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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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”.
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