 | The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject.(July 2022) |
A jailhouse confession is a confession to a crime given by a prisoner to another inmate while in custody. Legal regimes have developed with respect to the use of jailhouse confessions in the prosecution of crimes.
Writing in the California Law Review in 1990, Jana Winograde commented that, in California, " Jailhouse informants who recount their fellow prisoners' "confessions" are often used by the state as witnesses in criminal prosecutions. It has recently become public knowledge that such confessions are easily fabricated." [1] Such fabricated testimony may constitute a false confession and the accused person is often powerless to challenge or refute its veracity. [1] Jailhouse informants, who report hearsay (admissions against penal interest) which they claim to have heard while the accused is in pretrial detention, usually in exchange for sentence reductions or other inducements, have been the focus of particular controversy. [2] Some examples of their use are in connection with Stanley Williams, [3] Cameron Todd Willingham, [4] Thomas Silverstein, [5] Marshall "Eddie" Conway, [6] and a suspect in the disappearance of Etan Patz. [7] The Innocence Project has stated that 15% of all wrongful convictions later exonerated because of DNA results were accompanied by false testimony by jailhouse informants. In 2011, the Orlando Sentinel reported that 50% of murder convictions exonerated by DNA were accompanied by false testimony by jailhouse informants. [8]
Jailhouse confessions may be discovered through means other than informants, such as placing a covert listening device in a subject's jail cell and monitoring their communications to see whether they make a self-incriminating statement. In the 1977 case of United States v. Hearst , [9] the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the government's secret use of an electronic recording device to record a prisoner's conversations did not violate the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
In law, a witness is someone who has knowledge about a matter, whether they have sensed it or are testifying on another witnesses' behalf. In law a witness is someone who, either voluntarily or under compulsion, provides testimonial evidence, either oral or written, of what they know or claim to know.
Innocence Project, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit legal organization that is committed to exonerating individuals who have been wrongly convicted, through the use of DNA testing and working to reform the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. The group cites various studies estimating that in the United States between 2.3% and 10% of all prisoners are innocent. The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld who gained national attention in the mid-1990s as part of the "Dream Team" of lawyers who formed part of the defense in the O. J. Simpson murder case.
A miscarriage of justice occurs when a grossly unfair outcome occurs in a criminal or civil proceeding, such as the conviction and punishment of a person for a crime they did not commit. Miscarriages are also known as wrongful convictions. Innocent people have sometimes ended up in prison for years before their conviction has eventually been overturned. They may be exonerated if new evidence comes to light or it is determined that the police or prosecutor committed some kind of misconduct at the original trial. In some jurisdictions this leads to the payment of compensation.
Moore et al. v. Dempsey, 261 U.S. 86 (1923), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled 6–2 that the defendants' mob-dominated trials deprived them of due process guaranteed by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. It reversed the district court's decision declining the petitioners' writ of habeas corpus. This case was a precedent for the Supreme Court's review of state criminal trials in terms of their compliance with the Bill of Rights.
An informant is a person who provides privileged information about a person or organization to an agency. The term is usually used within the law-enforcement world, where informants are officially known as confidential human sources (CHS), or criminal informants (CI). It can also refer pejoratively to someone who supplies information without the consent of the involved parties. The term is commonly used in politics, industry, entertainment, and academia.
Etan Kalil Patz was an American boy who was six years old on May 25, 1979, when he disappeared on his way to his school bus stop in the SoHo neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. His disappearance helped launch the missing children movement, which included new legislation and new methods for tracking down missing children. Several years after he disappeared, Patz was one of the first children to be profiled on the "photo on a milk carton" campaigns of the early 1980s. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan designated May 25—the anniversary of Etan's disappearance—as National Missing Children's Day in the United States.
Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case that established that the prosecution must turn over all evidence that might exonerate the defendant to the defense. The prosecution failed to do so for Brady, and he was convicted. Brady challenged his conviction, arguing it had been contrary to the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Actual innocence is a special standard of review in legal cases to prove that a charged defendant did not commit the crimes that they were accused of, which is often applied by appellate courts to prevent a miscarriage of justice.
Michael Mark Welner, M.D., is an American forensic psychiatrist and Chairman of The Forensic Panel. Welner is best known for his work in sensitive and complex litigation. He has acted as lead forensic psychiatric examiner in numerous criminal or court proceedings of national and international prominence, including precedent-setting trials and higher court decisions. Welner is also known for a number of innovations in forensic science, forensic psychiatry and justice, including protocols for prospective peer review in forensic medicine consultation, research to standardize an evidence-based distinction of the worst crimes, The Depravity Standard, and recommendations for upgrading forensic science assessment. He has been featured in network television news coverage of forensic psychiatry issues, has authored publications for professional and public audiences, and has contributed to emerging legislation on mental health reform.
The Norfolk Four are four former United States Navy sailors: Joseph J. Dick Jr., Derek Tice, Danial Williams, and Eric C. Wilson, who were wrongfully convicted of the 1997 rape and murder of Michelle Moore-Bosko while they were stationed at Naval Station Norfolk. They each declared that they had made false confessions, and their convictions are considered highly controversial. A fifth man, Omar Ballard, confessed and pleaded guilty to the crime in 2000, insisting that he had acted alone. He had been in prison since 1998 because of violent attacks on two other women in 1997. He was the only one of the suspects whose DNA matched that collected at the crime scene, and whose confession was consistent with other forensic evidence.
Remand, also known as pre-trial detention, preventive detention, or provisional detention, is the process of detaining a person until their trial after they have been arrested and charged with an offence. A person who is on remand is held in a prison or detention centre or held under house arrest. Varying terminology is used, but "remand" is generally used in common law jurisdictions and "preventive detention" elsewhere. However, in the United States, "remand" is rare except in official documents and "kept in custody until trial" is used in the media and even by judges and lawyers in addressing the public. Detention before charge is referred to as custody and continued detention after conviction is referred to as imprisonment.
Jacob Rubenstein v. State of Texas 407 S.W.2d 793 (1966) was a decision by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the highest criminal appellate court in the State of Texas, that Jack Ruby, the killer of Lee Harvey Oswald, had been denied a fair trial. The decision ordered his conviction reversed, but Ruby died before he could be retried.
Centurion is a non-profit organization located in Princeton, New Jersey, with a mission to exonerate innocent individuals who have been wrongly convicted and sentenced to life sentences or death.
The Taney Court heard thirty criminal law cases, approximately one per year. Notable cases include Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), United States v. Rogers (1846), Ableman v. Booth (1858), Ex parte Vallandigham (1861), and United States v. Jackalow (1862).
The 1982 Lake Waco Murders refers to the deaths of three teenagers near Lake Waco in Waco, Texas, in July 1982. The police investigation and criminal trials that followed the murders lasted for more than a decade and resulted in the execution of one man, David Wayne Spence, and life prison sentences for two other men allegedly involved in the crime, Anthony and Gilbert Melendez. A fourth suspect, Muneer Mohammad Deeb, was eventually released after spending several years in prison.
The California Innocence Project is a non-profit based at California Western School of Law in San Diego, California, United States, which provides pro bono legal services to individuals who maintain their factual innocence of crime(s) for which they have been convicted. It is an independent chapter of the Innocence Project. Its mission is to exonerate wrongly convicted inmates through the use of DNA and other evidences.
Ryan W. Ferguson is an American man who spent nearly 10 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of a 2001 murder in his hometown of Columbia, Missouri. At the time of the murder, Ferguson was a 17-year-old high-school student.
Louis N. Scarcella is a retired detective from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) who initially came to prominence during the "crack epidemic" of the 1980s and 1990s, earning frequent commendations before many convictions resulting from his investigations were overturned during his retirement. As a member of the Brooklyn North Homicide Squad, he and his longtime partner Stephen Chmil built a reputation for obtaining convictions in difficult cases. Since 2013, Scarcella has received extensive and sustained publicity for multiple allegations of investigative misconduct that resulted in false testimony against crime suspects, meaning that innocent parties could have served long prison terms and guilty individuals could have gone free because of wrongful procedures.
Felicia Gayle Picus was a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who was found stabbed to death in her St. Louis, Missouri home.
Napue v. Illinois, 360 U.S. 264 (1959), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the knowing use of false testimony by a prosecutor in a criminal case violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, even if the testimony affects only the credibility of the witness and does not directly relate to the innocence or guilt of the defendant.
Jailhouse informants who recount their fellow prisoners' "confessions" are often used by the state as witnesses in criminal prosecutions. It has recently become public knowledge that such confessions are easily fabricated. However, many defendants convicted on the basis of allegedly perjured jailhouse confessions remain imprisoned because they lack the mechanism necessary to compel the informant to recant his earlier testimony in habeas corpus proceedings based on false evidence introduced at trial.