- Rafael Burton and Keziah Burton were Jamaican immigrants.
They met in London and got married
and moved to the United States.
And Huwe was their only child.
Huwe, his mother, and father lived on the second floor
in a three flat house.
They rented out the first and the third floors.
This was a family that was beginning to build a home
and there was always
between Huwe and his mom, and Huwe and his dad.
(soft music)
Whenever a parent is killed,
other family members are gonna be persons of interest.
The police wanted to talk to Huwe.
It was more of an interview,
and not an interrogation.
And Huwe told them, look,
if you wanna find out who killed my mom, find her car.
The second round of questioning was to get Huwe
to come down to the police station
to submit to a polygraph exam.
But there was no polygrapher there.
At that point he was no longer a person of interest,
he was their prime suspect.
And the interrogation was much more confrontational,
in an effort to get him to confess.
The first thing that they did is they accused him of lying.
He kept saying I was in school that day,
And then they made a variety of suggestions to him.
We know that you were with your girlfriend in the afternoon.
And by the way, did you know that she was underage?
And that you could be charged with statutory rape?
You have two choices here,
you could be charged with statutory rape and murder,
and be tried as an adult.
Or you could cop to the murder and be tried as a juvenile.
And that kind of promise of leniency and threat of harm
really broke Huwe down into a place
where he believed it was in his best interest to confess
in order to bring this interrogation to a close.
- [Detective] January 6th, 1989, it's 3:05 AM.
We're in the 47th precinct, detective supervisor Jerome.
Now you've been arrested
for the stabbing of your mother, Keziah Burton.
Do you wanna tell me what happened
on the day of January 3rd, 1989?
(tense music)
- [Steve] If you look at Huwe's videotaped confession,
there's a very rehearsed quality to it.
And part of what makes it seem rehearsed
is the language that he uses during the confession,
- At this time I'm stimulated on drugs.
And didn't really know what I was doing.
- No teenager talks about being stimulated by drugs.
- A few of my friends proceeded northward up Brockswood
to come home.
We reached home about 2:47 in the afternoon.
I just wanted to scare,
just wanted to scare her a little bit,
see what she was gonna do.
Plus I was still stimulated.
The mere mention of the word crack cocaine
in the midst of a crack cocaine epidemic
to me is the most powerful evidence that this confession
was constructed by the police
to make it almost a certainty
that Huwe Burton would be convicted.
They were able to give the jury an explanation
why this mild mannered, loving child
might have snapped and killed his mother.
Emanuel Green was a very different kind of person
than Huwe Burton.
He had a long criminal history record.
- I just got out of prison, ok?
Three and a half years ago.
I was in prison for an alleged rape
and also an attempted robbery.
- Emanuel Green had lied on his application
when he rented the apartment.
So the Burtons didn't have any idea
about his prior criminal history.
Once Huwe Burton confessed, the story of this teenage boy
murdering his mother for crack cocaine was on the front page
of every single newspaper in New York City.
So when Emanuel Green surfaced with Keziah Burton's car
they had to figure out a way
(soft tense music)
If you look at his statements, they're wildly inconsistent.
They suggest that he in fact was involved in the murder.
He took the knife and put it somewhere in his room,
or he put it inside of his book bag, I really don't know.
I was then in front of the house next to the door.
- 'Cause he knew details of the crime
that only the true perpetrator would have known.
That the knife that was found near Mrs. Burton's body
was not the murder weapon.
(tense music)
At the time, the Innocence Project
was only working on DNA cases.
So they referred the case to me
'cause of my knowledge about false confessions.
Huwe was out on parole,
but he continued to insist that he was innocent.
We brought the Innocence Project back into the case
when a new district attorney was elected in the Bronx.
And she had created a Conviction Integrity Unit
that would review cases like Huwe's
where there were serious questions about his innocence,
but no DNA evidence to prove that he was innocent.
I typed in the names of the officers
who took Huwe Burton's confession.
And I found that they has been accused
of taking two false confessions in a murder case
that had occurred within six months
of their arrest of Huwe Burton.
(soft tense music)
We actually spoke to one of the men
who had falsely confessed in that other case
and saw many of the same patterns
in Huwe Burton's case.
We made that man, Dennis Coss,
available to the district attorney's office.
And after meeting him they had a much better understanding
of the ways in which they were coercing innocent people
to confess to crimes they didn't commit.
(soft music)
- One of the most interesting things
is that I never asked myself how,
I just knew that I had to.
You realize that when you have truth on your side
even when they have things
that seems like it's just mounted against you.
But when you in your heart, you're just clear in your heart
you have truth, you just know that somehow,
some way you're gonna get to the truth of it.
Getting home, for me,
was only half of the battle.
I still had to say, ok, well I have to prove my innocence.
It's not just about clearing my name,
it's about restoring
Most guys inside prison,
you're gonna do some type of exercise or working out.
But I'm seeing guys who are twice my age
and they're running around the yard.
And I mean they looked like they didn't have any worries,
they looked free while they were running.
So I said, well, let me try it.
And I tried it and I couldn't get around the yard twice.
So being a person that I'm determined to see things through
And when I started running and I got better at it
I started to use running as a means of clearing my head
if something's on my mind.
As I got better I would see marathons on the television.
I was saying, when I get out of here one day
I'm gonna run a marathon.
Finally that day came.
It was more than just running.
(soft music)
- Many of the same tactics that produce false confessions
are still in regular use by law enforcement today.
- I'm still continuing to fight
because there are more people that are like Huwe Burton.
And some of them may never have a voice.
So the future is making sure that we hold people accountable
so things like this does not ever happen again.
It can't happen again.