Police tricked a teen and his parents to get a murder confession — and NC law allows it
When Charlotte-Mecklenburg police detectives questioned Jahzion Wilson in July 2017, they had help:
The mother and stepfather of the then-15-year-old sat in on the police interview. They also took part — repeatedly ordering and pressuring their son to tell the officers what they wanted to know.
“You did it,” Antonio Boone told Wilson, according to court documents. “Whatever y’all did, it’s done. Man up to it.”
Wilson eventually did what he was told. Except, the story he gave was not the one his parents expected. It was the one that police secretly had come to get.
How they got it has become a legal debate that can pit truth vs. justice and parents against their own child.
‘Finish telling this damn story!’
Wilson’s mother, Karla Wilson Boone, would later say in court that she had allowed CMPD detectives to talk to her son after they assured her the boy was “not in trouble for anything,” only that Jahzion was “a witness in a larceny case’’ who may have seen “something” that would help the investigation.
Instead, well into the 77-minute interview at the home of Jahzion’s grandmother on July 20, 2017, the actual police topic of interest became clear. The crime in question was not a larceny involving the online sale of an iPhone. It was a murder.
“I didn’t just come here to talk to you about buying or selling cell phones,” one of the detectives told Wilson. “You said you will be honest with me, and you’ll be honest with your parents, and this is where it has to start.”
Wilson, whom his attorney describes as a “perfect kid” who had never been in trouble before, was suddenly a suspect in one of Charlotte’s highest-profile homicides of 2017 — the Father’s Day robbery and slaying of college baseball player Zachary Finch, 21, in southwest Charlotte.
There was no lawyer present during the police interview. Even after the details of the fatal shooting dribbled out in Wilson’s answers to the detectives’ questions — how Jahzion and two friends arranged to meet Finch off Clanton Road to sell him a used iPhone; how Finch had been shot as he fled the resulting robbery attempt — the boy’s parents continued to pressure him to tell the full truth.
“Don’t sit here and lie,” Karla Boone said, according to court documents. “Finish telling this damn story. Now.”
Her son did just that. Wilson said he only had wanted to sell his phone to Finch but that one of his friends wanted to rob him; that he had not shot Finch himself but saw it happen. He also admitted that he was carrying a gun when he met with Finch.
Two years later, Wilson was tried as an adult, convicted of first-degree murder and robbery, and sentenced to life. Now 20, he’s eligible for parole after he serves 25 years. Charges were dropped against Wilson’s friend, a second juvenile originally implicated in Finch’s killing. A third defendant, Demonte McCain, pleaded guilty to two lesser charges in 2018.
“It’s terrible they preyed upon the good in humanity,” Finch’s mother, Tara Finch, tearfully told the Charlotte Observer after McCain’s plea. “Zachary believed in the good in everyone, because he was good. He thought everyone was like he was.”
Now, a recent legal fight focuses on some of the steps detectives took to bring Finch’s killers to justice. It also shines a light on the partnerships that often arise between officers investigating crimes and the parents of the youthful suspects accused of committing them.
CMPD: Legal interview strategy used
Two legal experts contacted by the Observer say mothers and fathers can unwittingly entrap their own children by first giving police access then joining officers in pressuring their kids to confess. Studies show that juveniles are far more likely than adults to give a false confession.
Northwestern University law professor Laura Nirider says those police-parent alliances also frequently involve the use of “trickery or deceit” by police. That, she says, appears to have been the case with Wilson’s parents, who thought their son was involved in a lesser crime only to learn differently once the police interview began.
“A witness to a larceny is very different than being a murder suspect,” says Nirider, co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law.
“(Wilson’s) parents had no idea of the real stakes their son faced. To use deception like this to enlist a child’s mom and dad to act as agents of the state against the interest of their own son ... this is now a troubling fact pattern that you see in state after state.”
In an emailed response to the Observer, CMPD says its detectives used a legal interview strategy in talking with Wilson that has twice been upheld by the courts hearing his case. That includes a unanimous ruling in May by a three-judge panel of the N.C. Court of Appeals, the state’s second-highest judicial body.
“Let us not forget who the victim is in this case, Zachary Finch, whose life was cut short by the defendant who was held accountable for his actions due to the work of CMPD Homicide detectives,” according to the police statement.
“Just in 2021, 12 juvenile members of our community were murdered, while 14 juveniles were charged with murder. In a time of rising violent crime, often committed by young people in our community, the detectives who worked the Zachary Finch case should be commended for their work that took a violent criminal off of the streets of Charlotte.”
Wilson’s trial attorney, Chiege Okwara of Charlotte, told the Observer that the information her teenage client gave police at the first interview was instrumental in his conviction, and that his parents’ pressure on him to cooperate with police had clearly been a factor.
“On the interrogation tape, you can hear them yelling and cursing,” Okwara said in an interview. “He’s all by himself.”
She unsuccessfully argued at Wilson’s trial that the information gathered at the July 20 interview should have been suppressed, claiming in part that police misled the parents into cooperating by downplaying the seriousness of the underlying crime and Wilson’s role in committing it.
“I’m a parent,” Okwara said. “If you tell me that my child is wanted as a witness to a larceny or a breaking and entering, my sense is ‘Sure. We can talk.’ But if you tell me that you want to talk to my child about a homicide. I’d tell you, ‘I want to talk to a lawyer first.’ If (police) had done that from the start, I don’t think Jahzion would ever have been made available.”
Today, Wilson’s parents are “devastated at what they see as their role in their son talking to police, implicating himself and ending up with a life sentence,” Okwara said.
Contacted by the Observer, Boone initially agreed to be interviewed for this story but said she could not because of the recent deaths of her mother and her grandmother.
“I’m dealing with a lot of things right now,” Boone said.
NC allows police deception
In North Carolina — as in most states — it is not unlawful for police to lie or use deceptive information when interrogating a minor. Only three states ban the practice, Nirider says.
Last month, three Republican judges from the state Court of Appeals denied a motion to throw out Wilson’s conviction and order a new trial, ruling that the teenager had “voluntarily” agreed to be interviewed by police before his arrest.
Assistant Appellate Defender David Andrews had argued, in part, that police had deceived Wilson’s parents, exploited the teen’s naivete and had “capitalized” after Wilson’s parents “bullied him into confessing,” according to the Court of Appeals filing.
The panel disagreed. In their ruling, the judges upheld Superior Court Judge Forrest Bridges’ decision at Wilson’s trial that the juvenile had not been deceived or coerced into confessing.
The panel, like Bridges, found that Wilson had not been in custody at the time of the first interview, which had taken place in a familiar family setting. The judges also ruled that police had not been physically threatening or deceptive during the interrogation. Instead, according to the judges, the detectives told the boy he could stop answering questions at any time.
Bridges broke from police on one point by blocking the evidence detectives had gotten from Wilson during a police station interview after his arrest because his parents weren’t present, as N.C. law demands.
Chief Appeals Court Judge Donna Stroud also disagreed with her colleagues in arguing that Wilson’s jury should have been given the option of convicting the teen of the lesser charge of second-degree murder, which would have led to a much shorter sentence.
Regarding the tactics of police, Appeals Court Judge Jefferson Griffin, a former prosecutor, cited a previous ruling by the state Supreme Court: “While deceptive methods or false statements by police officers are not commendable practices, standing alone they do not render a confession of guilt inadmissible,” the state’s highest court had ruled.
Barbara Fedders, director of the Youth Justice Clinic at the UNC School of Law, told the Observer that the appeals court panel “seems unbothered by the fact that police lied to (Wilson’s) parents.”
“Police need to be able to do their jobs,” said Fedders, who has represented youthful offenders for the past 25 years. “But there has to be a way to do it rather than turning family members against each other, particularly parents against kids, based on a lie.”
She says parents need to become more aware of the risks of cooperating with an investigation, particularly without talking to a lawyer first.
“Parents are supposed to be the protectors of a child,” Fedders says. “But they do not function as an attorney would. They are not trained to do that ... That’s what makes this so sinister.”
Cooperation v. confession
Wilson’s murder conviction was not based solely on what he told detectives at his grandmother’s house. Two of his friends from school — including Wilson’s girlfriend — both testified at the trial that Wilson told them he had shot and killed a man on Father’s Day.
Okwara, a veteran Charlotte criminal defender, says she still believes her client’s claims of innocence, interpreting the comments to his friends as online boasting.
Even after Bridges blocked some of the police evidence from Wilson’s trial, Okwara says prosecutors “had everything they needed,” after the initial interview when Wilson put himself at the scene of the shooting and admitted carrying a gun to his meeting with Finch.
“What happened to Zachary Finch and his family was tragic,” Okwara says. “But this was a 15-year-old who had never been involved in the legal system in any capacity whatsoever. He had no conception” of the risks he faced.
According to Nirider of Northwestern, being questioned by parents and police “under circumstances like these” can be even worse for a youthful offender than being interrogated by police alone.
“Parents, to a child, are a source of comfort and support,” said Nirider, who read the Court of Appeals opinion in the Wilson’s case at the request of the Observer.
“But here, that support has been neutralized. This 15-year-old is as alone as he’ll ever be. That protection from his parents has not only been removed, it’s been weaponized.”
Parents, according to Fedders, often act on the belief that it’s always better for their children to tell the truth.
In the case of “the Central Park Five,” a group of African American and Latino juveniles unfairly convicted of the 1989 brutal rape and beating of a New York jogger, that backfired.
The father of 15-year-old defendant Antron McCray persuaded him to confess to crimes he hadn’t committed because he thought police would let the boy go. McCray spent 7 1/2 years behind bars after being convicted for rape and attempted murder.
“My father was my best friend, my hero at the time,” McCray told The New York Times in 2019. “... Sometimes I love him. Most of the time, I hate him. I lost a lot, you know, for something I didn’t do. He just flipped on me, and I just can’t get past that.”
Juvenile reforms
North Carolina has not been at the forefront of juvenile criminal reforms.
It was the last state to automatically prosecute 16-year-olds as adults until the legislature raised the legal adult age to 18 for most crimes in 2019. A new law enacted in 2021 raised the minimum age at which children can be prosecuted in juvenile court from 6 to 10.
According to The Sentencing Project, 25 states and the District of Columbia have banned life sentences without parole for defendants under the age of 18. North Carolina is not among them.
Efforts to legislate how police interview juveniles are moving far more slowly. Only three states — Illinois, Oregon and Utah — prohibit police from using deceptive or untrue statements to entrap juveniles, Nirider says.
Illinois, California and Maryland require juveniles to have access to both their parents and an attorney before they can be interviewed by police.
“Parents can be tricked in the same way that their children are tricked,” she says.
Fedders put it this way: “Parents don’t know that if they urge their children to speak to the police, they may be starting a train moving that they can’t stop.
“They don’t realize how little power they have.”
This story was originally published June 22, 2022 at 2:19 PM.
