We don't know how we missed this before, particularly since he so closely follows our thinking, but we did. Check out Alas, a blog for his thoughts on the case, including:

"Guilty or not, it seems likely that - had Reyes' confession and DNA evidence been available at the time - more of the defendants, or perhaps all of them, would have been acquitted."

Isn't that the real issue now? Would the verdict probably have been different had the jury known of Reyes admitted involvement and that DNA tests confirmed it? If so, these defendants are entitled to have their convictions vacated and a new trial.

"Guilty or not, if the defendants - or their parents - had known enough to insist on a lawyer, they wouldn't have been convicted. Because no lawyer would have let them confess, and without the confessions the prosecution had no case."

We agree. And if the jury had been told the truth, that the parents were kept waiting for hours while the police were questioning, threatening and making false statements to the kids to get them to confess--as well as driving the kids to the scene of the crime where the police fed them with enough details to enable them to regurgitate them during the videotaped confessions--and that the parents were only allowed to be present for the final videotaping of the confessions, which occurred after-the-fact of the real interrogations--who can dispute the substantial likelihood that the verdicts would have been different?

The key here is that no physical evidence ties the five youths to the crime of rape. The sole evidence against them consisted of the videotaped confessions. Had the true circumstances surrounding those confessions been brought to the attention of the jury, we think it more than likely that the verdicts would have been not guilty. And that is enough for a new trial, if not an investigation into the conduct of the prosecutors who were present the evening of the interrogations.