An article written by staff attorneys from Northwestern Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth and a former Northwestern Law student was recently published in the Rutgers Law Review journal. In Arresting Development: Convictions of Innocent Youth, Joshua Tepfer, Laura Nirider, and Lynda Tricarico analyze a select group of exonerations in an effort to determine what factors might make children and adolescents more susceptible to wrongful convictions and what possible reforms could be enacted to reduce the occurrence of these convictions.
A key finding of the study showed that in more than 55% of the 103 youth exonerations examined, a false confession or false statement by another youth contributed to the wrongful conviction. Younger children were more likely to falsely confess than older children. Whereas sixteen-year-olds and eighteen-year-olds falsely confessed in 18.8% and 16.7% of the cases, respectively, false confessions occurred in more than half of the cases of eleven-to fourteen-year-olds. In an interview with Nirider and Tepfer, Nirider said that these findings were the most interesting to her. Although she suspected that younger exonerees would be more likely to falsely confess—both in comparison to adult exonerees and among youths themselves—the rate at which they did was higher than originally thought.
Tepfer was most surprised by the findings surrounding guilty pleas. Prior to the study, the authors hypothesized that like false confessions, younger exonerees would be more likely to plead guilty to crimes they did not commit. The study revealed, however, that while 7.9% of adult exonerees pled guilty, the rate was only 6.8% for the 103 youth exonerees. In order to derive the statistic for adult exonerees, 214 cases from the Innocence Project database were examined. The authors consulted a youth psychologist who explained that since juveniles tend to be greater risk-takers, they may be more willing to accept the risks of going to trial. Additionally, juveniles are more likely than adults to use moral reasoning in making decisions as opposed to practical reasoning. As such, they may be more inclined to follow the “only the guilty should plead guilty” guideline.
Given the high number of false confessions and false statements among youth exonerees, the authors note that “the threat of wrongful conviction can spread like a virus from one child to his friends and acquaintances.” Thirty-two percent of the 103 cases studied involved a multi-defendant exoneration. In other words, those individuals were exonerated alongside at least one of their co-defendants. Of the 214 adult cases examined, only 9.8% involved multiple defendants. The Central Park Jogger Case is the most well-known example of a multi-defendant wrongful conviction, a case that eventually led to the exoneration of five innocent men convicted during their teenage years. Their convictions were largely the result of false confessions and false statements made during police interrogations.
On average, the 103 youth exonerees included in the study were 16.6 years old when the crimes occurred, 16.8 years old when they were accused, 18 years old when convicted and 31.7 years old at the time of exoneration. African-Americans represented 57.3% of the youth exoneree pool, with whites and Latinos representing 24.3% and 14.6%, respectively; the remaining 3.9% were of an unknown race.
The findings presented in this article help to validate the authors’ beliefs that children and adolescents are uniquely susceptible to wrongful convictions, especially given their tendency to falsely confess and make false statements. In Roper v. Simmons (2005) and Graham v. Florida (2009), the Supreme Court recognized that juveniles do not possess the same risk-weighing capabilities as adults, and they are more vulnerable to comply with outside pressures. As noted in the article, the enactment of reforms such as recording police interrogations, developing more appropriate interrogation procedures and requiring the presence of an attorney during police questioning can help reduce the number of youth wrongful convictions that occur.
For more information on youth wrongful convictions, please visit the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth website. Click here to read the complete article, Arresting Development: Convictions of Innocent Youth.