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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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.
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