Welcome to Wrongful Conviction, False Confessions. I'm Laura and I writer, and I'm Steve Drisen. Today we'll tell you the story of Hugh Burton. In nineteen eighty nine, when he was sixteen years old, he was charged with the murder of his own mother at his family's home in the Bronx. Forget blind justice. This is a classic case of tunnel vision because even as Hugh was bulldozed into a false confession, the real killer was living in the apartment just one floor below.
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 to the most horrific crime imaginable? The murderer of a parent or a loved one.
Hugh's 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 nineteen eighty nine, when our story starts, Hugh was sixteen years old and in tenth grade. He was the only child of two Jamaican immigrants, Kaziah and Raphael Burton. Kaziah 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, nineteen eighty nine. Rafael 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 pocket book 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 you went to her place. At five point thirty, Hugh comes back home and makes a horrible discovery. His mom, Kaziah, is lying on the bed in the master bedroom. A telephone chord 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 nine to one one in a panic and
tells them, I think my mother's been murdered. The police arrive and pronounce 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 nineteen eighty eight 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 too calm, too cool, to collected. They had heard his frantic nine one 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 decide to question Hugh about his mom's murder, and that evening he agreed to go down with police to the forty seventh 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 questioned 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 question 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 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 Keziah'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, Hugh 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 fifth, 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, know an 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.
This time stimulated on drugs.
Who uses the word stimulated? How you say I was high?
I walked to the kitchen, the confession continued.
I got a kitchen steak knife and I came back into the room.
She then asked, are you going to kill me?
And I said and if I was, she went to smack me and I moved.
That's when I accidentally stabbed my mother in her neck.
It wasn't planet purposely, you know, I just wanted to scare a little bit, see what she was going to do.
According to the confession, Hugh washes off the knife, leaves it on the bed, and gives his mom's car to bugs.
This was no accident because iad 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 person to old money too? And who's that personal? Bugs? Do you know his name?
No?
I don't.
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 help, I don't know.
Back in the day, the Jamaican immigrant community didn't use the banks a lot and used parents were no different. They kept little pockets of cash and secret places throughout their home, places that you, as a kid, knew about.
It was two hundred.
Who gives a ten thousand dollars car to somebody to settle a two hundred dollars debt? If you needed two hundred dollars, he could have found that money in a jiffy.
So none of this is making any sense. You also was not known to use crack, much less run up debts with dealers or behave in a sort of depraved way that would lead a crack addict to attack his own mom. He wasn't Hugh Burton, But it's the story of the.
Confession school and I left.
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 nineteen ninety 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 cracker, selling crack. Nothing else matters.
Well, that's are off. Sure enough, Hugh is arrested and the media headlines go for maximum shock value.
Crack craze teen stabs mom to death.
Hugh is charged with second degree murder, and he's 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, Hugh 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 Hugh, they did what all police officers do. Do you know anybody, Hugh 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 eleventh, six days after Hugh confessed and was arrested. On the evening of January eleventh, 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 nineteen eighty eight 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 foot eleven, two hundred and thirty pounds.
You should see the body on this guy.
He was cutting 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 knew Immanuel Green in passing. Their lives were in completely different places. Emmanuel Green was a bouncer at a club who worked the late shift and slept during the day, and Hugh was in school during the day and at home most nights, and on the weekends if he went out with his friend's clubbing, he went to New Jersey, not where Emmanuel Green was. These were complete strangers.
After police catch Emmanuel in Kezi Burton's car, they bring them 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 third, Hugh had knocked on his door downstairs on the first floor apartment, and Hugh had told Emmanuel that he planned to steal his mom's nineteen eighty eight 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 supposedly said, and the two of them agreed to split the cash. Emmanuel claimed that Hugh then went back upstairs by himself and all almost immediately. Emmanuel said, I
heard arguing, screaming in 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 manual. 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 pocket book, 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 landlords, the guy who was actually found with Kaziah 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 grace the front page of the New York Times and the Post in the Daily News. And so when Emmanuel Green shows up with Keziah Burton's car, these police officers needed to figure out a way to reconcile these two very different stories.
Remember, h Was confession never mentions Immanuel 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, Hugh 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 Keziah'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 and 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 ten 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 Manuel Green.
As soon as we took the case in two thousand and 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 Hughes 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 steak knife found on
the bed. That was the theory embraced by police at the time of the interrogation, But after Hughes interrogation, the autopsy showed that Keziah Burton had actually been stabbed with a smooth edged blade. The steak 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 steak 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 Sheck. Susan's a rock star attorney at the Innocence Project, and Barry co founded the project with Peter Neufeld. He's one of the real ogs 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, had 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 investigate it 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, 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 huddled at the offices of the Bronx Defender, who were giving us a place to stay, and Steve googled one last time for something about the officers involved in his 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 Kossa's courage.
Dennis koss is the man who'd 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 Innocents 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 coerced 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 Keziah Burton's car. That teacher told the police that she'd 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 Burton 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 videotape outside the heat of a trial, in the tagline of a crack crazed 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've 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. I always stood by you, and he would always come up and visit him.
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 Pimo, and I wanted to hear everything that was going on with him. I finally spot him in the visit room and I make a b 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 close 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 courtroom, 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 this cigarette, and I didn't know why it was bothering me that he was asking for it, But then I realized it reminded me of a book that I had read, Man's Search for Meaning, a book by Victor Frankel in 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, I was exonerated this year January twenty fourth.
Thank you.
And although he didn't live.
To see all of this come to fruition, I am glad that he's watching and making sure that the job was done and done good.
Thank you.
In January twenty nineteen, a court finally threw out Huburton's conviction.
I vacated provision the culvers in Burton, and is a trimedy that mister Burton's pension playing here in jail to require.
That A to cot from there.
For this, I offer my apologize, mister Burton, of the heal of the Systom failed.
In the courtroom, seats were filled with other New Yorkers who'd been failed by the system too, who'd also been wrongly convicted as teenagers in false confession cases. They were there in solidarity.
We brought in Usat Salam the Central Park five nineteen eighty nine, Xener eighty five, we had in the front row Jet Deskovic in Westchester gave a false confession to murdering a high school classmen, Marty Tankliff. Again in nineteen eighty nine, co werced into confessing killing both of his parents, and then, of course right there with them was Dennis Koss. That tells you all you need to know.
It sure does. After a thirty year ordeal, Hugh joined their ranks as an exonery and he stood up in court and dedicated his exoneration to the memory of his mother. And that's the story of Huberton. 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. Till then, thanks for listening to Wrongful Conviction,
False Confessions. 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 Flamm and the team at Signal Company Number one. Executive producer Kevin wardis Senior producer and Pope, and additional production and editing by Connor Hall. Special thanks to Jogi Hammer for additional script editing, and for wrangling and writing like.
A mad woman.
Our music was composed by Jay Ralph. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter at Laura Nightwriter, and you.
Can follow me on Twitter at s Drizzen.
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