I’ll keep writing about the case against Tyler Sanchez until someone in Douglas County speaks out about People’s Exhibit #1.

Sanchez, 19, will face trial for a break-in and sexual assault that common sense and a motherlode of evidence suggest he didn’t commit.

The system failed him when Parker police hauled him in last summer, ostensibly related to a string of burglaries in the Stonegate neighborhood.

It failed him again when — ignoring signs that he is hearing-impaired and mentally disabled— sheriff’s deputies turned the questioning into a 17-hour interrogation about the unsolved assault. An 8-year-old reported being fondled by an intruder who climbed through a second-story window of her family’s home in the housing tract a week earlier.

It kept failing him when prosecutors continued pressing charges despite serious holes in the case described by Judge Susanna Meissner- Cutler as “contradictions,” “inconsistencies” and “speculations.” Among those is the fact that the thin redhead looks nothing like the older, bigger, brown-haired intruder described by the victim. Oh, and that DA Carol Chambers asserts that nothing is proved by the fact that DNA analysis of the girl’s panties — the key physical evidence — shows the profiles of two men, neither of them Sanchez. She also disputes that he is cognitively delayed.

The system further failed him Wednesday, when the judge ruled he must face trial based solely on a single piece of highly questionable evidence.

People’s Exhibit #1 is an 11-sentence statement Sanchez wrote after detectives broke him down 37 hours after his arrest. Sentence by sentence, it parrots the detectives, echoing verbatim details they admit they repeatedly fed him during their interrogation.

“First when I got off work from a bad night I decide to go chill out and drive around in my car for a little while,” it starts.

“Then as I was driving I see this house where that I can get to the second story window,” the statement continues.

“Once I got into the window of the house I could barely see cause it was dark and all. So I was looking around trying to find stuff then all of a sudden when I was feeling things all over the room trying to feel for stuff I felt something move (and) all of a sudden it was a little girl that started screaming so I quickly ran (and) jumped out of the window,” it reads.

“Last, I went to my car (and) quickly went home. And I want to say that I am sorry for everything (and) it will never happen again.”

It’s hard to imagine why a man would admit to something he didn’t do. Unless, of course, he’s disabled, confused and exhausted.

“I’m tired,” “I’m too tired,” Sanchez — who was alone without his parents or a lawyer — told his interrogators. “I can’t speak.” “I can’t even speak right now.” “I can’t think.”

It’s also tough to believe that police would coerce a confession.

Unless you were sitting in Douglas County’s Courtroom B this week, listening to detectives describe how they lie to suspects during interrogations and use all kinds of “tools” to coerce them.

“It’s not the end of the world,” Detective Mike Dixon assured Sanchez when trying to prod a so-called confession.

Chambers’ 18th Judicial District prosecutors argue that the case is simple. Sanchez’s statement placed him in the girl’s room that night. After all, the detectives testified, confessions don’t lie.

The judge is sending the case to trial, bound by a law that she must consider evidence presented at a preliminary hearing in the light most favorable for the People.

In the months before his trial, let it be said that we are the people and that, in our names, the light that DAs are pointing at Sanchez seems all too artificial and dim.

Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.