I was just watching a news story about a wrongfully convicted man who did 20 years because a jailhouse informant lied and said that he confessed to the crime while in jail. And it made me think, doesn’t the very concept of a jailhouse informant violate multiple laws?
First of all, isn’t it witness tampering to offer a witness something in exchange for testimony? I looked up several states’ witness tampering laws and it says just that. But prosecutors often offer people time off their sentence in exchange for damning testimony.
And isn’t hearsay inadmissible? Maybe I am misunderstanding what hearsay is, but I thought that conversations outside of court are not usable in court proceedings. So even if someone confesses a crime to me, I am not allowed to go to court and testify that they said this.
Finally, aren’t attorneys ethically bound to not let their witness testify if they know they are lying? Do prosecutors ever get disbarred or punished if it comes out they offered informants time off their sentence in exchange for false testimony? I know the legal system in our country is massively messed up and prosecutors have way too much power, so I doubt this is the case.
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Well, court cases admiss a lot of heresay. A lot of cases involve quite a bit of he-said-she-said.
Witness tampering generally refers to offering certain types of things in exchange for *false* testimony. Theoretically the prosecutors thought the informant was telling the truth. You may think the law says it’s illegal to offer a witness “something” but that’s not how the law works in practice. People get deals for testimony before conviction all the time.
Hearsay is generally second-hand knowledge or basically rumors. The witness seeing a confession first-hand is not hearsay, and the (potential) criminal confessing is not repeating rumors because they are the ones who would know for sure if they did it.
The informant can lie to attorneys and claim the testimony is true.
It may be unfair and inaccurate in many situations but it’s not illegal or many people would be successfully challenging it in court.
Heresay is allowed when it’s relevant and has weight to the argument. As in, if it adds to the relevant evidence and is consistent.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/ericbachman/2019/11/21/yes-you-can-use-hearsay-to-prove-your-case/amp/
I’m not sure why you think offering witnesses something in return for testifying is illegal.
That’s literally what witness protection is. If you testify as a witness the government agrees to spend a significant amount of money to keep you safe. (Keep in mind most people in witness protection are almost definitely criminals, even if that’s white collar crime)
Or people getting a deal for testifying to incriminate other people. Like someone that got a lighter sentance because they ratted out their co-conspirators.
Juries are told the situation and defense council makes the case that you’ve made about them being unreliable. It’s up to the jury to decide whether or not to trust what they’re saying.
Hearsay evidence is allowed under certain circumstances. There’s actually quite a lot of reasons hearsay evidence might be allowed.
>Finally, aren’t attorneys ethically bound to not let their witness testify if they know they are lying?
Yep. You’d have to prove they knew they were lying though, which is very difficult.
>isn’t it witness tampering
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>the legal system in our country is massively messed up
Answered your own question there
Juries are aware of how unreliable jail house informants are and a jailhouse informant is never the sole piece of evidence against someone – or even a major piece of evidence.
News stories usually do an exceptionally poor job of explaining why someone was exonerated and the *vast* majority of “wrongfully convicted” criminals share a similar fact pattern: they committed the crime but were charged incorrectly. This fact pattern comes about because they were charged as the sole perpetrator of a crime when, in fact, there were one or more other people involved.
How you are charged is extremely important. If you are charged with murder, it means that the prosecutor has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that you, personally, killed the victim – not that you were just present when your co-conspirator killed the victim.
DNA testing was fairly primitive until about 10 years ago and even now has significant limitations. What this means is that often times a DNA sample will be untestable. In those cases, its often not clear how many people were involved in the crime and so a lot of the evidence is circumstantial. IE, blood was found in your car, you sold the victim’s jewelry, and the jailhouse informant testifies against you.
Because that circumstantial evidence is *overwhelming*, you are convicted of murder.
Then, 20 years later, a new technique is developed that allows previously untestable DNA evidence found during the investigation to be tested. Those tests show that your DNA isn’t in the sample.
Your DNA isn’t in the sample because it wasn’t you that raped the victim before killing them – it was your friend that nobody knew about. But just because you didn’t rape the victim didn’t mean you weren’t there. You were, but you robbed the place while your friend raped and murdered the victim.
You’re still guilty of murder, but there is no reasonable doubt as to whether you committed 1st degree murder, felony murder, or were an accomplice to 1st degree and/or felony murder. Because of that reasonable doubt, your conviction for 1st degree murder is overturned and because its been 20 years, all of the original witnesses are dead and there is no hope of a reconviction without them.
Had you originally been charged with felony murder and/or as an accomplice, your sentence would have been the same. But nobody knew about your friend at the time you were originally charged, so you end up getting your conviction overturned on the world’s biggest technicality. And not only do you get off on a technicality, but there are plenty of reporters who either don’t understand the legal system or otherwise have an agenda to push who will focus in on the jailhouse informant as the cause of the “wrongful conviction”.
It’s not hearsay because they’re not presenting evidence of the crime, but merely that the suspect *said* he committed it. That’s a fact. “he said to me XYZ” is a fact, which shouldn’t be confused with “he did XYZ” which is not (in this example).
More importantly, if the suspect reveals details about the crime that were not public knowledge that adds weight to the statement. “How would he know that the shoes were red unless he was there, we never released that info” sort of thing.
Statements against self-interest are exceptions to the hearsay rule. Confessions are just that—statements against a person’s self-interest.
Jailhouse informant testimony can be inadmissible if the state is directing an informant to question someone in custody. In that scenario, the informant becomes an agent of the government, and the questioning is technically occurring while the target is in custody, which would necessitate Miranda warnings.
In reality, informants bring alleged unprompted confessions to prosecutors all the time looking for sentence reductions. It’s wide open for defense attorneys to hammer those witnesses on that motivation to lie/motive for bias.
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