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At 14, he found his mother murdered. Police suspected him because he was 'acting normal.' His case gets a new look.

Michael Politte with his mother, Rita
Michael Politte with his mother, Rita

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Michael Politte just didn’t look right to police when they showed up to a fire at his family’s mobile home in 1998 in Washington County, Missouri.

Politte, then 14, had just found his mother, Rita, on the floor, dead and set ablaze in their remote mobile home. But he showed no emotion. He seemed dulled, shedding no tears — alleged reactions that were later presented at a 2002 trial in which a jury found him guilty of second-degree murder.

He was “acting normal, not concerned about what had happened, no visible signs of remorse," an investigator said at his trial.

The only physical evidence used against him was apparent gasoline found on his sneakers. Law enforcement suspected gasoline was used to set her on fire.

Michael Politte was convicted on officers' hunches and fire evidence that Missouri officials have since acknowledged was faulty, according to court documents and the now 37-year-old's lawyers.

"They tried to put themselves in my shoes of how they would feel, how I should have acted in regards finding my mother burning to death on the floor. It wasn't to their liking ... so in their eyes, I was guilty," Politte said in an interview with the USA TODAY Network.

Research in the decades since has indicated that people — particularly young people whose brains are still developing — do not always react to trauma in a textbook way.

"Sometimes, trauma can lead us to act with a sort of a flat affect or in what may be perceived to be an unemotional way," said Steven Drizin, a clinical law professor at Northwestern University and co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions. "And that doesn't mean they're guilty and it doesn't mean that's a basis for turning up the heat during an interrogation."

Politte was arrested and convicted in the late 1990s, a decade of high crime overall and a surge in juvenile violent crime. The rise in youth crime gave rise to the "superpredator" myth that gun-toting American youth were menacing society with savage killings.

"There was a perception of teenagers that they were … remorseless," Drizin said.

Politte has never confessed. In fact, before his trial began, prosecutors offered "a sweetheart deal" of 15 years in prison for a plea to voluntary manslaughter, according to court filings. He did not accept the deal.

"He steadfastly maintained innocence and refused to plead guilty to a crime he did not commit," his lawyer said in a filing to the Missouri Supreme Court in October.

Missouri attorney general's spokesman Chris Nuelle said his office would not respond to the allegations made in the filing or comment on the case in general.

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'It was easy for them to assume that I was responsible'

Known as Bernie, Michael Politte was the only suspect from the outset.

Police and emergency responders were called to a fire at a trailer in Hopewell, Missouri, early on Dec. 5, 1998. Politte and a new friend he had asked to stay over were outside.

The lead sheriff's investigator, Curt Davis, said later that Politte was just "acting normal" and without remorse at the murder scene and during follow-up questioning.

"They set their sights on me right then," Politte told the USA Today Network. "It was easy for them to assume that I was responsible because I was the only living person other than (his friend) in my house. And then they began to analyze my behavior."

Soon after police and the fire marshal arrived on scene, Politte asked the responding sheriff's officers how his mother died, including whether his mother's throat was slit or she was killed some other violent way.

An autopsy wouldn't be done until later, but her throat was not cut; she had suffered head trauma. Still, the comment drew more suspicion.

"(The police) would say, 'well that's just an indicator of callousness' when there are also lots of other possible explanations... Was he saying, 'I want to know what happened, and I asked you because I just saw what I saw, and I want to know who killed my mom"? said Dr. Jeffrey Aaron, a clinical and forensic adolescent psychologist who has been working on Politte's case.

A seeming lack of emotion, his questions to investigators and being known to investigators in the small town as a "fire bug" gave the police and fire marshal's office "tunnel vision," said Megan Crane, Politte's lead attorney and co-director of the MacArthur Justice Center in Missouri.

Tammy Nash, a former deputy sheriff in Washington County who worked on the case, said she took exception to the premise that his reactions, or lack of them, amounted to guilt.

“Other officers focused on Michael right away and assumed he was guilty because they just did not think he was telling the truth and they thought he was acting odd,” reads her affidavit, submitted to the Supreme Court. “I disagreed; Michael was a fourteen year old kid who had just found his mom dead. I wondered how did they expect him to act after this trauma."

Michael Politte's school picture
Michael Politte's school picture

Police, Crane said, did not investigate Politte's father, who had just finished a contentious divorce from Rita Politte. His father had threatened Rita Politte's life a week earlier after a significant financial settlement against him from the divorce, Michael Politte's attorneys said.

His father surrendered Politte to the sheriff's office within days of Rita Politte's death. At that point, Politte demanded an attorney and protested that he was being "framed," according to the filing.

"Michael became the prime suspect," the attorneys wrote. "Police wrongly suspected him because they misinterpreted his reaction to the trauma of finding his mother’s burning body as evidence of guilt, deception, and ultimately, what the State called a remorseless cold heart."

Politte was interrogated over the next 48 hours, charged with murder and moved to the juvenile detention center. While there, according to testimony, Politte was upset about something and shouted, “I haven’t cared since December 5th. That’s when I killed my mom.”

In a court filing, Crane and attorneys with the Midwest Innocence Project and the Missouri law firm Langdon & Emison argue the statement was fabricated.

Years later, the state determined that the substance investigators thought they found on Politte's shoes was not gasoline at all. In 2016, a state crime lab determined the “gasoline” was actually chemicals in the rubber caps on the front of his Converse shoes.

“They adopted (the new testing) in the late '90s, and yet they didn't retest the evidence in this case,” Crane said. “And they presented it to the jury through two separate expert witnesses as if it was scientifically solid and unquestionable evidence.”

One of the jurors in Politte's case, Linda Dickerson-Bell, recently said in an affidavit filed with the Missouri Supreme Court that she regretted her guilty vote.

"If I had known then what I know now, I would not have convicted," she said. "I now believe Michael is innocent. "

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Modern studies of brain development 'should knock everybody's socks off'

Testimony about police trying to read the emotions of a traumatized boy who witnessed his mother burning "should never have been allowed into evidence, because there's no science behind it," said Drizin, who also co-founded the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth. "People react to the death of their loved ones differently."

The understanding of brain development has progressed significantly in recent decades. Most researchers say a child's brain is not fully developed until at least the age of 25, meaning they are impulsive, easily led astray, don't think through an action's long-term consequences and extremely gullible.

Law professor Samantha Buckingham said such science has found its way into the legal system, leading to landmark decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, which, among other cases, outlawed the death penalty for juveniles in 2005 and ruled juvenile life without parole was unconstitutional in 2012.

"We now know that the period of brain development during adolescence, 12 to 25, rivals the period of brain development from zero to 3," said Buckingham, Loyola Law School professor of law, director emeritus of the Juvenile Justice Clinic and of counsel at the Center for Juvenile Law. "And that should knock everybody's socks off. It is tremendously revolutionary."

She added that when young people experience trauma, as Politte did in finding his mother's body, it "is going to have impact on their brain development, much the same that ADHD would make a young person even more impulsive," because a key part of the brain is still developing.

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After four hours of deliberation, Politte was convicted for life

Politte's criminal trial in 2002 lasted just three days — and most of that was taken up by the prosecution arguing a remorseless kid beat his mother's head with a blunt object, then set a controlled burn, something they argued Politte had practiced earlier.

But the evidence was contaminated, his attorneys have since said. Witnesses and family members who vouched for Politte's innocence did not make it into the courtroom "because they did not fit the narrative decided on the morning of the murder," his attorneys said.

"His attorney did not consult or present a single expert, despite the State’s reliance on scientific evidence of which counsel had no knowledge or experience," his attorney's state Supreme Court filing reads. "Counsel did not call any of Michael’s family to testify in his defense, and counsel did not prepare or call Michael to testify despite his urgent desire to explain his innocence."

The jury deliberated a little over four hours before returning a verdict of guilty.

Dickerson-Bell, the former juror, said in her affidavit that said she wishes she could take it all back.

"His attorney came every day looking very tired and he was never prepared," she said. "He seemed like he was over his head... I had a lot of doubts about Michael’s guilt even back then, but his defense attorney did not give us anything to work with... (I) do not remember the defense putting on evidence or explaining why the prosecution’s evidence did not mean anything."

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Are police trained to think they are human lie detectors?

Many police officers in America have been trained using the Reid Technique developed by John E. Reid and Associates.

The technique influences about every manner of policing, and many activists, criminal justice and wrongful convictions experts blame the technique for misleading police officers into thinking they are sort of human lie detectors.

"The heart of the Reid technique is what's called the behavioral analysis interview," Drizin said. "And this is where police officers have someone in the box. They are analyzing the suspect's behaviors, his or her body language, the words that they use in response to questions. And they're sort of running their answers and their observations through a checklist."

Joseph Buckley, the company's president, dismissed this critique. In an interview, he said the firm's 2013 training book is often scapegoated, such as when DNA evidence uncovers wrongful convictions based on coerced or false confessions.

"We stand behind everything we teach," he said.

"There are a lot of factors that affect a person's behavior, their emotional psychological condition," Buckley added.

He specifically addressed Politte's experience.

"...if somebody just went through a very traumatic experience of seeing their mother on fire, you can pretty much throw everything out the window because they're going to be traumatized. If you're talking to them kind of immediately after that, whatever they do or say, I think, to a great extent is going to be unreliable," he said.

Given the vulnerability of youth and the damage that can be caused at such a young age, police need more training on handling young people, Buckingham said.

The Reid book, she said, "is 449 pages, not including the index... there are total of 11 pages in the entire book that have any reference to kids. Any reference at all."

Buckley said the company's technique does teach how to handle juvenile suspects — as well as people who are mentally impaired and intoxicated.

"When we talked about socially immature individuals, oftentimes the juvenile population, (an interrogation) really can't rely on their behavior at all," he said.

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What’s next for Michael Politte?

Michael Politte in prison
Michael Politte in prison

On Tuesday, the Missouri Supreme Court asked the state to respond to the filing by Politte's lawyers and the allegations made in it.

Crane said the absence of an automatic denial from the state high court was a good first step.

The Supreme Court could grant or deny the request for Politte's release, or it could order an evidentiary hearing before making a decision. The exact timeline is not clear.

If Politte loses his state Supreme Court bid, Crane said the next step would be federal court.

If he does lose in court, state or federal, Politte could still win freedom next year through a parole hearing. A new state law allows for parole for juveniles convicted of crimes less than first-degree murder after 15 years served, and Politte is eligible for a hearing early next year.

"It's pretty amazing and impressive for Missouri to pass this," Crane said of the new law, passed in a state that has been reticent to oppose tough-on-crime legislation. "We will continue fighting for his exoneration, and we'll continue litigating this in the courts. But it’s amazing this opportunity is even on the table, and we’re hopeful that he may go home one day."

Read the documents

Eric Ferkenhoff is the Midwest criminal justice reporter for USA Today Network.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Was 14-year-old who acted 'normal' after mom killed wrongly convicted?