End Chicago-style youth interrogations

• Reprints

Updated: July 14, 2011 4:43PM

When I moved to Chicago from Philadelphia in the 1980s, the locals loved to talk about their “Chicago-style” hot dogs and “Chicago-style” deep-dish pizza. Both are delicious and I have had my fill of these savory delights over the past 25 years.

Unfortunately, I’ve had my fill of another Chicago-style contribution that is not as savory — the Chicago-style police interrogation of juvenile suspects and witnesses.

The Chicago-style juvenile interrogation involves picking up juveniles at school or on the streets, isolating them from their parents or loved ones, and then questioning them, sometimes for hours on end, until they confess or implicate others. The police then use the first confession as a script to pressure other juveniles into giving copycat confessions.

These tactics have closed many murder cases. But when Chicago-style tactics are used on juveniles, they often lead to false statements. And Chicago Police have obtained more juvenile false confessions than any other city in the U.S.

This shameful distinction led me to create a new project at the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University to focus on juvenile confessions and interrogations. Our work is beginning to bear fruit. For the second time recently, DNA evidence has appeared to clear our clients and multiple other defendants who were only teenagers when they confessed to rape-murders.

In the 1992 case of the Dixmoor Five, Illinois State Police interrogators obtained confessions from three teenagers to the murder and rape of a teenage girl. These confessions ultimately led to the conviction of five teens. In the case of the Englewood Five, Chicago Police got five teenagers to confess to the murder and gang-rape of a prostitute in 1995. In both cases, DNA has linked these crimes to convicted rapists. These men were adults at the time they committed their crimes, had no connection to any of the teens and went on to commit numerous other crimes while the teens were imprisoned. When these teenagers are ultimately exonerated, eight more juvenile false confessions will be added to Chicago’s tally sheet.

And there’s more. The Center also represents Daniel Taylor, who was one of eight boys and men arrested in connection with the murder of a couple in Uptown in 1992. Chicago police got to Taylor by pressuring Lewis Gardner, a 15-year-old mentally retarded kid, to confess and name Taylor and seven others as his so-called accomplices. Of the eight murder confessions, four came from teenagers, and all, including Taylor’s, are probably false. Taylor couldn’t possibly have committed the murders; he was in jail at the time of the crime, having been arrested for disorderly conduct earlier in the evening. He will die in prison if courts do not grant him relief.

Nearly 50 years ago, in 1964, Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, a Chicagoan, condemned Chicago’s style of interrogating suspects. Justice Goldberg’s words in Escobedo vs. Illinois still ring true today: “We have learned the lesson of history, ancient and modern, that a system of criminal law enforcement which comes to depend on the ‘confession’ will, in the long run, be less reliable and more subject to abuses than a system which depends on extrinsic evidence independently secured through skillful investigation.”

Danny Escobedo had been interrogated by police for more than 14 hours without being allowed access to an attorney. The Supreme Court overturned his conviction for murder.

It has been over 50 years since Escobedo’s arrest, and Chicagoland’s law enforcement community is still blinded by its love of the confession. Chicagoland detectives still close too many cases with little more than confessions. They still interrogate juvenile suspects exactly the same way they interrogate adults. And prosecutors compound the problem by opposing requests for DNA testing in confession cases and disputing that DNA evidence is exonerating when it proves that the confessions are false.

It’s time for policymakers to put an end to Chicago-style interrogations. Focusing on juvenile witnesses and suspects is a good place to start. Recording interrogations of homicide suspects does not go far enough because police claim that many suspects are just “witnesses” to avoid recording these interviews. This loophole must be closed and all interviews, as well as interrogations, of juveniles, in all serious felony cases should be recorded in their entirety.

DNA testing, where available, should be required before trial in confession cases and courts should hold pretrial reliability hearings to determine if DNA and other evidence so undermines confessions that they should be excluded from the jury’s consideration.

Finally, Justice Goldberg’s solution in Escobedo should be revisited. Goldberg believed that the only way to protect suspects from Chicago-style interrogations was to let them consult with attorneys before their interrogations and to exclude any statements obtained from them when they were not represented by counsel. This is especially necessary for teenagers who are less competent at exercising their Miranda rights and more likely to falsely confess under Chicago-style interrogations.

Steven A. Drizin is legal director of the Northwestern Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions and founder of its Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth.