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**Pitts:** Why would anyone confess to a crime they did not commit? It happens so often in Chicago that defense attorneys call the city "the false confession capital of the United States." Chicago has twice as many documented false confession cases as any other city in the country. One reason may be the way police conduct their questioning, and "60 Minutes" has learned that the Chicago Police Department is now the subject of a Justice Department investigation into its interrogation practices.
Two cases we examined involve several teenage boys who were arrested and claimed they were forced or tricked into confessing to violent crimes they never committed. Each of them spent nearly half their lives in prison. They are free now and shared their stories together for the first time.
**Terrill Swift:** We all got one thing in common—we did an extensive amount of time in jail for something we didn't do. And that's the bottom line.
**Pitts:** They each received sentences that ranged from 15 years to life. Terrill Swift, Michael Saunders, Vincent Thames, and Harold Richardson were convicted in one rape and murder; James Harden, Robert Taylor, and Jonathan Barr were convicted in a different case. All were found guilty based solely on confessions.
**Pitts:** Jonathan, you went in as a 14-year-old boy.
**Jonathan Barr:** Yes, sir.
**Pitts:** What did you come out as?
**Barr:** Came out as a 34-year-old man.
**Michael Saunders:** Yeah, we were young, little kids.
**James Harden:** I miss my mama, man. I miss my mom and daddy, man. I miss my mama. It seemed like some days I can't function.
**Pitts:** She died while you were in prison?
**Harden:** Yeah.
**Pitts:** Their troubles began in 1991 when Chicago was in the midst of a violent crime wave, with more than 900 homicides in 12 months. Police were under enormous pressure to solve those crimes. Terrill Swift was 17, still in high school, and had never been in serious trouble when another teenager from his neighborhood implicated him, Vincent, Michael, and Harold in the rape and murder of a 30-year-old prostitute named Nina Glover.
**Pitts:** Did anyone ask you, "Terrill Swift, did you murder this woman?"
**Swift:** That was the first thing they said. Whoa. "Raped and beat who? Nina? I don't know Nina Glover. Can I get my mother in here so I can get a lawyer?" And nothing.
**Pitts:** Terrill voluntarily turned himself in to police and was placed in an interrogation room surrounded by several detectives. The questioning, he said, lasted for over 12 hours.
**Pitts:** How close were they? Show me, physically, how close were they?
**Swift:** Right here. "You're going to die in jail. You're never going home."
**Pitts:** Yelling at you?
**Swift:** Yelling at me.
**Pitts:** Were you scared? Did you cry?
**Swift:** Absolutely, I was crying, but no one listened.
Terrill wanted to go home and says the police told him if he admitted to the rape and murder, he could leave. He signed a 21-page confession that provided specific details about how he and his co-defendants committed the crime.
**Pitts:** I got to tell you, the first time I read it, all 21 pages, I said, "That man is guilty."
**Swift:** Right. Everything that’s in that confession was fed to us, myself and my co-defendants, by the police.
**Pitts:** Did they force you to sign?
**Swift:** No.
**Pitts:** So why did you sign it?
**Swift:** I thought I was going home.
**Pitts:** You were 17 years old, so you weren't a child.
**Swift:** I guess I was still a mama's boy.
**Pitts:** Come on now. You had to know that if you admitted to raping and killing a woman, you weren't going home to mama.
**Swift:** I had no understanding of that, none.
Terrill would later recant, but it was too late—at trial, a judge believed the confession and sentenced him to 30 years.
**Robert Taylor:** That whole ordeal did something to every last one of us. And with me, it made me numb.
In the other case, Robert Taylor, Jonathan Barr, and James Harden were arrested in high school for the rape and murder of their classmate, 14-year-old Catteresa Mathews. They were taken into custody after a fellow student provided their names to police as possible suspects. Robert was 15 when he says he was taken into an interrogation room and forced to sign a confession.
**Taylor:** Man, you’re being cuffed and beaten by the police. Man, they can get you to do what they want you to do.
**Pitts:** What did they make you do?
**Taylor:** Made me sign it. I mean, that... that killed me inside.
His co-defendant, James Harden, said he was told by police that if he signed the confession, he'd be released immediately.
**Harden:** They had the statement already typed up, and the man said, "Do you want to go home and sleep in your bed tonight?" So I said, "Hell, yeah." That's how easy it is for a person to sign their life away—just the thought of being taken away from your parents and saying, "Okay, I want to go home and sleep in my bed tonight." Hell, yeah, I was fixing to sign it.
But James never got home that night. He and the others were tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison.
**Bob Milan:** There's nothing worse as a prosecutor than playing a role in sending an innocent person or people to prison for many years. There’s nothing worse.
Bob Milan should know. As a young prosecutor, he worked on this case and eventually rose to second-in-command in the Cook County State's Attorney's Office. Now in private practice, he says publicly for the first time that he should have examined the confessions more closely.
**Milan:** I never believed anybody would confess to a horrible crime they didn't commit. I didn't believe it. I didn't think people would confess to... to the rape and murder of a woman. You know, I just didn't believe it. But based on my experiences, I found it did happen. These young men lost a lot of good years. I was part of it—I didn’t mean it, I never would have done that intentionally, but it doesn't make it any easier.
**Pitts:** Yeah. It haunts you, still, it sounds like.
**Milan:** Sure. Always will.
**Pitts:** Why would a detective push for a false confession, do you think?
**Milan:** What happens is it's tunnel vision, okay? They get locked in on this individual. So the anonymous phone call, the confidential informant, the well-meaning witness sends them down the wrong path.
Chicago has a long history of false confessions. A Chicago police board found former Commander Jon Burge guilty of physically abusing suspects, from using electric shock to putting a gun to a suspect's head. So far, more than 85 convictions have been overturned in Illinois since 1989, many as a result of police misconduct.
**Peter Neufeld:** Quite simply, what Cooperstown is to baseball, Chicago is to false confessions. It is the hall of fame.
Peter Neufeld was one of the defense attorneys representing these men. He is the co-founder of the Innocence Project, an organization that has helped exonerate 300 wrongfully convicted men nationwide with the use of DNA testing.
**Neufeld:** There are more juvenile false confessions in Chicago than in any place in the United States. What’s happening? It's not because the kids are different that makes them more vulnerable to confessing. It's because of the way the police keep pounding and pounding and pounding away in those interrogation rooms. You get innocent kids to confess to crimes they didn't commit.
**Pitts:** Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez disagrees. Responding to public pressure, she set up a new unit within her office to re-examine questionable prosecutions. But she defends the actions of the police in these two cases.
**Alvarez:** We have not uncovered any evidence of any misconduct by the police officers or the state's attorneys that took the statements in these cases.
**Pitts:** Alvarez still believes the confession Terrill Swift gave in the Nina Glover case, despite the fact there was no DNA evidence linking him or the others to the crime.
**Pitts:** Did you find any of the boys' DNA on the victim?
**Alvarez:** No, we didn't.
**Pitts:** Did you find any of their DNA in the basement of the house?
**Alvarez:** No.
**Pitts:** How do you explain that the boys would say they raped a woman and there not be any DNA evidence? Doesn't that strike you as odd?
**Alvarez:** Well, we would love to have DNA on everything, on every piece of evidence that we have in every crime. But it doesn't necessarily occur.
Last year, the Innocence Project retested the one DNA sample recovered from inside the victim, Nina Glover. It was submitted to the national DNA database, and a match was made to Johnny Douglas, a serial rapist and convicted killer who is now deceased. However, this new discovery did not change Anita Alvarez's mind.
**Pitts:** You find out years later that the DNA found inside the victim's body belonged to Johnny Douglas, a convicted serial rapist and murderer. Doesn't that tell you that he most likely is the person who killed this woman?
**Alvarez:** No, it doesn't. Is he a bad guy? Absolutely, he is. Absolutely. But can we prove, just by someone's bad background, that they committed this particular crime? It takes much more than that.
**Saunders:** For her to just say DNA is not everything—well, what else do you have if DNA doesn't matter?
**Swift:** This was a rape and a murder. How can you say DNA is nothing?
**Pitts:** Why would a confession trump DNA evidence?
**Saul Kassin:** Because confessions are incredibly compelling. Nobody can understand how they would ever be goaded into confessing to something they didn't do.
Saul Kassin is a psychology professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and has studied police interrogation practices and false confessions for 27 years. He notes that DNA is supposed to solve our problems; it's supposed to identify the perpetrator and absolve the innocent. Here, however, we have cases where DNA does exonerate the innocent, but we don't believe them because the innocent have confessed. Thus, the DNA doesn't seem to matter anymore.
In the case of Robert Taylor, Jonathan Barr, and James Harden, the DNA found inside the 14-year-old victim Catteresa Mathews was also retested, and a match was made to Willie Randolph, a 34-year-old convicted rapist with 39 arrests. Peter Neufeld says prosecutors rejected the DNA evidence and instead developed an unusual theory to explain it all away.
**Neufeld:** They suggest that perhaps after the kids killed her, this man wandered by and committed an act of necrophilia.
**Pitts:** Necrophilia? A lot of our viewers won't know what that means.
**Neufeld:** Having sex with a dead person.
**Alvarez:** It's possible. We have seen cases like that.
**Pitts:** Possible?
**Alvarez:** It is. We've seen it in other cases.
**Pitts:** It's possible that this convicted rapist wandered past an open field and had sex with a 14-year-old girl who was dead?
**Alvarez:** Well, there are all kinds of possibilities out there, and what I'm saying is that I don't know what happened.
**Milan:** People don't like to admit they've made a mistake. But we need to do that. Our job as prosecutors isn't to win; our job is to get it right.
Former prosecutor Bob Milan emphasizes that prosecutors need to put the same sense of urgency into exonerations as they once did into prosecutions.
**Milan:** When you have physical evidence, it doesn't lie. So when you have the DNA of a girl from some guy with a history of sexual attacks, that pretty much tells you where you're going.
**Pitts:** Not the people who gave the confessions?
**Milan:** No.
By now, ten defense attorneys were focusing on the new DNA evidence. Working with them was a third-year Northwestern Law School student named Katie Marie Zouhary. She was assigned to re-examine the original confessions, and her research helped change the case.
**Katie Marie Zouhary:** I think when you look at a confession on a piece of paper, a court-reported confession, a handwritten confession, it seems like all the pieces are in place. But what you don't see is the 17-year-old in the room by himself with the police officers; what you don't see is that confession next to the other confessions, which allows you to see that these things don't match up.
Zouhary discovered that the boys' confessions contained different accounts of the crimes, from the chronology to their own nicknames.
**Zouhary:** They get the framework right, but they don't get the details right. If any two of them had gotten the details right, that would be one thing. But when you look at each of these confessions line by line, as we did, it’s pretty glaring that there is no cohesive story here.
Last year, based on the new DNA evidence and Katie Marie's work, the courts vacated the convictions and granted all of them certificates of innocence, restoring their full rights as U.S. citizens. As for Anita Alvarez, she's still not convinced that Terrill Swift and his co-defendants are innocent.
**Alvarez:** I don't know whether he committed the crime or not. There are still unanswered questions in both of these cases that I couldn't sit here today and tell you that they are all guilty or they are all innocent.
**Pitts:** What would you say to her if you could?
**Swift:** I was wrongfully incarcerated for 15 years, and you're still fighting my innocence—not only mine but my co-defendants. What else needs to be done?
During our interview, Terrill's mother, who was in the room at the time, became emotional.
**Pitts:** I could hear you crying over there. Why are you still shedding tears?
**Mrs. Swift:** That was hard, actually, to have your child taken away from you when he was innocent. And I knew this from the beginning. But what could I do? To not be able to get my child, my baby, my firstborn—that was hard, and it still is. We came through it with the belief that the truth would eventually come to light.