The police homed in on Mr. Deskovic within days of finding the body of his high-school classmate Angela Correa, 15, at a park in Peekskill, about 36 miles north of here. Their focus came in large part because Mr. Deskovic seemed unusually distraught after Ms. Correa’s death and had an intimate knowledge of the case, which he was determined to help solve.

Suspicions were amplified by Mr. Deskovic’s fitting a profile of the killer that was prepared by the New York Police Department: He was a white man about 5 feet 10 inches tall and under 19 years of age. Ms. Correa’s real killer, Steven Cunningham, who pleaded guilty in March after DNA recovered from the crime scene was linked to him, is African-American, is more than 6 feet tall, and was 29 at the time of the murder.

The police did not pursue other leads, concentrating instead on building a case against Mr. Deskovic. They met with him many times, even after his mother told them she did not want her son speaking to the police, the review says, and they selectively taped their talks, collecting snippets of conversation that sounded incriminating but that offered jurors no context when presented in court.

In one instance, investigators recorded 30 minutes of a four-hour encounter with Mr. Deskovic. And on the day he confessed, after several hours of persistent interrogation, they did not turn on the tape recorder at all.

“The police tactics in dealing with Deskovic did not take adequate account of his youth, naïveté, inexperience with the justice system and psychological vulnerabilities,” says the review.

It was prepared at no cost by two retired judges, Leslie Crocker Snyder and Peter J. McQuillan; a former Staten Island district attorney, William L. Murphy; and Richard Joselson, supervising attorney of the criminal appeals bureau of the Legal Aid Society in New York City.

The panel also highlighted prosecutors’ concerted effort to discredit the value of the DNA profile retrieved from semen and hairs found at the crime scene, which did not match Mr. Deskovic’s. Prosecutors argued that the hairs could have belonged to workers from the medical examiner’s office, and the semen to another man with whom the victim had sex.