A Manhattan judge vacated the convictions of Brian Boles and Charles Collins for a 1994 murder after DNA testing on fingernail evidence from the victim excluded the men as the source and pointed to another individual as the perpetrator.
The Honorable Ruth Pickholz dismissed the indictments against Boles and Collins after a joint request from prosecutors and attorneys from the Innocence Project, who represent Boles, and attorneys from Ropes & Gray, who represent Collins.
“Brian Boles was only a teenager when this nightmare began,” said Jane Pucher, a Senior Staff Attorney at the Innocence Project. “We are grateful that the District Attorney’s Office and the court have finally acknowledged what Boles has always maintained – that he was wrongfully convicted. He lost three decades of his life for a crime he had nothing to do with.”
Boles was just 17 when, after two days of extensive questioning by police who threatened and lied to him, he falsely confessed to the murder. He had no attorney, parent, or guardian present. This “confession” was the only evidence against Boles, who, after being found guilty at trial, went on to serve 30 years in prison before being released on parole in 2024. Collins, fearful of also losing at trial, took a plea and served 23 years in prison before being released on parole in 2017.
New DNA testing, using technology not available at the time of the initial investigation, was conducted as part of a joint post-conviction reinvestigation by the Innocence Project and the New York County District Attorney’s Office’s Post-Conviction Justice Unit (PCJU). DNA evidence found under the victim’s fingernails, which likely belonged to the actual perpetrator, did not match Boles or Collins. The investigation also uncovered police reports and witness interviews, none of which were disclosed to the defense, showing that the murder victim was seen alive hours after the time Boles said the crime occurred in his “confession.” These accounts made the timeline in Boles’ statements about how and when the murder occurred impossible. Further, the investigation uncovered a forensic report previously undisclosed to defense showing that a detective’s testimony at Boles’ trial purporting to link Collins to a shoeprint left at the crime scene was untrue. While the detective claimed at trial that Collins’ shoeprint “matched” a print left at the crime scene, the forensic report stated that the print was too partial and no comparison could be made.
A Factually Impossible Coerced Confession
On Feb. 7, 1994, an elderly man was found beaten, gagged, and strangled with a telephone cord in his Harlem apartment in the same building where Boles was then living with his father. Police only eyed Boles as a suspect after he and Collins were arrested for an unrelated robbery. While there was no evidence linking Boles to the murder, detectives decided the two cases were connected. After two days of intense questioning during which he was handcuffed to a chair and sleep-deprived, Boles was repeatedly lied to, threatened, and physically and verbally abused until – scared and wanting to go home, he told police that he and Collins had committed the murder. Over several more hours, police fed Boles more details about the crime, which he then repeated back to police and resulted in his “confession.” Collins was subjected to similarly coercive interrogation tactics and also falsely admitted guilt to the murder.
But that statement was directly undermined by reports in the prosecutor’s possession that were not disclosed to defense counsel at trial, in violation of Boles’ constitutional rights. Those reports showed that the murder victim was alive for many hours after the narrow window of 12-1 p.m. when Boles’ statement said the crime occurred. In fact, they showed multiple neighbors interacting with and seeing the victim alive into the early evening. They also documented that neighbors heard loud sounds and furniture being dragged in the victim’s apartment around 10:30 p.m., suggesting he was killed late at night. Had these reports been disclosed to the defense, they would have allowed counsel to show that the story captured in Boles’ statement was factually impossible and, thus, that his confession was false.
Lies and Deception Drive False Confessions
Modern social science research shows that the circumstances under which Boles was questioned created fertile ground for a false confession. Coercive interrogation tactics, combined with Boles’ youth and history of trauma, made him uniquely vulnerable to giving a false confession. The tactics detectives used are now known to produce false confessions at a high rate: they lied to Boles repeatedly, first telling him that a neighbor had seen him outside the victim’s apartment, which was false; and then telling him that Collins had implicated him in the murder, which was also a lie. Collins, in fact, had told police that he and Boles had nothing to do with the murder.
Law enforcement’s use of force, coercive tactics, isolation, and deception, as in this case, are proven to increase a person’s stress and mental exhaustion, making them susceptible to falsely confess. Studies show that this effect is particularly pronounced in children, juveniles, and people with intellectual disabilities. Nearly a third of all wrongful convictions are the result of false confessions and a third of those false statements were made by individuals 18 or under at the time of arrest.
Boles’ false confession is far from an anomaly. Police deception has contributed to countless wrongful convictions, such as those of the Central Park Five — now known as the Exonerated Five — when police railroaded five Black and Latino teens by lying and making false promises to secure false confessions for the brutal rape and assault of a white jogger in 1989. All five were later exonerated in 2002. Law enforcement used similar methods when interrogating Huwe Burton, who was 16 when he falsely confessed to killing his mother. Police separated Burton from his father, threatened him with additional criminal charges, and offered leniency if he confessed to the crime. Even though he soon recanted, he was convicted of second-degree murder in 1991. Burton was exonerated in 2019. Marty Tankleff presents another stark example of the devastating impact of such techniques. He was 17 when he falsely confessed in 1988 to stabbing his parents in their Long Island home. The lead detective lied to Tankleff, saying that his father named him as the attacker before he died, prompting him to confess and then immediately recant. He was incarcerated for 19 years before being exonerated.
Since 2021, 11 states have passed bills into law to ban the use of deception during the interrogation of youth, including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Virginia. In New York, a bill has been introduced in the state legislature that would mandate the provision of counsel for people under the age of 18 before they are questioned, ensuring that consultation with an attorney could not be waived by them or their family, and establishing that statements obtained in violation of those requirements could not be used against them at trial.
The Beginning of a New Chapter
In its decision today, the court vacated Boles’ and Collins’ convictions and dismissed the underlying indictment. That dismissal recognized the exonerating power of the new DNA evidence and the impact that the reports — which raised doubts about the confessions — would have had at trial if they had been given to the defense. The dismissal also included charges related to the robbery incident which was tried jointly with the murder case and which the prosecution argued at trial was inextricably linked. Noting that both men took responsibility for their actions in that robbery, that both men served the entirety of their sentences for those acts, and that there were mitigating circumstances related to the robbery that the jury could not properly consider because the charges were joined, the prosecution argued — and the court agreed — that all charges should be dismissed in the interests of justice.
While incarcerated, Boles participated in the Bard College Prison Initiative, graduating in May 2025 with his bachelor’s degree in Sociology. He is eager to continue building his career serving marginalized communities, now without the heavy burden of a wrongful conviction.
Boles is represented by Innocence Project Senior Staff Attorney Jane Pucher and Foderaro Post-Conviction Litigation Fellow Shabel Castro and assisted by Senior Paralegal Kanani Schnider. Collins is represented by Christopher Conniff, Ethan Fitzgerald, Insia Zaidi, and Bryte Bu of Ropes & Gray.
Republished courtesy of Innocence Project