#127 Wrongful Conviction: False Confessions - Huwe Burton

When I was asked to look into Hugh Burton's case by the Innocence Project, Laura and I were just beginning the process of setting up the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, which was a project focus on false confessions taken from young people. Children and teenagers are between two and three times more likely than adults to falsely confess, and we were seeing a particularly disturbing pattern multiple cases of young people falsely confessing to the murders of their

own family members. When Hugh's story came to us, it fit that pattern to a t. What is it that could make someone confessed in the most horrific crime imaginable? The murderer of a parent or a loved one. Hughes story begins in the Wakefield neighborhood of the Bronx, a working class section of New York City that's home to a thriving Jamaican American community. In when our story starts, Hugh was sixteen years old and in tenth grade. He was the only child of two Jamaican immigrants, Kauziah and

Raphael Burton. Kauziah was a nurse and Raphael was a successful building contractor, so successful that the family was able to buy real estate, a red brick apartment building three stories tall on Eastchester Road. The Burtons moved into the second floor and rented out the rest of the building. Hugh was a good kid, and his parents were proud of him at sixteen. He was smart, soft spoken, good looking.

He did love the emerging rap scene, and he'd cause his old school parents no end of worry by hitting the dance clubs till closing time. But the family was close, loving and prosperous. An American success story. It's January third, nine nine. Raphael Burton was out of the country. He'd gone back to Jamaica to check on relatives who'd been hit by Hurricane Gilbert a few months earlier. It's a Tuesday,

and Hugh gets home from school at two thirty. No sign of his mom, but he does notice that the TV's on his mom's car is gone and her pocketbook had been dumped out on the living room floor, but Hugh doesn't think too much about it. He had plans to hook up with a girl after school, and off he went to her place. At five thirty. Hugh comes back home and makes a horrible discovery. His mom, Kaziah,

is lying on the bed in the master bedroom. A telephone cord is wrapped around her wrist and her underwear has been pulled down. A serrated steak knife is lying next to her on the bed, and there's a gaping knife wound in her neck. Hugh called in a panic and tells them I think my mother has been murdered. The police arrive and pronounced Kaziah Burton dead. They soon conclude, though, that she hasn't actually been raped. Instead, her underwear has been pulled down to make it look like a rape.

The real motive seems to be robbery. The attacker made off with her brand new Honda Accord. When the police came to the crime scene. They took notice of a couple of things. One of the things was that Hugh was sitting outside and to then he appeared to calm, too cool, too collected. They had heard his frantic nin one call, and his lack of emotion or apparent lack of emotion at the crime scene was a red flag

to them. I mean, this is a kid who had just come across his mother's stabbed body and he is panicking on that nine one one call. But by the time the police arrived, shock had set in, which they read as remorselessness. So as the police are at the scene, they decided to question Hugh about his mom's murder, and that evening he agreed to go down with police to the forty seven Precinct for questioning. Even while his dad, who was still in Jamaica, was catching the first flight

back to New York. He had nothing to worry about. This is what he wanted to do. He wanted to find out who had killed his mother, and so he went down there to do anything he could do to help the police find and catch her killer. The police question Hugh and he gives them every detail of his activities from putting in a full day at school to meeting up with a girl in the afternoon, right up

until he discovered his mother's body in the evening. After they finished questioning, he spends the night at his godmother's house because his dad hasn't gotten back to New York yet. The next day, Hugh returns to the precinct and the same three detectives questioned him again for hours. Now we don't have a videotape of the whole interrogation. Police only turned on the cameras at the end to capture Hugh's final confession, but Hugh says he remembers what happened in

that room. Hugh says he confessed because of a threat. Remember the girl whose house he'd gone to that afternoon, Well, she was fourteen, and under New York law, Hugh was potentially liable for statutory rape, even though they were consenting classmates. The police told him he'd go down for murder plus statutory rape and be sent to write her his island

unless he confessed. Now, Hugh didn't know exactly what statutory rape was, but he knew the word rape was really bad, and he knew well enough what Riker's Island was a notorious New York jail with a reputation for horrific violence. On the other hand, the police told him that if he confessed, he would go to family court where his dad could pick him up in a few days, which

is a blatant lie. It's total bullshit. The police also tell Hugh that they talked to his teacher and her records didn't confirm that he was at school during first period. How is that possible? He knew he had been there all day, but it was starting to be clear the detectives didn't believe him. They were developing their own theory of Casiah's murder with Hugh as the killer. And of course the police said to Hugh, it was an accident

and everybody will see that it was an accident. So your options are murder and statutory rape and Riker's Island, or admitting to an accident, being sent to family court and being picked up by your father within a few hours of your first court appearance. And over time, he realized the only way for him to get out of that room was to cop to these charges. So by the early morning of January five, Hugh Burton found himself signing a confession to the murder of his own mother.

And let me tell you, this confession is weird. It's written in stilted formal language, and the story it tells is all about crack cocaine. I Hugh Burton, known individual by the name of Bugs, who I owed two hundred dollars to for some crack I received from him to sell. Instead of selling the crack, I kept it for my own personal use. The confession goes on to describe Hugh getting high on crack the night before his mom died.

He comes home, gets into a quote stat with his mother, and wakes up the next morning still high stimulated on trunks. Who uses the word stimulated? Ow you say I was high? I walked to the kitchen, the confession continued, NiFe and I came back. She then asked, are you going to kill me? And she went to smell me and I'm moved. That's when I accidentally stabbed my mother in her neck. It wasn't planet purpose, you know, I just wanted to scare a little bit see what she was going to do.

According to the confession, He washes off the knife, leaves it on the bed, and gives his mom's car to bugs. This was no accident because I have Burton had been stabbed twice in the neck, very deep, violent stab wounds. And there were other parts of this confession that made no sense whatsoever. Got a call from the person who old money too? And who's that personal books? Do you know his round name? You couldn't tell the police anything about books, who he was, where he lived, or even

what he did with the car. Any telephone number that would have been, I don't know. Back in the day, the Jamaican immigrant community didn't use the banks a lot, and use parents were no different. They kept little pockets of cash in secret places throughout their home places that Hugh as a kid knew about. Who gives a ten tho dollar car to somebody to settle a two hundred dollar debt. If you needed two hundred dollars, he could have found that money in a jiffy. So none of

this is making any sense. He also was not known to use crack, much less run up debts with dealers, or behaved in a sort of depraved way that would lead a crack addict to attack his own mom. This us He wasn't Hugh Burton, But it's the story of the confession school. So where did this whole crack theme come from? It came from the late nineteen eighties culture

of fear about the New York City drug epidemic. Between nineteen eighty six and three, that time frame, New York was averaging two thousand murders a year and police were attributing a significant percentage of them to crack cocaine. And think about it from the police perspective. Here you have a kid who's got no criminal background by all accounts. He has a deep and abiding love for both of

his parents. He's a respectful kid when it comes to his parents, and all of a sudden he snaps and stabs his mother to death over two hundred dollars that she would have gladly given him. The crack theme came from the police, not from Hugh. And there it is in the very first lines of this confession that word once. This story is about a kid using crackers, selling crack. Nothing else matters off. Sure enough, Hugh is arrested and the media headlines go from maximum shock value, crack craze,

teen stabs mom to death. Hugh is charged with second degree murder and he sent not to family court. But to the place he feared most, Riker's Island. Those promises the cops made to him were nothing but lies. From the minute that Hugh was charged with his offense, his father knew that Hugh was innocent. He just knew it. He knew his son, his whole family stood by him, but it was too late. He'd confessed. From the depths

of his jail cell. He writes a eulogy for his mom and mails it to a relative so it can be read out loud at her funeral, and then he grieves alone. Let's stop for one second, Laura. You know when the police were questioning who they did what all police officers do. Do you know anybody who who might have wanted to hurt your mother? Can you give us any leads as to who might have done this? And Hugh came up blank. He said, I don't know anybody

who would want to hurt my mother. But I think what you need to be focused on is what happened to my mother's car. The person who had taken my mother's car, that's the person who probably killed her. Fast forward to January eleven, six days after Hugh confessed and was arrested on the evening of January eleven, police in Mount Vernon, New York, pull over a car for running a stop sign. It turns out that car was Kaziah Burton's missing gray Honda Accord. So who was the driver.

Emmanuel Green was the first floor tenant in the Burtons apartment building. He just moved in there with his girlfriend Stacy. Emmanuel was twenty two years old, five ft eleven pounds. You should see the body on this guy. He was cut, totally ripped. This guy could bench you, Steve. And he wasn't exactly a choir boy. He'd done time for a

knife point rape and attempted robbery. In fact, Emmanuel Green was on parole at the time that Kaziah was murdered, and only a month before he'd been arrested for assaulting his previous landlord, Hugh Burton. Only new Emmanuel Green in passing. Their lives were in completely different places. Emmanuel Green was a bouncer at a club who worked late shift and slept during the day, and he was in school during the day and at home most nights and on the weekends.

If he went out with his friends clubbing, he went to New Jersey, not where Emmanuel Green was. These were complete strangers. After police catch Emmanuel in cause Iiah Briton's car, they bring him in for questioning and he's interrogated by the same officers who questioned Hugh Burton. After only a few hours, Emmanuel goes on videotape to make a statement

of his own. He says that on the morning of the murder January three, Hugh had knocked on his door downstairs in the first floor apartment, and Hugh had told Emmanuel that he planned to steal his mom's Honda Accord, and he asked Emmanuel if he knew how to get rid of a stolen car. I'll take care of my mother, Hugh was supposedly said, and the two of them agreed to split the cash. Emmanuel claimed that Hugh then went back upstairs by himself and Moost. Immediately, Emmanuel said, I

heard arguing, screaming, and a thumping noise. He said he overheard Hugh yelling you won't give me the money, Fuck you bitch, I'll kill you and take it. A few minutes later, he reappeared outside Green's apartments, supposedly distraught, and he confesses to a Manuel, I killed my mother. I stabbed her. I stabbed her. Emmanuel continues, my criminal mind took over and I said, let's make it look like a robbery. He claimed to have gone back upstairs with

Hugh to the Burton family apartment. They stole two hundred dollars from Kaziah's pocketbook, and Emmanuel told Hugh to get rid of the knife somewhere outside. Then Emmanuel took off with Kaziah's car. So we have two statements, one of them from a slick talking bouncer with a history of rape and robbery and attacks on his landlord's the guy who was actually found with Casiah Burton's car, and the other one from a sixteen year old with no criminal history.

The train had already left the station for Hugh Burton after his arrest. The detectives who were involved in the interrogation leaked information about the case to the press, and they were quoted widely in newspaper articles that graced the front page of the New York Times, at the Post in the Daily News. And so when Emmanuel Green shows up with Kaziah Burton's car, these police officers needed to

figure out a way to reconcile these two very different stories. Remember, he was confession never mentions Emmanuel Green his downstairs neighbor at all, and Green's confession never mentions crack, cocaine or any drug debt. The confession of Emmanuel Green was cooked up in the interrogation room in Mount Vernon by the same detectives who took the confession of Hugh Burton. So the case against Huburton plowed forward, and before too long he found himself convicted of the murder of his own

mother and sentenced to life in prison. For his part, Emmanuel Green was never charged with Causiah's murder. He was only ever charged with crimes relating to the theft of her automobile, but he was never convicted. Before his trial, Emmanuel Green was stabbed to death as part of a

dispute arising out of a lover's triangle. So when the case came across my desk, it was sometime in two thousand eight early two thousand and nine I was sent a letter from Hugh Burton and some materials related to his case by a woman at the Innocence Project at the Center on Wrongful Convictions. We get referred false confession cases a lot, but When Steve looked at Hugh's case, he realized it was different than a lot of the other cases we've told you about on this podcast. DNA

testing wasn't an option here. There was no evidence left at the crime scene that, if did could lead to a different outcome. It was really all about the confession and all about trying to prove the guilt of the true perpetrator and Manual Green. As soon as we took the case. In two thousand nine, Hugh, thank goodness, was released on parole after almost two decades behind bars. And this was a wonderful thing. Having your client out is

a blessing, even before they are exonerated. We want to get them out because when they're out, they can help us with our investigation. It's easier to represent someone who's free. You can call them whenever you need to, and you can meet with them face to face without glass or guards or prison walls between the two of you. For his part, Hugh was able to begin a new life on the outside. He's always been a runner, but instead of doing laps around the prison yard, he started running

long distances in the free air. And, as Hugh said, his sites on the new York City Marathon. His legal team embarked on its own marathon investigation, because even though Hugh was free, he was still a convicted murderer who needed his name cleared. Steve invited Laura Cohen, an attorney and professor at Rutgers University, to join the team, and we got to work pretty soon. We discovered powerful evidence of Hugh's innocence. Hugh had described killing his mom with

a serrated stake knife found on the bed. That was the theory embraced by police at the time of the interrogation. But after Hugh's interrogation, the autopsy showed that Kaziah Burton had actually been stabbed with a smooth edged blade. The stake knife wasn't the murder weapon. The fact that Hugh's confession incorporated an error that police believed was true at the time, that's a red flag. The police were feeding

Hugh their own theory of the crime. Emmanuel Green, on the other hand, had known that the stake knife wasn't the murder weapon. He described using a different blade, one that he told Hugh to dispose of outside. This was information only the real perpetrator would know. Months of investigation turned into years, and we were gathering evidence slowly but surely, and then finally we got a couple of lucky breaks.

You see, in twenty sixteen, a new DA got elected in the Bronx and we saw a new opportunity to have a conversation about Hugh's case. So we got in touch with our friends at the Innocence Project in New York, Susan Friedman and Barry Shack. Susan's a rock star attorney at the Innocence Project, and Barry co founded the project with Peter Nufeld. He's one of the real o g

s in the exoneration movement. And before long, Barry was able to put us in touch with a special new division of the Bronx DA's office, the Conviction Integrity Unit. Here's very now. One of the things that the Innocence Project and myself in particular have been involved in a lot is the creation of what are known as conviction

integrity units. The whole point of a conviction integrity process is to have a non adversarial search for the truth where you set up an investigative plan that both sides agree to go forward with it, and you develop a process where you share information and go back and forth. You just forget about the legal technicalities and you just look at the evidence and investigated together and see where it leads. And for the next three years we worked

in collaboration with the Conviction Review Unit. It was an extremely cooperative experience. We shared documents, we interviewed witnesses together. We brought in experts to educate them about all of the changes that had taken place with regard to false confessions and new understandings from the science. As we started working with the Bronx Conviction Integrity Unit, that's when we

really got lucky. We'd all huddle at the offices of the Bronx defender, who were giving us a place to stay, and Steve google one last time for something about the officers involved in this case. Detectives who obtained false confessions are often serial offenders. I typed in the names of these detectives in a search for other cases, and I

hit gold. All of a sudden, he hit, for whatever reason, we don't know, an opinion that appeared in the New York Law Journal by Judge Steve Barrett that was quite incredible. What Steve found was shocking. A court decision describing how the same cops who interrogated Hugh had coerced a false confession out of another man in a completely different case. And by sheer chance, the evening before we're going in to talk to the conviction Integrity Unit, we found it.

Finding that these detectives had been involved in another false confession just three months earlier than you. Burton's case began to raise questions about who these detectives were and whether we could trust their accounts of what happened in that interrogation room. In the end, this may not have all happened if it weren't for Dennis Coss's courage. Dennis Coss is the man who had falsely confessed at the hands of the same interrogators just three months before they questioned Hugh.

So Steve and Barry arranged a meeting with Dennis, and the story he told them was heartbreaking. We brought him in to our office at the Innocence Project late at night, and we began asking Dennis to recount for us what happened when he gave this confession and talk about post

traumatic stress disorder. I am telling you that this poor man went into almost a fugue state he began shaking and sweating when he described what happened and how they scared the living hell out of him, and they co worced him and they wouldn't let his family come up, and it was unbelievable. I mean, you could just see him reliving it, and he was just terrified of these cops and what they did to him, same cops that frame you Burton. The investigation uncovered one other piece of

evidence too. Remember that teacher who said that Hugh wasn't in school the morning his mom was killed, well, the day before Emmanuel Green was caught with Kaziah Burton's car. That teacher told the police that she had made a mistake. Hugh actually had been in school that morning, but it seems police never shared that information with Hugh's defense team.

So it's like a soup, right, You bring in new evidence and at a certain point in time, you reach a critical mass where it becomes clear that the person who was convicted of this crime was innocent. And in our case, it became clear that Emmanuel Green was guilty. The case against Hugh Burtons should have fallen apart when the teacher retracted her mistake and the real killer was caught with a car, but instead police doubled down on their case against Hugh. It took thirty more years until

that case finally disintegrated. In the end, the tipping point for the Bronx Conviction Integrity Unit was when Hugh came in for an interview and the prosecutors actually met him, And when they saw Hugh separated from that sixteen year old on the video tape outside the heat of a trial in the tagline of a crack craze team, when they saw who he was and how much he loved and respected and revered his parents, they knew that he couldn't have committed this crime. When Hugh was in prison,

he had developed a nickname. They called him wise. He had a sort of peacefulness that helped him survive in prison but also helped him to keep other inmates on track. And that wisdom, that decency, that aura of his innocence is what really tipped the scales in his case. When you meet Hugh, you just know this is a good man, and these prosecutors saw that, they saw the human being, not the accusation. I'm sure you realized this already, that

you is quite an extraordinary individual. But one of the Innocence Project conferences, he got up and he told the story that was astonishing about his father. So you know his father, he always stood by you when he would always come up to the visits. So the week leading up to the visit, I'm excited. I couldn't wait to tell him everything that I've been doing, how I've been

developing with the case. I wanted to let him know how good I had gotten with playing my piano, and I wanted to hear everything that was going on with him. I finally spot him in the visit room and I make a bee line towards him. We embraced, I hold him for a long time, and we finally sit down.

He came with my cousin. She brought him up. As I'm asking him questions I'm getting these kind of clothes ended answers, so everything was yes, no, and I realized, I said something is wrong, and then he began to refer to me as my brother. And I think that was the first time that I realized that because of the Alzheimer's, my dad didn't know who I was. The guy who was in every court room, every visit room, my guy. He didn't know who I was, but still

I was just glad he was there. So as the as it went on, he wanted to smoke, he wanted a cigarette, but I know he knew that if he went out to smoke, that the visit was terminated. You can't come in and out, it's not an in and out policy. But he kept asking for the cigarette. And I didn't know why it was bothering me that he was asking for it, but then I realized it. It

reminded me of a book that I had read. Um Man searched for meaning a book by Victor Frankel and which he details being in concentration camps, and in the concentration camps, cigarettes were a medium of exchange. So he would notice that when people would smoke their cigarettes is when they had lost the desire to live. And it's right in that moment that I realized that he couldn't go on anymore. I knew that when he left that visit room that day, that was going to be the

last day that I saw him, and it was. Thankfully, however, um I was exonerated this year January, thank you, and and although he didn't live to see all of this come to fruition. Um, I am glad that he's watching and making sure that the job was done and done good. Thank you. In January accord. Finally throughout Hugh Burton's convictions, that is a priory. That was Burton's pedion peer in Hill, the require that you talk for this all right, for

my apologize, Mr Burton on the Hill fulfilled. The courtroom seats were filled with other New Yorkers who had been failed by the system too, who had also been wrongly convicted as teenagers in false confession cases. They were there in solidarity. We brought in you sat Slab the Central Park five. Nineteen eighty nine, we had in the front row Jet Deskovic in Westchester gave a false confession to

murdering a high school classmate, Marty Tankleff. Again in nineteen nine coerced into confessing to killing both of his parents. And then, of course right there with them was Dennis Coss. That tells you all you need to know. It sure does. After a thirty year or deal, Hugh joined their ranks as an exonoree, and he stood up in court and dedicated his exoneration to the memory of his mother. And

that's the story of Hugh Burton. Next week we'll tell you about Chris Tapp and Idaho man whose confession was proven false thanks to the perseverance of an unlikely champion, the victim's mother. Until then, thanks for listening to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. Ye Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts in association with Signal Company

Number One. Special thanks to our executive producer Jason Slam and the team at Signal Company Number one executive producer Kevin Wardace, Senior producer and Pope, and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Special thanks to jog Hammer for additional script editing and for wrangling and writing like a madwoman. Our music was composed by j Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura ni Rider and

you can follow me on Twitter at s Drisen. For more information on the show, visit Wrongful Conviction podcast dot com and be sure to follow the show on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction