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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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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