Huwe Burton - Murder / False Confession

Burton, Huwe; murder; NRE: false confession, perjury/false accusation, prosecutor misconduct, police officer misconduct, withheld exculpatory evidence, misconduct in interrogation of exoneree

Suggestibility issues

[590:972]; Bronx Cty. Ct. 3/27/92; pre-trial motion

The prosecution moved to exclude psychiatrist's testimony that acute grief caused Burton to confess to a crime he did not commit. Court held such testimony inadmissible; motion to preclude granted.

"Huwe Burton is accused of matricide...[His mother] died as a result of separate stab wounds to her neck."

[Note: Huwe Burton was featured on "The Moth," a radio show of true stories told to a live audience, on August 23, 2020.]

from NRE synopsis (by Ken Otterbourg):

"When the police in the Bronx...arrived at the apartment of Keziah Burton on January 3, 1989, the 59-year-old woman was already dead. She had been stabbed in the neck and was face-down in a nightgown on her bed. Her underwear had been removed, initially suggesting a sexual assault. There was a telephone cord wrapped around one wrist, and the contents of her purse were strewn on the living-room floor.

"The 911 call had been made by Burton's 16-year-old son, Huwe Burton, who told police that he had come home from school just before three. While he noticed that the TV was on and his mother's belongings were on the floor, he said he thought she had just run to the store. He said that before he had a chance to look more carefully around the apartment, the phone rang, and a friend invited him over to her apartment. It was only after he arrived home at about 5:40 that he looked in his parents' bedroom and found his mother's body.

"The police never established a time of death, but they believed that Keziah Burton knew her killer. Investigators quickly focused on Huwe. They were initially suspicious because she said he knew the exact time, 2:47 p.m., that he had come home from school. That, the investigators thought, seemed like he was trying to establish an alibi. Second, he said that he had been at school all day, but his first-period teacher told police he was not in her class that morning.

"The police brought Burton in for questioning on January 5. They interrogated him for three hours. Twice, he asked to speak to his father, who was out of the country. These requests were denied. They told him he was lying about when he was at school. The friend Burton had visited the afternoon of his mother's death was a 13-year-old girl and she and Burton had had sex. The officers told him that was statutory rape, and he could go to jail for that.

"While the interrogation itself wasn't recorded,* Burton would produce a written and videotaped confession in which he said he was high on crack cocaine and had killed his mother during a fight. He was arrested and charged with murder."

[* Neither was Nickel's. ]

"Six days after Burton's confession, police in Westchester county...stopped a man named Emmanuel Green. He was driving Ms. Burton's Honda, which had been reported stolen on the day of her death. Green lived downstairs from the Burtons. He had been interviewed early in the investigation, but at that time, police didn't know he had an extensive criminal record that included convictions for rape and robbery. He was interrogated by the police, and he signed a statement that said Burton had come to him for help after he had killed his mother. Green said it was his idea to make the killing look like the work of an intruder. Although charged with larceny, possession of stolen property, and hindering prosecution, Green was not charged as an accomplice in Mrs. Burton's murder. He died before Burton's trial.

"[T]he detectives who interrogated Burton had produced false confessions before in a homicide case three months earlier. While these two suspects were acquitted at trial, the coercive techniques used were similar to those used on Burton."

"The initial examination of Mrs. Burton's body at the time of her son's confession suggested that there was a single fatal wound, so violent that it had gone through one side of her neck and out the other. And in his confession, Burton said he stabbed his mother with a serrated knife and then she fell to the bed. But a later, more extensive examination showed she had been stabbed twice, with a smooth-bladed knife. She had also been beaten, which is not mentioned in Burton's confession. Burton said that after he stabbed his mother, he dropped the knife on the floor. But the knife recovered at the scene was behind the bed, and testing revealed no traces of blood."

"Burton's confession was filled with police jargon as opposed to descriptions a boy would use. He said he was 'stimulated' on cocaine, 'associating with a friend,' and 'proceeding' up a road."

[This is very similar to Raymond Santana's false confession in the 'Central Park Five' case. (See Antron McCray et al. ) The following is the relevant section from that case (Yusef Salaam in a radio interview):

'I remember listening to Raymond Santana's confession, his false confession...I remember hearing his false confession at trial, and it was the most craziest thing that people believed in 1989. Here he is, being made to say, at approximately 1900 hours, me and a group of my colleagues began to walk south...[W]hat 14-year-old boy talks like that?' Likewise, in Nickel's purported statement, Detective Mark DeFrancesco has him using phrases that virtually no one -- except a policeman -- would ever say. (See Day Two of annotated trial transcript.)]

"The police had focused on Burton because his teacher said he wasn't at his first-period class, and during the interrogation, they had used that apparent lie to break him down and induce the confession. But shortly after the confession, the teacher told the police she had checked her records. Burton was in class that morning. That...wasn't disclosed to Burton's attorney."

"On January 16, 2019, the Bronx [DA's] Office submitted a recommendation for dismissal of charges against Burton. The charges against Burton were dismissed by Judge Steven L. Barrett...that day. Barrett was the judge in the earlier homicide case where the detectives who interrogated Burton had coerced false confessions out of two innocent young men."

"In July 2020, Burton filed a claim for compensation with the New York Court of Claims. In October 2020, he filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against New York and its police department. The lawsuit was settled in June 2021, with the city agreeing to pay $11 million."

[All emphases added unless otherwise noted.]

 

Perversion of Justice

Is deliberately finding someone guilty of things he did not do ever justified? If we convict people for acts of child sexual abuse that never happened, does that somehow 'make up' for all the past abuse that went completely unpunished? Is it okay to pervert justice in order to punish people wrongly perceived as perverts?

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