WHAT YOU NEED TO
KNOW
Criminal Defense
Preparation
Motion to Supress False
and Inaccurate Confessions
False Criminal Confessions by Children and Juveniles
In most cases children charged with serious crimes talk to the police. Many of these children and teens do not understand how to invoke their 5th Amendment Right to Remain Silent or what it means that anything they say can and will be used against them. The Shellow Group in Milwaukee has been pioneering challenges to the competency of juveniles to waive their Miranda Rights long before these injustices made the national headlines.
Children, when questioned by adults, try to please adults with the answers they give to questions. The Shellow Group listens to their young clients and conducts its own investigation using in-house investigators who know that a child's analysis of what constitutes a bad fact is often wrong and, so often, the child charged with murder withholds from the police, and even his or her lawyer, the fact that they think will hurt them the most. Sometimes it is as basic as answering a police interrogators question, "No, I wasn't afraid".
Children are taught from an early age that fear is a sign of immaturity and so when asked the question which is the make or break question in a homicide case, the child will deny he was afraid because he doesn't want to look stupid or immature. Often children confess to things that could not have occurred the way they told the police it occurred. Once the police have the confession they rarely go out and see if the physical evidence matches the confession. If the child says he shot with his right hand and the trajectory of the bullet doesn't support that fact, effective and winning cross-examinations of police officers are the key to securing the result that keeps a child with children and does not subject them to trial in the adult court where 100's of America's children are doing life in prison.
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