Brenton Butler didn't do it: but he did confess. And so do a surprising number of innocent people--teenagers in particular. Studies show that teens are especially vulnerable to making false confessions with terrible consequences.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: National

On May 7, 2000, Brenton Butler was walking to Blockbuster video store to fill out a job application when he was picked up by police as murder suspect. The slight 15-year-old from Jacksonville, Florida, had never been in trouble before, and he told police that he had nothing to do with the murder. Still, for almost 12 hours, detectives kept Butler locked in an interrogation room with carpeted walls, refused to let him see his parents or speak to a lawyer, gave him just a cup of water and a couple of pieces of stale Chex mix to eat, and insisted that he had shot and killed a woman. To Butler's repeated pleas of innocence they spat back: "You're lying."

"I was scared," recalls Butler, now 18 and since cleared of any connection in the case. "I had no business being there, and I felt trapped at their mercy."

Though police deny it, Butler says at one point a detective punched him in the stomach and then in the eye. And, Butler says, when an officer wrote out a "confession" and he still refused to sign, the cop unstrapped his holster. "I said, 'What you gonna do? Shoot me?'" Butler recalls. "And he said, 'You guessed right.'" Butler signed the confession.

How could this happen? How could an innocent person admit to doing something he didn't do? It turns out that under the right stressful set of circumstances, people do confess to crimes they did not commit. In some cases, false confessions have landed innocent people behind bars for years. Some justice experts say false confessions are a terrible problem that calls into question the very integrity of the justice system. Teenagers, many believe, are particularly susceptible to being coerced into confessing to crimes they didn't do.

"Teenagers tend to place too much faith in the ability of the legal system to ferret out the truth," says Steven Drizin of the Children and Family Justice Center, which has compiled a list of 40 verified cases of juveniles falsely confessing. "They may decide to confess because they're tired of the interrogation process, thinking that once this matter ends up in court, everything will be cleared up."

Law-enforcement officials say the problem of false confession is tiny when taken in the context of the entire justice system Robert McColloch, president of the National District Attorneys Association, says those who enforce the law take great pains to avoid prosecuting the innocent.

"From the police and prosecutorial perspective, we're interested in having the right person in the courtroom and in jail not the wrong guy," McColloch says. "We're always looking for something in the statement that can be independently verified."

Indeed, the number of false confessions by teenagers uncovered so far is miniscule compared with the mote than 2 million teens arrested a year (See graph below). Regardless of numbers, however, justice experts say the horrific consequences--innocent people languishing in prison--justify serious attention.

"We are convicting innocent people, and it's time to take a good look at that, critique our system, and implement some institutional changes," says Sarah Tofte of the Innocence Project, a group that works to exonerate the wrongfully convicted.

How do these disasters happen? Sometimes, critics say, police interrogate too aggressively; but mostly, it's because teenagers are developmentally different in a number of ways that make them more vulnerable, experts say. "Kids are much more likely to focus on the short-term consequences of their decision and not pay attention to long-term consequences," says Laurence Steinberg, a psychology professor at Temple University. "So when a cop says, 'If you tell me you did it, I'll let you go home' that will be much more important ha the mind of 16-year-old."

QUESTIONED FOR 27 HOURS

Take the case of Michael Crowe, of Escondido, California. In 1998, Crowe, then 14, was accused...