Adults can’t not talk. It’s so ubiquitous that criminal defense lawyers joke about people’s inability to not try to talk their way out of an arrest.  Cops call it the “first best lie,” the story that a suspect tells when he thinks he can lie his way out of trouble, and the one that will hang him at trial.

The Miranda Court may have thought the warning would be the death of interrogations. They could not have been more wrong.  But what about kids?

Even when police interrogators left the room, cameras kept recording the teenage suspects. Some paced. Several curled up and slept. One sobbed loudly, hitting his head against the wall, berating himself. Two boys, left alone together, discussed their offense, joking.

What none did, however, was exercise his constitutional rights. It was not clear whether the youths even understood them.

It’s not that teens are unfamiliar with the Miranda warnings. Everybody has at least a passing familiarity with them, because TV. And yet, they can’t seem to invoke their rights.

Therefore none had a lawyer at his side. None left, though all were free to do so, and none remained silent. Some 37 percent made full confessions, and 31 percent made incriminating statements.

These were among the observations in a recent study of 57 videotaped interrogations of teenagers, ages 13 to 17, from 17 police departments around the country. The research, published in Law and Human Behavior, adds to accumulating evidence that teenagers are psychologically vulnerable at the gateway to the criminal justice system. Youths, some researchers say, merit special protections.

This is no trivial problem. In 2011, the last year for which statistics are available, 1.5 million teenagers were arrested.  All the infirmities with statements, confessions, that exist for adults exist as well for teens, but there are some more disturbing aspects that arise out of the interrogation of teenagers.

Teenagers, he added, are also less likely than adults to know that the police can lie during interrogations.

“The police often promise kids things in the present. ‘If you just tell me you did it, you can go see your mom,’ ” he continued. “And because the brain’s reward systems are hypersensitive during adolescence, that immediate reward of confessing will trump the thinking of, ‘What will happen when I come back to court in a month?’ ”

Not only are they peculiarly susceptible to false confessions, generated by police lies and manipulation, but they appear to be inclined toward complying with authority, appeasing adults, and doing whatever is necessary for immediate gratification at the expense of their future.

The old rule of thumb, a matter of law in some states, is that juveniles can’t be questioned in the absence of a parent to protect them from overreach.  But that, like so many “common sense” notions, turns out to be less than adequate protection.

But if parents are not legally savvy, their presence may not serve young suspects well.

In the videos, five parents remained largely silent. Some lectured their children and then questioned them, taking on the interrogator’s role. A few parents urged their children to come clean, inadvertently sealing their fate.

Among the things parents may teach their children is to be law-abiding and trust police.  In the context of interrogations, the parent’s effort to use this as a teachable moment will prove disastrous.

Josh Blackman, who is far closer to his teen years than I am, made an “ultra-cool” video for the purpose of teaching young people to invoke their right to counsel.  The New York Times article offers some dubious legal advice:

Dr. Steinberg suggests that parents tell teenagers: “If you’re being questioned by police because they think you’ve done something bad, say you need to talk to your parents first.” Parents can decide whether to call a lawyer.

Josh nails the response.

No. You always call a lawyer. Even if your kid is in trouble, your first duty as a parent is to make sure the child is adequately represented. Parental punishment can always come later.

This is true for teens. It’s true for adults. It’s good advice.  Even more important than invoking the right to remain silent is invoking the right to counsel.  The reason is that a person can subsequently change his mind on the right to remain silent, particularly in the face of some manipulative banter like, “well, if you only told us X, we would have let you go home,” but once the right to counsel is invoked, it can only be waived in the presence of a lawyer.

As Miranda has proven ineffective and goofy for adults, and rather a boon to police who get relatively a free pass on lies and manipulation provided they recite the magic words, it’s essentially worthless for teens.

Regardless of one’s views on the myth of child predators and the efficacy of confessions (because no one would ever falsely confess, right Paul?), the increased potential of teens to be manipulated into confessing or giving false confessions is sufficiently real to warrant special protections:

Citing recent research, the American Psychological Association has called for widespread protections for suspects, including teenagers, during interrogations. The recommendations include limiting the length of interviews; videotaping them in their entirety; assuring that teenagers are always accompanied by a lawyer; and that interviewers be trained to reduce the risk of eliciting false confessions from impressionable suspects such as youths.

While these protections actually address the problems, the likelihood that teens will be accompanied by counsel during interrogations appears pretty poor given the fact that Gideon right to counsel is so often honored in the breach.  If we can’t provide competent counsel to adult defendants in court now, what are the chances they will be provided to teens during interrogation?

Even the International Association of Chiefs of Police and federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, have put together a program to train interrogators on the care and feeding of youth.

Notably, nothing in there suggests that law enforcement is prepared to sacrifice their primary goal, convicting the teen they’ve already decided is the perp, in the process of interrogation.  So they extract a kinder, gentler confession? Not exactly what the Supreme Court in Miranda had in mind.  So much for do it for the children.