On Feb. 16, 2022, detectives in a suburb north of Chicago interrogated a 15-year-old about a shooting that injured a dollar-store clerk. The teen confessed to the crime even though he did not commit it. The police kept him in jail on charges, including attempted murder, until his basketball team proved he was in another town during the shooting. The city of Waukegan refused to release video of the 43-minute interrogation until WBEZ sued and a judge ordered it.

The video shows a Waukegan detective leading the 15-year-old to make false statements implicating himself in the Feb. 4 shooting. The police tactics included deception that inflated the evidence against the teen and undermined his Miranda rights, according to Steven Drizin, a Northwestern University law professor who reviewed the video for WBEZ. The false confession came even though police did not use harsher forms of coercion, such as yelling, threatening the teen’s family and sleep deprivation.

“This interrogation should be required viewing by every detective and every juvenile officer — a tool for training them how not to interrogate suspects, especially those who are vulnerable,” Drizin said.

We asked Drizin, who co-directs Northwestern’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, to analyze the interrogation to help the public understand how a false confession can unfold. In his view, lead detective Sean Aines made four key errors. WBEZ selected clips from the video to illustrate each.

Based on the video, WBEZ also created a complete transcript of the interrogation. The captioning on the clips below is derived from our transcript. WBEZ has redacted brief portions to protect the teen’s privacy.

• RELATED STORY
• Criminal Justice

Transcript of the interrogation by Waukegan detectives that led to a 15-year-old’s false confession

read more

Aines did not respond to requests for comment on Drizin’s criticism. Reviews of the interrogation by police commanders and an outside consulting firm identified some of these errors but concluded the detective did not violate any law or police policy.

Error 1: Negating the teen’s Miranda rights

This video clip begins with Aines telling the teen his rights under Miranda v. Arizona, a 1966 U.S. Supreme Court decision establishing rights of suspects under interrogation. Those include the right to remain silent and the right to an attorney.

Right off the bat, however, Aines negates those rights, Drizin said.

Aines tells the 15-year-old, “Your words are going to be extremely valuable in this situation. … I don’t think you have anything to necessarily fear in terms of talking to us.” Aines later adds, “I can tell there’s a weight on your chest right now, OK? So I promise you, if you’re straight with me, that that weight’s going to go away.”

The detective’s statements are not only misleading, Drizin said, they contradict the fact that anything the teen says can be used against him.

“They suggest that no harm will befall a suspect who gives up his Miranda rights,” Drizin said. “It results in an involuntary waiver of his right to silence.”

Next, Drizin said, Aines undermines the 15-year-old’s right to a lawyer by suggesting that it would take time to get one — a lengthening of the process that may be unappealing to the teen, who is shivering in a T-shirt, who is hungry for lunch and who has already expressed a desire to go home. (Illinois allows interrogations of juveniles 15 and older without an attorney present, even for serious offenses.)

Aines also suggests the teen is not likely to be charged as an adult. He does not mention that the charging decision will be up to the prosecutors, not the police, and that teens charged with attempted murder face risk of transfer from juvenile to criminal court, Drizin said. “The timing of this statement, immediately after the [Miranda warning] that he could be charged as an adult, undermines the importance of that right.”

The teen’s signature on the Miranda waiver form, finally, “isn’t just some evidence that the rights were read to him and he understands them,” Drizin said. “It is also a statement that he is giving up those rights. This was never communicated to him.”

Error 2: Suggesting leniency

This video clip shows Detective Aines introducing the idea that the teen shot a gun in self-defense or by accident. Aines tells him he has “driven home suspects who shot people” under such circumstances and “they never spent a day in jail.”

Juvenile suspects believing they can go home after agreeing to such a story is “the No. 1 reason why they falsely confess,” Drizin said. He noted that the tactic may have been especially powerful on a 15-year-old who told the detectives during the interrogation, “I’m nervous that I’m not going to be able to see my family tonight.”

An Illinois law that took effect Jan. 1, 2022 — six weeks before the Waukegan police held this teen — bans deceptive tactics while interrogating a juvenile. The law’s definition of deception includes “unauthorized statements regarding leniency by a law enforcement officer.”

Error 3: Inflating evidence

In this footage from the interrogation, Detective Aines pumps up the evidence against the teen and suggests there is no doubt he was the shooter. Specifically, Aines tells the 15-year-old about “an abundance of information that you were there and you were involved with this.” The detective suggests he merely wants to hear what pushed the teen to shoot.

But there was not a lot of evidence against the teen, Drizin said, based on his reading of the outside review, commissioned by the city and released as a result of WBEZ’s open-records lawsuit.

“This is deceptive because the case against [the teen] is actually weak without the confession,” Drizin said.

The case’s victim — a dollar-store clerk who was shot in the face — said the person who shot him was not in a photo lineup that included the teen, according to the outside review. And a witness, viewing the same six images separately, did not circle the teen’s photo until he had looked at them for more than seven minutes. Experts said taking so long could indicate the witness was not sure.

Drizin also said Aines misrepresented the evidence to the 15-year-old. The misrepresentations include saying a video from the store captured the teen at the time of the shooting and showed him in a confrontation with the victim and then shooting the victim.

In Drizin’s view, those statements violate the law prohibiting deception because the detective did not know for sure that it was the 15-year-old in the footage and, in fact, it was not him. He was on a basketball court 18 miles from the store.

Error 4: Feeding facts to the teen

At several points during the interrogation, Aines tells the 15-year-old, “I don’t want to put words in your mouth.”

But Drizin said that’s exactly what the detective does — instead of seeing whether the teen can come up with key facts. In this clip, Aines supplies several of those facts: The shooting took place in a Dollar General store on Grand Avenue; the store clerk who was shot was Hispanic and nearly 6 feet tall; the clerk pushed the gunman out of the store; and the gunman shot through the door.

At other moments of the interrogation, Aines tells the teen that other people were in the store. Drizin said this raises the prospect that they witnessed the incident and could identify him.

“The detective was letting the teen know that his goose was cooked and that continued assertions of innocence would be futile,” Drizin said.

At no point of the 43-minute interrogation, however, does Aines ask the 15-year-old for a description of the weapon used in the shooting. Drizin said the teen’s answers might have conflicted with other evidence and raised doubts about his self-incriminating statements.

Chip Mitchell reports on policing, public safety and public health. Follow him at @ChipMitchell1. Contact him at cmitchell@wbez.org.