He confessed. But that doesn't mean he did it.

This week the U.S. Supreme Court turned down the case of Brendan Dassey, whose coerced confession troubled hundreds of thousands of Americans who watched the hit documentary “Making a Murderer.” This means the court avoided setting much-needed new standards for confessions, which are used to convict hundreds of people in murder cases each year – a good number of whom are actually innocent.

Dassey, a teenager with an intellectual disability, powerfully demonstrates the problem. Police pressured him into giving a barely understandable confession that became the sole evidence leading to his murder conviction.

As we watched police elicit Dassey’s confession, all we could think of was our client, Henry McCollum, who spent 30 years on North Carolina’s death row. There is no recording of the interrogation that led to Henry’s confession, but if there were, we suspect it would sound a lot like Dassey’s.

Like Dassey, Henry and his brother, Leon Brown, were teenagers with intellectual disabilities. They were interrogated without a lawyer or a parent. They were fed details of the crime by investigators. Police promised Henry he could go home if he signed a confession. Instead, he went to death row.

We served as Henry’s lawyer and social worker for 20 years before the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission tested a cigarette butt that exonerated them. DNA testing showed that a serial murderer had committed the crime. The brothers were exonerated in court in 2014. They received a pardon of innocence from the governor in 2015. While the victory was sweet, the bitterness of the injustice lingers.

Henry, Leon, and Brendan Dassey are all victims of a legal system addicted to confessions. More than a quarter of the people who have been exonerated by DNA gave false confessions. Many of the common practices of police investigators — such as coercion and threats of the death penalty — can lead to false confessions. Yet, confessions are almost always allowed in court and are extremely persuasive to a jury.

Henry’s case shows why confessions are so unreliable and yet so damning.

Investigators took Henry, who was 19, to the police station under the pretense of asking about some missing money in New York. They soon began to demand a confession about the grisly rape and murder of 11-year-old Sabrina Buie. Over and over, officers falsely told Henry that others had already implicated him, and that if he confessed and named others more responsible for the crimes, he could avoid the death penalty and even go home. Under this pressure, he eventually signed a confession implicating himself and four other people, including his brother Leon. The other three had solid alibis and were never prosecuted.

Leon, just 15, was also taken into an interrogation room alone. Henry and Leon’s mother was in the waiting room, but when she asked to see her sons, she was threatened with arrest. Through the door, she heard police yelling, “Didn’t you kill Sabrina? Didn’t you kill Sabrina?” and Leon crying, “No, no, no!”

Law enforcement wrote the confessions and Henry and Leon signed them, despite reading levels below a fourth-grade level. They included some of the goriest details of the crime.

We now know that those details were fed to Henry and Leon by crime scene investigators who participated in the interrogation. But for many years, those details were seen as airtight evidence of their guilt. No physical evidence connected them to the crime, but the confessions alone were enough to land them on death row.

Their confessions contradicted each other and implicated other people who could not possibly have been involved. Before they were exonerated, their convictions were upheld by state and federal courts.

As long as we give law enforcement such broad power to coerce confessions and use them as evidence in court, we will continue to see innocent men and women convicted and even sentenced to death.