Story of Coerced Confessions of Innocent Teenage Boys.
All parents know that children lack the maturity and experience that allows adults to make good decisions. Children also are taught to respect figures of authority. No wonder children, when read their constitutional rights by the police, waive those rights, even when to do so is against their best interest.
In the Crowe murder case, prosecutors, without a shred of evidence, wanted to try the three teenage boys as adults and send them to prison. The prosecution based its case entirely on coerced confessions, which is why I document in my book how police investigate, interrogate, and obtain false confessions when children are exposed to psychological manipulation.
These three boys were lucky. Friends and neighbors mortgaged their homes to raise bail money and hire top-notch attorneys for their defense. Yet even then they barely escaped the tragedy of the Central Park Five, where Black youths, ages 14 to 16, each spent six to thirteen years in prison before being exonerated for the rape of a White female jogger, and Black 16-year-old Huwe Burton, who spent 19 years in prison before being exonerated for the murder of his own mother.
These are not isolated cases. Thirty-two percent of all known false confessions are suspects under 18 years old. Such tragedies occur far too often, but rarely make newspaper headlines or the evening news.
As our country examines the role, behavior, and protocols of how the police treat us and our children — those they are sworn to protect and serve — we should also address the techniques and procedures the police use that can result in false confessions.
My proposed Children’s Bill of Rights and a new, easier-to-understand Miranda warning for children would require a parent to be present during questioning, and would require an attorney be consulted before any rights are waived. Only by taking these steps can the tragedy of juvenile false confessions, such as in the Central Park Five, the Huwe Burton case, and the Crowe murder case, be avoided.
We must remember that these children might have been our own.
In a very special way, they are.
Let’s adopt a new Miranda warning and Children’s Bill of Rights. Let’s make parental and legal representation mandatory for juveniles.
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Donald E. McInnis served as defense counsel in the Stephanie Crowe murder case in San Diego, California, and is the author of She’s So Cold: The Stephanie Crowe Murder Case — A Defense Attorneys Inside Story, released on February 11, 2021. www.donaldmcinnis.com