After I graduated high school, I had an internship (later, a paid writing position) at my local paper. One of the courtroom stories I covered went down like this:

A freshman in high school was off-campus for lunch. He hung around "the wrong crowd" and was walking back, alone, to my alma mater from the mall, where everyone went for lunch. Members of another "wrong crowd" started shouting out racial epithets (he was Hispanic). They ganged up on him, a fight broke out, he pulled a pocketknife, no one got stabbed, everyone dispersed and he went to class.

Sounds like teenage gang-lite hijinks, right? Wrong. One of his aggressors got all scared because this guy had a knife and pulled it on five guys during a fight, so he told his parents, his parents told the school and the next thing you know, this kid's being arraigned for felony assault after they extracted a confession from him.

The defense complained the confession was ill-begotten, especially as a plea bargain loomed, and I couldn't obtain the tapes through FOIA. Lucky for me, the family of the defendant leaked them. Eighteen fucking hours of the police bullying a scared 15-year-old by claiming they had a videotape of the incident (the school had no videotape) and threatening him with a harsher Measure 11 sentence if he didn't 'fess up to a) pulling a knife and b) starting the fight (which, having known the kid personally, is completely incomprehensible), neither of which they could prove without his confession, as everything was hearsay.

Finally, the defense succeeded in getting the tapes sealed, but only in a third or fourth hearing after the family plead not guilty (the defense lawyer having convinced them he could get the tapes sealed). Unfortunately, the jury had already heard them, so even though the judge ordered the jury to ignore the tapes and decried their validity, they returned with a guilty verdict to a Measure 11 charge with no admissible evidence aside from the blood-free knife that was drawn and the judge, who was clear-headed in his determination against the tapes, nonetheless said his verdict should serve as "example" to any local youth who were considering joining a gang.

He's still in prison today.

(Disclaimer: Some of these details may be sketchy, because it happened several years ago and it was a pretty complicated story, but the long story short is that a 15-year-old who thought he was defending himself is still in prison after an illegal confession and a trial presided over by a judge bent on making examples of the local youth who ran afoul of the law. Small-town justice is fucked up.)