Experts Doubt That 8-Year-Old’s Taped Confession in Double Killing Is Admissible

November 22, 2008


By JOHN DOUGHERTY
PHOENIX — It is very unlikely that the videotaped confession of an 8-
year-old Arizona boy who is charged with killing his father and 
another man will be admissible in court, legal and child-psychology 
experts say.

And, they say, contrary to the preference of the police force that 
investigated the case, it would be extremely unusual for the child to 
be tried as an adult.

The boy is charged with premeditated murder in the Nov. 5 shooting of 
his father, Vincent Romero, 29, and Timothy Romans, 39, a boarder in 
the Romeros’ two-story home in St. Johns, a rural community of about 
4,000 residents 170 miles east-northeast of Phoenix.

The case has attracted renewed international attention after 
prosecutors released to news organizations this week a videotape of 
an hourlong police interview with the boy.

On the video, the boy at first repeatedly denies firing the gun that 
killed his father and Mr. Romans. But after continued questioning, he 
eventually admits shooting each of them twice, saying he had found 
them already wounded.

“I think I shot him because I think he was suffering,” he says of his 
father.

A few minutes later, the boy says his stepmother, at his father’s 
request, had spanked him five times the day before the shootings. An 
officer then asks whether he was angry at his father the day the men 
were shot. “The first time I was mad at him,” he says, “but he was 
already shot, and I shot him again.”

Legal experts doubt that the confession will be admissible in court, 
because the police never told the boy of his right to silence and to 
a lawyer, and because he was interviewed without a parent or a lawyer 
present.

Prosecutors say the reason is that he was initially being interviewed 
as a victim and did not become a suspect until he gave contradictory 
statements during questioning.

But Dale Baich, an assistant federal public defender in Phoenix, 
said, “At the point where the police decided the boy was no longer a 
victim and was a suspect, that’s when the questioning should have 
stopped.”

Judy Stinson, a clinical law professor at Arizona State University 
and former juvenile prosecutor, said the legal issue centered on when 
the interview became a “custodial interrogation” from which he was 
not free to leave.

“The level of forcefulness used by the police includes the 
defendant’s perception about whether he is free to go and able to 
leave,” Ms. Stinson said. “An 8-year-old child is not free to go.”

Any statements made by the child after the point at which the 
interview became a custodial interrogation would most likely be 
inadmissible in court, she said.

The lack of parental presence during the interview is not as critical 
a factor as the absence of a lawyer, said Steve Drizen of the Center 
on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law.

“Parental representation does not adequately protect the child,” Mr. 
Drizen said. “What is needed with children of this age is an attorney.”

Even if the boy had been read his rights and been free to leave, it 
is doubtful that his confession would stand up in court, given the 
susceptibility of young children to confessing crimes they did not 
commit, child psychologists said.

“Just because this 8-year-old said he shot the father and the other 
man gives us no great confidence that he really did,” said one 
leading expert in child confessions, Steve Ceci, professor of 
developmental psychology at Cornell. “We can take most 8-year-olds 
off the street and get them to eventually admit they did this as well.”

The boy is being held in a juvenile detention center, though he is to 
spend Thanksgiving with his mother on a 48-hour furlough. The St. 
Johns police have urged prosecutors to try him as an adult, but no 
decision has been made.

Trying an 8-year-old as an adult would be unprecedented in modern 
jurisprudence, said Thomas Grisso, director of the law-psychiatry 
program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

“I have never heard of an 8-year-old being tried as an adult,” Dr. 
Grisso said. “It would be more than extraordinary. It would be 
totally unique.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/22/us/22arizona.html?