Huwe Burton ran straight to the telephone when he got home from school that afternoon in 1989; his girlfriend was calling and he was 16, after all. His mother’s car was gone so he didn’t share his plans; he assumed she was running errands. Her bedroom door was ajar, but this detail wouldn’t register as a problem until later – later when his life shattered into Before ... and After.
After he came home to find her car still missing. After he opened that door left oddly ajar. After found his mother’s bloody body, wrists still bound with a telephone cord.
The boy who waited outside his Bronx apartment to guide police to the scene didn’t realize then what dangers he was ushering in. He didn’t realize what lengths the detectives, the prosecutors, the police questioning him for hours would go to in order to pin his mother’s violent murder on her own child.
They threatened, they lied, they kept a traumatized 16 year-old on the edge of panic for an eternity in that cramped interview room until, he said later, he would have done anything to make it all end.
So Burton did what many victims of modern witch hunts have done when facing impossible odds: he made a false confession to save himself. He did what the devils demanded in order to escape their torment.
Burton was exonerated in 2019 through The Innocence Project after serving 19 years in prison for that false confession and subsequent murder conviction. Speaking by Zoom to Muhlenberg County High School students last week, he was asked what he would say to his accusers now.
“Is a conviction or an arrest, is that more important than ruining a child’s life?” he said. “Ruining a man’s life who has to deal with the passing of his wife, then has to deal with the defending of his son, when everybody in society is saying ‘He’s not worth the time of day.’ … Was it worth it?”
If history has taught us anything, it is this: a confession of guilt is nothing more than a plea for mercy when it is wrung from the accused through abuse. It is a threat not only to those unjustly charged, but to any society where such witch hunts are allowed to spread.
Yet such experiences are becoming more common in American courts. The Department of Homeland Security has chosen might over right as it becomes more immune to the rule of law, the cost of which is a legal morass of the falsely accused which will swamp the justice system and cost taxpayers for decades to come. It also sets a troubling precedent.
When legal immigrants choose to self-deport, instead of fighting to right the constitutional injustices against them, we the people should be more than a little concerned about the health of our justice system.
When abandoning your home, your career — even your children — is less painful than staying in ICE detention while awaiting your day in court, we the people should be more than a little concerned about the lack of government oversight.
When dozens of unconvicted, imprisoned human beings whom we once called neighbors die in facilities our own tax dollars built, places even Congress cannot inspect without notice, we the people must tear down the rotten pillars of the systems allowing such human suffering to desecrate the remnants of our democracy.
To be clear, whatever is allowed to happen on American soil to our black and brown friends despite their legal rights can just as easily be done to us if the government decides to invalidate our own documents while we sit in custody. Or sit at the airport.
An immigrant’s decision to self-deport should not be mistaken as evidence of actual guilt. It is a false confession given out of desperation to escape their long suffering. It is also a red flag warning us of the Department of Homeland Security’s disregard for Constitutional rights and its disdain for Habeas Corpus.
The American judicial system is at a critical crossroad. The growing injustice of our immigration courts and ICE internment camps must be remedied or it will continue to fester until it has turned the rule of law into a cancer of political persecution from which we may never recover.
Seven years ago, Huwe Burton stood before a Bronx County Supreme Court judge and was given his long-awaited exoneration with help from The Innocence Project. After serving nearly 20 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, he is still angry, he told MCHS students, but that anger carries a choice.
“Anger is a very interesting thing. A lot of times when I speak [about this case] I try to tell people, anger is a lot like fire in the sense that fire can be used to heat your home or that same fire can be used to burn it to the ground. It all depends on how you use it. So in terms of anger, I’ve never stopped being angry,” Burton said. “... I choose to use the anger to inform, to hold people accountable, and to to use that same anger to say hey, don’t allow what happened to you, all you’ve gone through, to define who you are. You define who you are.”
We as a nation are facing that same choice. Too often we have been defined by our witch hunts, from Salem’s hysteria to McCarthy’s Red Scare. Grassroots organizations such as The Innocence Project are working diligently to undo more recent judicial failings. But more such organizations are badly needed for ICE detainees as well. Without them, DHS will continue to dismantle the legal system while we remain adrift in the fable that desperation is proof of guilt.
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