My name is Jeffrey Descovic, executive director of the Jeffrey Descovic Foundation for Justice, which frees wrongfully convicted people. Actual Innocence is a podcast that tells the stories of people who serve time for crimes they did not commit.

Listen to the heartbreaking true accounts of wrongfully convicted people and their journey to exoneration.

Thanks so much for listening.

Recent studies have shown that the human brain does not stop developing until a person is well into their 20s.

And with that development comes the ability to make mature, responsible decisions.

However, in 1989, in New York, a 16-year-old Jeffrey Duscovic was able to be questioned, interrogated, polygraphed, and arrested without any kind of parental or legal representation.

I'm Brooke, and this is Jeff's story.

In November of 1989, I was 16 years old. Life was pretty good for me. I was having my best year in school academically. I would say I kind of lived a double life in the sense that I grew up in an apartment complex in the suburbs of Westchester and Peakskill. And within that apartment complex, there were a lot of kids as well as people who lived in the suburbs of Westchester in Peakskill. And within that apartment complex, there were a lot of

kids, as well as people who lived in the nearby area. And so kind of like whatever activity I would

suggest would kind of be what we would do. I mean, from playing basketball to swimming, to riding

bikes, to stickball, to a variety of other games that we even made up.

Whereas in high school, that was a different set of kids, and so I wasn't as familiar with them,

and so I was kind of quiet into myself, and I really didn't participate in very many organized sports.

In 1989, I was a sophomore in high school.

I asked Jeff what he was doing on

November 17, 1989. Yeah, November 17, 1989. It was just a normal day. I went to high school,

hung out with some of my friends, and I think later on that evening I saw in a newspaper,

that another teenager who was a classmate of mine in two of my classes as a sophomore and one of them as a freshman that she had been missing and that her body had been found.

15-year-old Angela Correa lived a sheltered life and was rarely able to leave the house without being accompanied by her parents or older sister.

However, on this occasion, she had been taking pictures after school for her photography class.

Some personal items had been found near her body, and she appeared to have been raped, beaten, and ultimately strangled

to death.

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