Bronx man convicted for 1989 murder of mother cleared — 30 years later
Huwe Burton was wrongly convicted of one of the worst crimes imaginable — fatally stabbing his mom for drug money, then stripping her body naked to make it look as if she had been raped and murdered by an intruder.
He served almost 20 years in prison before he was paroled in 2009, but the Bronx native never truly felt free until Thursday.
That’s when he was finally cleared of the horrific 1989 killing.
“It just felt like a weight was officially lifted,” Burton, now 46, said moments after being exonerated in Bronx Supreme Court.
Burton silently wiped tears from his eyes as Justice Steven Barrett granted a motion to vacate his 30-year conviction.
“Certainly, it is a tragedy that Mr. Burton spent some 20 years in jail for a crime that he did not commit,” the judge said.
“For this, I want to apologize to Mr. Burton for a system that failed him.”
Burton was 16 when he returned home from school and found the body of his mother, Keziah, in her bedroom at their Williamsbridge apartment on Jan. 3, 1989.
His father, Raphael, was visiting relatives in Jamaica at the time.
Eager to make an arrest, detectives forced Burton, then a sophomore at Evander Childs HS, to confess to the slaying, according to a two-year, joint investigation by the Bronx district attorney’s Conviction
Integrity Unit and the nonprofit Innocence Project.
The sleep-deprived teen copped to investigators’ theory — that he was a crack addict who exploded in a rage when his mom refused to give him $200 to pay his dealer.
The 59-year-old nurse, who worked at Beth Abraham Hospital, was found with her wrists bound by a telephone cord, and detectives came up with the idea that her drug-crazed son staged her grisly slaying to look like a rape-murder.
At the time, one investigator publicly declared himself shocked “that someone would degrade their mother to that degree.”
During Burton’s hours-long interrogation, cops browbeat him with threats of statutory-rape charges because he had an underage girlfriend — and also promised that he would be treated leniently and tried as a juvenile in Family Court if he admitted accidentally killing his mom.
But after falsely confessing to matricide, Burton was instead prosecuted as an adult, convicted of second-degree murder and weapons possession in 1991 and slapped with a 15 years-to-life prison sentence.
Officials now believe Emmanuel Green, a 22-year-old felon who lived in an apartment below the Burtons, was likely the killer.
Days after Keziah Burton’s death, Green was busted for running a red light — in her stolen car.
“The apprehension of Green in possession of Ms. Burton’s car should’ve been a red flag,” one of Huwe Burton’s lawyers, Innocence Project staff attorney Susan Friedman, said in court.
“However, instead it was perceived by police as a problem — because they had closed the case six days earlier.”
Green was killed in a love triangle a short time later, and his convictions, including for a knifepoint robbery and rape of a teen girl, were never disclosed to the defense.
Burton wouldn’t see freedom until he was paroled in 2009, while Innocence Project lawyers worked to clear his name.
The nonprofit was founded by Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, who were part of O.J. Simpson’s defense team.
Prosecutors said they supported Burton’s exoneration because the three detectives who interrogated him used what research now considers “psychologically coercive techniques” to elicit his false confession.
During its re-investigation of Burton’s case, the DA’s office found the cops used the same tactics in two unrelated murder cases three months before his arrest.
Separate juries acquitted the defendants in both of those cases after less than an hour of deliberations each.
District Attorney Darcel Clark said her office would review the other cases handled by the now-retired 47th Precinct investigators — Lt. Frank Viggiano and Detectives Stanley Schiffman and Sevelie Jones.
But, Clark said, “what happened back then, what they did, was not necessarily wrong.”
“That is the way things were done then. The science and things have developed over the years so that now we know that those techniques are not good to produce reliable confessions,” she said.
“For 1989, that was standard practice for NYPD. That’s how they did it. But now we know better.”
Inside the packed Bronx courtroom, Burton lamented his treatment.
“I stand here today for that 16-year-old boy. He didn’t have anyone to protect him,” he told the court.
And he expressed sorrow for his father, who died in 2005 without knowing his son would be vindicated.
“I stand here today for my father, who never made it to this point in the journey, who had the responsibility of dealing with his wife’s death and dealing with his son’s defense at the same time,” he said.
Attending the emotional hearing were two fellow exonerees — Yusef Salaam of the “Central Park Five” and Jeffrey Deskovic, cleared of murdering a high-school classmate in Peekskill, Westchester County.
Afterward, Burton headed to Marcus Samuelsson’s famed Red Rooster restaurant in Harlem to celebrate with his lawyers and girlfriend, Schaunta Booth.
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