The list of culprits behind the conviction of Anthony Caravella starts with the police, the prosecutor, the judge. Then it becomes embarrassing.

Miramar cops extracted five questionable confessions out of the kid. Two witnesses claim the arresting officers beat an admission out of Caravella.

The prosecutor and the judge seemed oblivious to troublesome aspects of the case. Caravella was only 15 when he was arrested in 1983. His IQ was 67. The only evidence implicating him in the rape and horrific murder of Ada Jankowski was his own utterances.

And his taped confession, the one with incriminating details, was marred by leading questions and suspicious gaps, as if the tape recorder had been turned off intermitteningly to prep the suspect.

Yet Robert Carney hung a death penalty prosecution on nothing more substantial than the words extracted from a mentally deficient teenager. And Broward Circuit Judge Arthur Franza allowed that shoddy confession into evidence.

AN EARLIER ERA

Everyone knows that mentally challenged suspects are apt to confess to anything. Except that Caravella's murder trial unfolded in an era when theories about wrongful confessions had yet to gain credence in the courts. Or in the press -- the other shameful culprit in the Caravella ignominy.

At the time, neither The Miami Herald nor the Sun Sentinel were piqued by what now seems so obvious. ``None of this got a lot of press,'' said Diane Cuddihy, the assistant public defender who pushed for the DNA tests that freed Caravella from prison Thursday. ``The press didn't seem bothered by the contradictions in Anthony's statements.''

Nor did we question the prosecution decision to seek the death penalty (ultimately rejected by the jury) for a mentally deficient 15-year-old. It sounds outrageous in 2009, but in 1984, no editorials or columns questioned Broward County's descent into medieval justice. Another 17 years would pass before the Sun Sentinel's Paula McMahon began the push for justice for Anthony Caravella.

Broward Public Defender Howard Finkelstein can fairly radiate outrage when he discusses the county's disgraceful record of convicting mentally hapless defendants for murders they didn't commit. Caravella's name goes on the list along with Jerry Frank Townsend, Tim Brown, Frank Lee Smith and John Purvis.

`THEY DIDN'T KNOW'

Finkelstein insists that judges and prosecutors either knew that cops employed abusive interrogation tactics or they were willfully ignorant.

But he concedes, ``They didn't know that the mentally retarded were so susceptible to suggestion and so apt to say anything to please their interrogator.'' The seminal studies on wrongful confessions were yet to come.

It was an era when cops were less educated, less professional and less humane. And modern judges and prosecutors, he said, tend to be wary of confessions extracted from the mentally deficient.

Finkelstein noted that the 2009 Broward state attorney's office quickly moved to undo the injustice caused by its ignoble 1984 version. Once DNA testing cast doubt on his conviction, Assistant State Attorney Carolyn McCann supported the court action to free Caravella from prison.

``They've gone out of their way to do this right,'' Finkelstein admitted. ``We've all come a long way.''

By ``we,'' he included the other culprit in the Caravella story -- we in the press.

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