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Last November, Robert Taylor walked out of Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet, Illinois, after spending nearly 20 years behind bars for a rape and murder he did not commit. Taylor, now 34, was one of five men convicted of sexually assaulting and killing a 14-year-old girl in Dixmoor, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, in 1991. At that time, Taylor and the other suspects were also teenagers, ranging in age from 14 to 16.

Now, all of the men, who became known as the Dixmoor Five, have been exonerated and their convictions vacated based on new DNA evidence that linked another man to the crime.

In partnership with other organizations, that evidence was pursued by the Center on the Wrongful Conviction of Youths (CWCY), a clinical program at Northwestern University School of Law. After the Public Welfare Foundation gave a planning grant for the Center in 2008, it was launched in 2009.

Joshua Tepfer, co-director of the Center, called the wrongful convictions of the Dixmoor Five, “one of the most tragic injustices in this state’s history. It’s historic in its scope: five kids who had the best years of their lives taken from them, while the true perpetrator went on and ravaged a community by committing other violent offenses.”

According to investigations by CWCY and others, the young girl disappeared after leaving her grandmother’s house in Dixmoor, about 20 miles south of Chicago. Her nude body was found several weeks later with a gunshot wound to the mouth.

The murder remained unsolved for about a year, but in 1992, the five teens were arrested. Three of the five signed confessions, and two of those youths agreed to testify falsely against the three others in exchange for extremely lenient sentences. Even though DNA evidence taken from the victim failed to match any of the young suspects, and there were marked inconsistencies in the confessions and testimony, all three were convicted and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.

The Center’s work in another Illinois case known as the Englewood Four led to more overturned convictions that garnered national attention. In that case, five black teenagers confessed in 1995 to another rape-murder, resulting in convictions for four of them. Last year, DNA testing pursued by CWCY linked to a man believed to be responsible for the murders of two other women. A court vacated the convictions last November and the four were officially exonerated on January 17, 2012, almost 17 years after their confessions.

Such discrepancies from teenage confessors are not unusual. According to a study by the Center, youth are twice as likely as adults to confess to crimes they never committed. The difference is explained by developmental research showing that youth are less able to weigh risks and long-term consequences. They are also less able to understand Miranda rights and to withstand pressure by authority.

Yet police regularly ask youth to waive their Miranda rights without making sure that they understand those rights; isolate and question youth for hours during high-pressure interrogations without notifying their parents or an attorney; and even lie about or manufacture damaging evidence pointing to their guilt, while urging the young suspect to confess so that he can be released or receive lenient treatment.

Those were some of the elements in the widely publicized case of the West Memphis Three (WM3) in Arkansas, where three teens were convicted in the murders of three eight-year-old boys in 1993. After a nearly 12-hour interrogation by police, then 17-year-old Jessie Misskelley, Jr. confessed to the killings, implicating Damien Echols and Jason Baldwin, who were 18 and 16, respectively, at the time.

It was not until 2007 that new forensic tests of evidence at the crime scene showed no genetic material belonging to any of the suspects. The Center became involved in the appeal process, writing an amicus brief to the Arkansas court that explained the process of how young suspects can confess falsely. These arguments helped persuade the court to order new hearings for the three defendants. In August 2011, not long after CWCY attorneys officially joined the defense team, the WM3 were released in a deal agreed to by prosecutors and defense attorneys.  

Over the last two decades, DNA evidence has freed at least 289 people nationwide, which has caused much-needed scrutiny of the types of evidence used to convict people, including confession evidence. At the same time, Tepfer explains that there has been “a sea change in the way courts have been thinking about young people in conflict with the law…and a realization that youth, categorically, need to be treated differently than adults.”

The most notable recognition of these differences has come from the U.S. Supreme Court, which has abolished the death penalty for juveniles and sentences of life without parole for certain juveniles in recent years.

Addressing evidentiary flaws as they affect young people is the Center’s mission. As Tepfer puts it, “We use our own litigation to build campaigns in targeted states and nationally to implement policies, such as the electronic recording of police interactions with youth, which will help prevent false confessions and wrongful convictions of children.”     

In addition to strategic litigation, the Center is advancing its goals by building coalitions, training advocates and reaching out to media. Last year, it helped organize an advocacy effort to persuade the Arkansas Supreme Court to propose a rule endorsing the electronic recording of youth interrogations. The issue is currently under consideration in Arkansas and the Center is mounting a campaign to educate the judiciary and policymakers in Texas. To tackle the problem more broadly, the Center has partnered with the International Association of Chiefs of Police to publish a juvenile interrogations protocol that is now used to train officers in more than 200 police departments across the country.

One of the most promising developments last year was the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling that a child’s age must be taken into account in determining whether he is in custody and entitled to Miranda warnings. The Center’s amicus brief in the case, which pointed to the increased risk of false confessions from youth, was specifically cited by the majority.

As the Center continues to push for and helps to implement such rulings, there should be fewer cases like the Dixmoor Five, West Memphis Three and Englewood Four in the future.