Defense lawyer backs minors’ rights

False confessions are too common when juveniles are involved, a new book argues.

Many veteran attorneys have a case or two they never forget. For Donald McInnis, a longtime San Diego criminal and civil defense lawyer, it was the 1998 killing of Stephanie Crowe.

“It haunted me for years,” he said. “It haunts me still.”

Officially, the knife slaying of the 12-year-old Escondido girl in her bedroom remains unsolved. But that’s not what troubles the 76year-old McInnis the most.

He’s haunted by the realization that his client, one of three teens originally charged in the case and later cleared, easily could have been convicted and sent to prison, perhaps for life.

“People who think this couldn’t happen to their kids need to think again,” McInnis said.

Last month, he released a new edition of his 2019 book on the case, “She’s So Cold,” to include recommendations for improving the judicial system. He said he hopes to preclude the mistakes that plagued the Crowe case and drowned it in reasonable doubt, making it unlikely justice will ever be achieved.

He’s proposing a Children’s Bill of Rights that would require, among other things, the presence of a parent or legal guardian any time a minor is questioned by police. He wants the Miranda warning officers are required to give to suspects — “You have the right to remain silent,” etc. — augmented with language a child can understand.

“Studies have shown that minors — children and adolescents — lack the mental capability to fully comprehend the meaning of the rights,” McInnis writes. “Therefore, minors cannot make a ‘knowing and intelligent waiver of their constitutional rights’ as required by law before they are interrogated.”

It’s an issue that is gathering attention in other cities amid a nationwide conversation about police reform. Sparked by the killing last year of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody, the discussion has been mainly about curbing alleged physical abuse. But psychological and emotional coercion are drawing scrutiny, too.

In the Bronx, N.Y., prosecutors are reviewing 31 homicide convictions that relied on confessions obtained by three detectives who worked together in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In one of their cases, a 16-year-old boy falsely confessed to killing his mother and spent 20 years in prison before he was exonerated.

Nationwide, studies have shown that false confessions, often produced by high-pressure interrogation techniques, are a leading cause of wrongful convictions in the U.S. The National Registry of Exonerations lists false confessions as responsible for 12% of the 2,750 cases it has documented since 1989.

The Crowe case, McInnis said, could have been one of them.

An inside job?

In the early hours after Stephanie was stabbed nine times, Escondido police concluded that it was an inside job and zeroed in on her brother, Michael, 14.

Detectives interrogated him, without his parents’ consent or knowledge, for about eight hours over two days. They lied — a tactic that is legal — and told him they had found blood in his bedroom. They promised him leniency if he came clean and hinted at the horrors awaiting him if sent to adult prison. They said his parents believed he was guilty and never wanted to see him again, another lie.

Michael eventually confessed to the murder, parroting detectives’ suggestions that there were two sides to his personality, and that the “bad Michael” had taken over in a rage fueled by sibling rivalry.

Detectives also brought in Michael’s best friend, Joshua Treadway, 15, and interrogated him for about 18 hours over two days. They lied to him too about evidence and said he was being set up by Michael to take the fall. Treadway confessed, saying he had acted as a lookout while Michael and a third teen, Aaron Houser, crept into Stephanie’s room.

Houser, 15, was questioned, too, and although he denied any involvement in the slaying, he gave what the detectives deemed a “chilling” hypothetical description of how he might have committed it.

The three teens were arrested and charged as adults with murder. In a pre-trial hearing, a Superior Court judge threw out Michael’s confession, Houser’s statement and most of Treadway’s confession, ruling they had been illegally coerced or not prefaced with the necessary Miranda warnings.

Left admissible was a two-hour part of Treadway’s confession that detailed the alleged murder conspiracy. Prosecutors decided to try him first.

With jury selection under way, DNA tests found Stephanie’s blood on a piece of clothing — not anything belonging to the teens, but on a sweatshirt worn by a homeless man seen wandering in the Crowe neighborhood the night of the killing, knocking on doors and peering in windows in search of a woman he knew.

The case against the teens was dropped, and the homeless man, Richard Tuite, 28, was put on trial.

He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in 2004 and sentenced to 17 years in prison. A federal appellate court overturned the verdict, ruling that Tuite’s attorney had been unfairly limited during cross-examination of a prosecution witness. Tried again in 2013, Tuite was acquitted.

By then, Michael Crowe and Treadway had sought and been granted a rare finding of factual innocence by a judge who ruled that “no reasonable cause exists” to believe they were involved in the slaying. Houser was not part of the motion, but its outcome applies to him, according to the lawyers involved.

The Crowe family sued for various civil rights violations and received more than $9 million in settlements, most of it from the cities of Escondido and Oceanside, which employed the detectives who interrogated the teens.

The juvenile brain

McInnis represented Houser in the case after he was approached by a friend of the family. He’d worked criminal cases earlier in his career, both as a prosecutor and a public defender, but at the time was in private practice doing mostly personal injury, insurance and other civil cases.

He said he knew right away that the confessions would be a problem if they made it in front of a jury, even in a limited way.

“It’s so damning when a suspect says ‘I did it,’ which is why police work so hard to get a confession,” McInnis said. “It’s the most powerful evidence that any prosecutor can present.”

He said he was preparing his defense of Houser to include experts who would explain why minors lack the mental capacity and life experience to understand what is happening during an interrogation, why they are so willing to obey and please authority figures and why they falsely confess.

Those are issues he has explored through scholarly articles, including one due out soon in the Dartmouth Law Journal.

McInnis said he decided to write the book after encountering a group of people at a senior-living facility 12 years ago, well after the teens had been cleared and there had been widespread media coverage of it.

“They all believed the boys did it,” he said.